Fresh Air - Waking Up And Feeling 'Yuck'

Episode Date: July 18, 2024

Humorist Shalom Auslander has written for decades about growing up in a dysfunctional household within an ultra-orthodox Jewish community. Feh, title of his latest memoir, comes from the Yiddish word for "yuck." He talks about self-hatred, changing the narrative and his friendship with late actor Philip Seymour Hoffman. Also, Justin Chang reviews the new horror movie Longlegs.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for this podcast and the following message come from the NPR Wine Club, which has generated over $1.75 million to support NPR programming. Whether buying a few bottles or joining the club, you can learn more at nprwineclub.org slash podcast. Must be 21 or older to purchase. This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. Today, my guest is writer Shalom Auslander. For decades, he's written with humor about what it was like to grow up in a dysfunctional household within an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community near the Catskills in the town of Muncie, New York. He describes how it was drilled into him from a very young age that he was born into sin, which meant he was broken, shameful, and in constant need of redemption.

Now in his middle age, Shalom Ostlander explores the weight of trying to shed those feelings in a new memoir titled Fe. Fe is the Yiddish word for yuck, a pervasive feeling of self-contempt Shalom has battled with his entire life. In his attempt to rewrite his story, he faces some of the darkest parts of himself, which include addiction, thoughts of harm, and contending with the loss of his good friend, actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, whom Shalone says also battled with feelings of shame. His first memoir, Foreskin's Lament, was about his childhood years and his estrangement from his religious community and its traditions. His work has been featured on This American Life and in several publications, including The New Yorker, Esquire Magazine, and The New York Times. And Shalom Ostlander, welcome back to Fresh Air.

Thank you. Glad to be here. Can I have you read a passage from Fae to get us started? Sure. The story of Fae is just the first story in a long book of similar stories, the collection of which is a book called You Suck. The first part of You Suck is known as the Old Testament. Spoiler alert, Moses, the main character, dies before reaching his goal. Why? Because he was Phae. The second part of You Suck is known as the New Testament. Spoiler alert. It ends with

God making a huge wine press, filling it with millions of people, and crushing them to death. Why? Guess. Most people who read the Old Testament don't read the New. Most people who read the New Testament don't read the Old. They don't have to. They're the same story. Feh. The name of the man who blinded me was Rabbi Hammer. People in Muncie went to him for advice. Tell us how to see, they beseeched him. But Rabbi Hammer was blind too. When he finished telling us Fe, he closed the book of Yusuk, leaned forward, and kissed it.

Then he called us up, one by one, and gave us each a small copy of the book. To keep in your hearts and minds, he said, all the days of your lives. Then he handed us our book and shook our hands. Mazel tov, he said. Hebrew for good luck. He wasn't kidding. I am 50 years old now, and still I am blind.

It is a strange blindness. It is not a darkness, not a blackness, not an absence of light. Rather, I go through life as if beneath a shroud. I can see the sky, the earth, the trees, the animals, all the flora and fauna without deviation, without distortion or diversion. But mankind appears to me grotesque, vile, foul, ignominious, none more so than myself.

With others, I can occasionally be fair. With others, there is a chance of expiation. With myself, though, I am a hanging judge. To myself, I show no mercy. There is no criticism I don't believe, no compliment I accept. I avoid mirrors. Mirrors are bad. Catching a glimpse of my reflection in a store window is enough to ruin my whole day.

This is what I think when I do. Fe. You know, Shalom, when I read that passage, I immediately thought about something my son said when he was about three or four years old, and it was about the video game Pac-Man. And he said, is Pac-Man the good guy or the bad guy? And, you know. That's a great question. Which made me think about this book because really what you've been asking yourself all of your life is if God is a good guy or a bad guy. Right. And then sort of falling out of that, then am I the good guy or the bad guy? Exactly. Because the Old Testament and the New Testament, all of us, like God is the protagonist of that book.

