Feh is the title of Shalom Auslander's outrageously funny second memoir--and the Yiddish word for "yuck." With humor and heart-wrenching detail, Auslander (Foreskin's Lament; Hope: A Tragedy) confronts his deep-seated self-loathing and warns of how received stories can do psychological damage.
Auslander was in first grade when his ultra-Orthodox yeshiva teacher blindsided him with a fundamental story: "Man wasn't great. He wasn't even good." From creation onward, it seemed that humanity was nothing but a disappointment. The Old Testament's message, as Auslander absorbed it, was "You Suck." Every health and career setback he experienced later in life only served to confirm this. When his use of an unlicensed weight-loss drug landed him in the hospital with pancreatitis, it wasn't attempted suicide as some suspected, but a cry for help.
Feh features hilarious retellings of stories from the Bible and classic literature, as well as précis of the author's own short stories and other works. Auslander spins vivid set pieces from painful memories. Envious of women's beauty as a boy, he earned his father's contempt for blow-drying his hair; by contrast, he supported his son Lux's obsession with wigs and Beyoncé's dance routines. A notable strand sees Auslander break into writing for Hollywood. (He even managed to tap Philip Seymour Hoffman for a television pilot, but just two days after the series was green-lit Hoffman was found dead.)
The memoir is as iconoclastically funny as Auslander's fiction, but it's also reassuring as, with encouragement from his wife, Orli, and his psychiatrist, Ike, Auslander begins to overcome his self-hatred. --Rebecca Foster, freelance reviewer, proofreader and blogger at Bookish Beck