The Exchange: Rachel Shukert on Memoir Writing, Jewish Identity, and the Dutch Love of Phil Collins

It’s a tale as old as time, or at least as old as the Eurail pass: girl moves to Europe, embarks on regrettable romances with men who barely speak her language, works menial jobs, and in the process, learns something about herself. But with her new memoir, “Everything Is Going to Be Great: An Underfunded and Overexposed European Grand Tour,” Rachel Shukert manages to do something nearly unprecedented in the female travelogue subgenre: she is funny. “Everything Is Going to Be Great” recounts Shukert’s sojourns in Paris, Vienna, and finally, Amsterdam, where, after some harrowing misadventures, she meets her future husband. Viewed from Shukert’s charmingly candid perspective, Europe is a land rife with comically phallic meats, reasonable attitudes toward health care, and maddeningly infrequent garbage collection. I spoke with Shukert earlier this week; an edited version of our conversation appears below.

In the book, you never quite say that you went to Europe to find yourself (and you mother is certainly skeptical of the idea). But in the end, that’s exactly what happens. Obviously since it’s about your life, you knew how the story would end, but did you have a sense of the shape the narrative would take?

I suppose my resistance to the idea of “finding myself” (or at least, calling it that) has to do with it seeming so contrived. For better or for worse, I’m very much her daughter in that way: if it sounds too self-indulgent or navel-gazing, I’m dubious as to its value (I realize this might sound hypocritical coming from the author of a memoir. Rest assured, I have a lot of issues with self-loathing). But I also think that my initial impulse to go away came from wanting to lose myself, rather than find myself. I was sick of me. I felt like being in New York was exacerbating all the things I didn’t like about myself: the petty competitiveness, the anger, the terror of failure. And I figured if my life was inevitably going to be frustrating and disappointing, I at least wanted to be frustrated and disappointed in new and exciting ways.

Also, the book as I originally imagined it was going to be very different: I had planned a sort of light collection of comic essays about travel and being abroad, not all necessarily from this time. It wasn’t until I started writing that I realized that there was something under that surface, a sort of greater narrative, almost novelistic trajectory to this really focussed period of time.

Related to the previous question: if there’s a subplot to the book, it’s your coming to terms with your Jewish heritage. It’s not that you were ashamed about it to begin with, but somehow by the end you’ve embraced your background more fully—largely by settling down with a nice Jewish guy.

Being Jewish in Europe is a funny thing. My generation of American Jews have become so deracinated, so used to being accepted as part of mainstream “white” society (even if we don’t necessarily see ourselves that way) that it can be startling to realize that isn’t necessarily the case abroad. That’s not to say that any of the people I encountered were particularly anti-Semitic (except the neo-Nazis, obviously); in fact, I think they’d be mortified if they seemed that way. But Jewishness, in this case, my Jewishness, was something that was definitely conspicuous, and whether it was out of discomfort or residual guilt or just curiosity, people were unable to keep themselves from mentioning it. You can choose to get really huffy and defensive about these comments and leave everyone feeling guilty and alienated, or you can give people the benefit of the doubt. For my own sanity, I mostly chose the latter, and it had the interesting side effect of making me more comfortable and less reflexively defensive about my own Jewishness. And comfort with yourself is such a powerful thing: when you’re fine with something that is obviously discomfiting to someone else, you have so much more control. Self-hatred just leads to more hatred.

On a deeper level though, for me, Jewishness has always been totally conflated with my parents. I think the coming to terms with my heritage that you describe was really coming to terms with them. I had to accept the idea that their happiness and mine weren’t necessarily mutually exclusive. I could marry a nice Jewish boy because I loved him and he made me happy, and the fact that it also made them happy was a nice side effect rather than something that had to be avoided at all costs. I didn’t have to keep making a disaster of my life in order to somehow teach them a lesson.

Your use of imagery is extremely effective and entertaining; for instance, you write that Jerry Falwell looks like a “molten blob of Crisco.” Getting the images just right is important for any writer, but it’s essential when you’re trying to be funny. Are there any writers— humorous or otherwise—you look to as role models in this department? I was reminded of David Sedaris, which I’m guessing you have heard before.

David Sedaris is incredible at this, and I don’t think anyone can write in this genre anymore without being influenced by him; he virtually invented it in its modern incarnation. But for me, the master of the weirdly effective image is David Rakoff. There are numerous examples of this in his books, but they just come out of his mouth in daily life; I remember he once described this woman we both knew as having “a face like a sewing machine,” which was so perfect on so many levels, I can’t even tell you. Martin Amis is another one (although he’s not my friend); there’s one I always liked in his first book, “The Rachel Papers,” where he describes an acne-plagued teen-ager’s face as a “crumbling death-mask.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com