He's the good guy. He's perfect in every way. And then there's us. And we're a pain in the butt. And we sin from day one, right? So you're five years old and you're sitting in a yeshiva or a madrasa or wherever you are and they tell you. So this is how humanity began. God made us out of dirt.

And the first thing we did was steal. Then we lied about stealing. So God kicked us out because he couldn't take one more second of us. Then we had kids, and the boys tried to murder each other. Then God said, I'm flooding the world. I'm so sick of you, but I'm going to leave one group behind, one little family. So what does that family do? They get drunk, and the father has sex with his daughters.

And you're like, I don't know if I want to belong to this family. This is a pretty screwed up family. And this is me. This is who I am. Was there ever part of that story that filled you with hope that you felt good about when you were a kid and you were learning about it? No. There was always a piece. The way the narrative of that book works and all those books work is just when you think it's good, it goes bad.

Right? So every up is followed by a horrendous down. And it's usually a down that's caused because we were fat. In some way or another, we caused this. This was our fault. And I guess in my life, it just got to a point, I'm 54, in my late 40s, where the shrapnel of that story was threatening my life and my new family, which was a beautiful family. Made up of your wife and your children. Yeah, and that's it.

I don't have any connection to my family, my birth family at all, and haven't for a long time. And it was causing more bleeding when I thought that I was over it. When I thought I was over the idea of a foul God and that that was something I could just sort of say, well, that's probably not true and I can move on. I realized that there's this narrative that's deep within me. And ultimately, I think deep within mankind, the story we've been telling ourselves for so long, that we suck. Right, because you decided to become estranged from your family. You wrote this first memoir, Four Skins Lament, where you went through your childhood and you really took a hard look at what you had been taught. And you and your wife made this conscious choice. We are no longer going to be in communication. We're going to start a new life.

Take us back, though, to what you were escaping from. So you grew up in this ultra-Orthodox community. I think I've heard you say it's like growing up in a town where Tony Soprano runs it. So that's quite a visual. What's an example of what that looked like for you as a boy in the day-to-day? It was just terrible fear and shame. I remember going through the town with someone and they were saying, oh, you know, it's weird. You drive through Muncie and it's quite beautiful. It's this, you know, bucolic little country town. You know, it's rural, no sidewalks, no streetlights, pretty, pretty.

And my feeling was like, yeah, but there's a monster here that you can't see. It's like that twilight zone where there's a monster here. And that monster is a god who is furious all the time. For me personally, the problem that I ran into was that I couldn't just say, well, that's just a made up story because my father in heaven was crazy. And my father in the living room was also crazy. He was abusive. He was an alcoholic. Yeah. He drank a lot. He hit.

And so my first reaction was, oh, there's another one? There's two fathers? I could do without any at this point. And so there was just a lot of bad feeling and shame involved with it. I never quite fit in. I never felt like I belonged there. And it wasn't until my teens where I started to move out a little bit, discovering, frankly, discovering literature and used bookstores in Manhattan. But finding other people who were taking this story or this shameful feeling and examining it.

I was really fascinated in the book when you began to explore those puberty years. Puberty must have been hard because, I mean, it's a burgeoning sexuality, but you are in a community where rules around pleasure are so strict. Oh, yeah. Look, puberty is no picnic for anybody. Right. But when you're told that all the things that are happening to you or you're feeling are evil or wrong, it's ten times worse. And you don't want to see yourself in the mirror.

None of the way I feel about myself, to me, in the mirror. Like it doesn't, none of the way I feel about myself to me is a surprise. It all follows from that background. As I say, in fact, you're not born hating yourself. We're told this story either through a story story or through the actions of people around us.

But for me with, you know, up, and it wasn't today, so porn was like hid under the blanket. Under mattresses, right. And VHS tapes where you had to go to a place to actually get them. Yeah, yeah. And I would go into these places and feel awful. You would feel awful, but you still would go. I don't know. I feel like there was some element of, am I really that bad?

You know, and when you're told you're bad, you're just like, okay, so I'm bad. So I'll just be bad. I heard you tell this story about your grandmother. And I think it was, was it Chiclets? And the reason why I'm bringing this up is because you just mentioned how, even though you were told you were bad, there was that small little part of you that was thinking, am I that bad? Can you tell the story of the Chiclets and what that opened up in your mind for you? Yeah, I mean, that was a little tiny moment in my life was just one of those things you look back and go, oh, thank God it happened. But it was my mother's mother and they were religious.

And we used to go over to her house in Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn. And we'd get there and she'd call me over and she gave me chiclets, which I don't know if listeners remember this. But it was this awful gum. It came in little squares. They came in like a little yellow box. And she would give them to me when I got there every time. And I remember one time my mother saw her giving it to me and she got upset. She's like, what are you doing?

That's treif. It's non-kosher. And I was ashamed and I was ashamed for my grandmother because she looked a little chastised. And she just, my mother's like, don't give him that anymore. You're not allowed to have it. You shouldn't have it either, and whatever, walked out. And then my grandmother turned to me, and she takes out the chiclets and takes my hand and pours two of them into it. And she just said, oh, don't worry about it. It's just gum. What did that signal to you? What did it say? Well, first I was like, oh my

God, Bob is a sinner. Right on. Let's go for burgers. But then it was this, oh, maybe there's a middle ground, right? Maybe there's sanity in some of this, right? Like I didn't question whether she believed in all the rules and God and everything else. She did very much. But it was this moment of moderation, right? Of, yeah, God will let some gum slip, whereas I was told he didn't. He didn't let anything slip. The story of Moses not getting into the promised land is perhaps the purest of the pure one

time hit a rock. And so God said, that's it. You're not getting in. Your life goal, you're not getting in. And that's the lesson you learn as a kid. Do not mess up. That's the Tony Soprano thing. You don't make more than one mistake because he's coming. The way that you express how you felt all of your adult life, this faith that's on you. And I think you actually said this, that it's probably what's on most people, we all, no matter if we're Jewish or not. But you express what I

think a lot of people feel and don't say, but it's also what we are told that we shouldn't feel. So that is, you wake up every morning and you feel fat, you feel disgusted, you feel bad. And you have to actually walk towards the good, you feel bad, and you have to actually walk towards the good. You have to make the conscious choice. We've been told the narrative that good is the place where we should be sitting in and the bad is just sprinkled in. I don't understand that. I think that's because we know we shouldn't. But everybody I know, everybody I've ever met has had to deal with these perceptions of themselves that are – that they got from somewhere that are pretty negative. But yeah, I wake up in the morning and I remember we rented a new apartment recently and everything was perfect about it except the fact that the bedroom had wall-to-wall mirrors. And I'm like, oh, God, are you serious?

I have to sleep looking at myself and wake up? The moment you wake up. Oh, God. And it's bad lighting. It's sunlight. And you're like, oh, this is horrible. Is it as bad as you thought it would be, though? I try and get up early before the sun comes up.

But it is. It is. I have to kind of go, ugh. And at this point, I can laugh. Laughter is the saving grace for me. So I can laugh at myself for it. But I'm not going to lie. I'm pretty happy when the shirt comes on.

Even when you're alone? Oh, yeah. Is that a mark of faith? Because I would think that, you know, being alone, there's no judgment of anyone around you. Right. But there is no being alone. Right? With faith, there's no being alone. There's always someone or something watching. God. God or society or, you know, I often wonder, like, if everybody felt really good about themselves, there'd be nobody at the gym. Yeah.

Like, yeah, I know some people go because it feels good. Yeah, okay, but minus those lunatics, if everyone was fine, there'd be no such thing as a health club. Yeah, okay. But minus those lunatics, if everyone was fine, there'd be no such thing as a health club. Like what? Who needs that? We talked a little bit about you being estranged from your family. And the last time you were on the show, you talked about this interaction with, I think it was a midwife, you were having your first son, and she asked you if you were going to have family in the room. And you said, No, we're estranged from our family. And she said, well, that is sad. And you said, well, it's sad for them to be in our lives. And it's sad for them to be out of

our lives. And that was 17 years ago. Yeah. Does it get any less sad? It changes. I don't have any regret or feel like that was the wrong thing to do. And I look at my sons and my wife and I'm convinced every day that it was the right thing to do. My kids are very free thinking and loving and they're artists and musicians and they would not fit in any better in Muncie than I did and probably have less patience for it. But the truth is that's kind of the happy ending. People hear it and they're like, oh, that's awful. But the truth is staying would have been awful because I wouldn't be who I am. I wouldn't have the marriage that I have.

I wouldn't be the husband I am. I wouldn't be the father I am. I probably wouldn't be here. I probably would have thrown myself off a building sometime in my early 20s, mid 20s for sure, because that's what I was considering doing. I couldn't be in a place where everything pointed to there's something wrong with you. And, you know, that included everything from, I remember when I, my mother found out I was eating non-kosher, she told me I was finishing what Hitler started. And I was like, wait, Hitler had started a Happy Meal? Because he left over the fries. And it's just this harsh, right? And you're like, well, that's kind of harsh.

But I guess I'm ruining my people. And, you know, I write about this in Feb where, like, you know, I so much hated being a male because of everything I was told in yeshiva about it that when I was very young, I was convinced I wanted to be a woman. I found a Victoria's Secret catalog in the mail. And I was like, oh, my God, women are just perfect. And look at me. I'm gross. And I was like, oh, so let me put on my mother's pantyhose. Let me put on some heels.

Hey, you know what? Kind of works. Kind of feels good. Kind of works. And then like very soon after, you know, someone in the school, someone in my grade had found a porno mag at the side of the road. And it was a gay porno mag. And they were all laughing at it and being horrified. But the thing that horrified them most

was an ad for a film about a transvestite. And I was like, oh my god, I'm worst of the worst. And I happened to have been wearing pantyhose under my yeshiva clothes at the time. And just felt like, they're gonna

find me. They're gonna know who I really am. And I think that's been the thing my whole life. I feel like that's with a lot of people. There's this impression that who you really are deep down inside is broken, wrong, evil, sinful, not enough in some way. And you have to work your way better than that. But it's not true. Oftentimes, the thing we are inside is the best part of us. We've just been told it's awful. So that's really what the battle against fae is to me.

Our guest today is Shalom Auslander, author of the new memoir, Fair. We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees.

Download the WISE app today, or visit wise.com. T's and C's apply. Hi, this is Molly. And I'm Seth. We're two of the producers at Fresh Air. If you like listening to Fresh Air, we think you'll also like reading our newsletter. You'll find the interviews and reviews from the show all in one place. Plus,

staff recommendations you won't hear on the show, behind-the-scenes Q&As, bonus audio. It's also the only place to find out what interviews are coming up. We keep it fun, and it comes straight to your inbox once a week. Subscribe for yourself at whyy.org slash fresh air. So Shalom, you were good friends with the late actor Philip Seymour Hoffman. And about your connection, you write, Feh knows Feh. Feh recognizes Feh. How did you know? Well, I knew Phil for some years right before the end. We met each other through work. And I kind of told the story in the book about meeting him for the first time. And there's just something about people who are fat that you just know it when

you meet them. They just seem to be under a cloud of some kind. It's a certain posture. It's a certain way of talking. It's hard to put your finger on. And it's not always posture it's a certain way of talking it's hard to put your finger on and it's not always the same thing with Phil it was this he was very kind of had the weight of the world on his shoulders and was constantly judging himself

but I think you know among other things Trump is a fae you know he was told his whole life by his father he was worthless and that's one version of fae, this sort of, well, then I had ridiculously weird amounts in common, the way our mothers were, the way our brothers were, the way our fathers were. Our fathers had porn in the same place, in the same room in the house. He was sort of tortured by Irish Catholicism. I was tortured by Orthodox Judaism. And we were both the same age.

And it felt like we were both at this age where it was like, can this still really be going on? Does this ever end? And trying to find a way through with me writing, with him acting and directing, find a way through it. He wrote to you or said to you one time, and I want to read this. It's from the book. He once said to you, you writers are lucky. You get to tell the story you need to tell when you need to tell it. You're sick, you get medicine. Actors, though, we have to sit around mute, waiting for a script to come along somehow. And if we're lucky, it tells the story we need to tell. That was really powerful. And I wanted to know, had you considered that when

he told you that and thinking about the ways that your art is a balm and in particular for him? I hadn't, to be honest. I didn't quite know what makes actors tick. And I don't know that that's necessarily true for every actor, because I've met a few and clearly some just like acting or being the center of attention. That's femme medicine, I think. Yeah. Yeah, I think it is. I once suggested to him that I thought, because we both had psychiatrists who are pretty much father figures to each of us. But I remember suggesting that I think at the time I was like, I think maybe celebrities and actors get paid so much money because the studios are paying them to stay sick. That if they were healthy, they might not do this job. And they certainly wouldn't do it as well, I think, in the same way as a writer. Like if I got all my stuff healed, I don't know.

You wouldn't have anything else to write about. I'd go garden. I'd go mow the lawn. I'd do whatever. I'd jog. I'd be fine. Now I can't jog because I jiggle too much and it's fat,

but I like the idea of it. So there was this notion of like how are we getting past this fanness of ours? And Phil just had – for me, like a laugh is really important. A person's laugh is like – I don't care if Stalin had a good laugh. I'd probably hang out with him. A good laugh changes everything for me. And Phil had this – short of my wife, he had a good laugh, I'd probably hang out with him. A good laugh changes everything for me. And Phil had this, short of my wife, he had the greatest laugh ever. It was just this massive laugh, and it didn't come easy.

And when it came out, it was like this paroxysm, and you could hear it around the world. And so it was fun for us to laugh together. And a lot of what we laughed about was how crappy we feel. You wrote this screenplay, which later turned into Happy-ish. Gosh, I want to say all the words, but it was called Pigs in S initially. Yes, it was about advertising. Yeah, so it was about this depressed middle-aged guy who works in advertising, and all of his colleagues are younger than him. And the premise of it really was that like happy-ish is the closest we're going to get to happy, right?

Philip was going to play this role, even though he was a film actor, because this was for streaming. This is a series. Yeah, it was going to be his first TV role. And there was a pilot. And there was a pilot that was shot. And he'd been up and down. We'd been through, I knew it was going on with him. He'd been through some rehab and seemed to be getting better. And same old story. But we shot the pilot. It was challenging just because of what he was going through physically, let alone emotionally, in his sort of rehab-ness. We've shot the pilot.

We all really liked it. Friday, I remember, I got a call from the head of Showtime at the time, David Nevin, saying, we're going ahead, It's greenlit. Congratulations. And it was just this incredible, holy cow, this is awesome. And then I go the next day and I start to write episode two. And my phone rings and it's the executive at Showtime crying, just saying, Phil's dead. And I had no idea what she was talking about.

Like, it just didn't make any sense at all. And I just remember being really furious, first at him, but then at everything that led to that. To the people in his life, mainly his youth, that told him he was this fat person. And it just made me furious. And that's kind of what started all of this, was that I knew that fat had me close to the edge many times. But I didn't realize that it was, because I also thought, oh, it's just a Jewish thing,

or get over the Old Testament, buddy. Read some Richard Dawkins and cheer up. And I was shocked at the power that that story had because Phil was this force of nature. I mean, he was just indomitable. I mean, first of all, physically, he had been a wrestler. He was a big guy. If you wanted to bring him down, you're going to need a football team. And yet, it felt to me that he gave into that story.

And that just made me sad and angry. Let's take a short break. If you're just joining us, my guest is Shalom Auslander. He's written a new book titled Fe, which is in Yiddish, yuck. It's about coming to terms with what he learned about himself growing up in a dysfunctional, ultra-Orthodox Jewish family and how in adulthood he's trying to rewrite his story. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is Fresh Air. You know, Philip Seymour Hoffman's death had such a huge impact on me for someone that I didn't know, but I felt so deeply connected to.

I think I was in bed for a few days after he died. I was really upset by it. And you articulating this fear over him, I think I felt at the time that someone like him who everyone loved him as an actor, he was beloved and had that over them, where no matter how much you feel for them, they can't feel it for themselves. Which also in reading about you, it made me think about your wife and how she sees you as perfect. Well, better than I see myself, that's for sure. Yeah. Yeah, because fa is a certain blindness. It's an inability to see things in a certain way.

And I kind of learned that in my 20s and 30s, thanks to her and some mental health professionals, that I couldn't necessarily trust what I was seeing. So something would seem to me negative or an attack or going badly, and I would need her or somebody sort of on the outside of my fae to just say, no, no, no, that's not what's happening. I talk in the book about this very rare brain disorder called Anton syndrome, and it's people who are blind but think they can see. And it's not denial. It's literally that's the disorder. They're convinced. They'll sit there on a table and say, do you know, there's a mic over here and a laptop there and speakers over there, and then get up and walk into the wall.

But for them, they'll just— It's accurate for them. They realize that it—yes. Right. The interesting thing about it is, well, first of all, there's no cure. And second of all, it comes from trauma, right? It's not a virus. You're not born that way.

Something usually hits you in the head and makes you see things in the wrong way. And that's what FAIR, to me, has done to me, and it did to Phil. And frankly, it feels more and more, you know, you spend five minutes on social media or watching the news, and it feels like it's hit the whole world that way. And we're these animals that know ourselves by a story, right? We teach by story, We learn by story. We communicate by story. Everything's story. We remember by story. And we're telling a story for thousands of years of we're terrible. We're sinful. We suck. Is fast something we could recover from?

I think that we need to find a new story. I think that we have to understand what that story is doing and the prevalence of it. I see it – I mean that helped, right? Because I would write something and someone would say, have a bad attitude about it or whatever. And I could see in them that anger, that sort of fat about themselves and just go, wow, that's just everywhere. Or I would see a newscast, CNN, and this one's hating that one and the world's on fire and just go, yeah, but everything they're saying to each other is fair. They're pointing their fingers and judging. And I guess I just got really tired of it. And that was the reason for writing the book was just like when do we stop sitting in judgment about ourselves? Because we're not going to stop sitting in judgment about others until we do that.

And where does this come from? And to see it take someone's life who is in the prime of his life. And to your point, we'd go out somewhere in Soho, get a coffee and walk out. I remember this. We walked out of a coffee shop and a big truck goes by and the guys are leaning out the window shouting, I love you, man. And I'm like, oh, thanks. But like you said, it didn't matter. I think part of what Fed does to us is that the love we get from the people that matter, we discount.

And so we want love from strangers. But when that love comes, we discount that because we know it's, at best, it's adulation and that they're reacting to something they saw on screen or read in a book. So how do you fix all of that? And I feel like, to me, writing the book was helpful because I can see it more. But writing on the page, though, you are writing about you. Yeah. But there's a distance that writing provides, right? It's at a remove.

So it's sort of analyzing myself, but with a sense of humor, right? So it's like it's bad, but it's kind of funny that it's bad. And then it doesn't seem so bad. Where did you learn to find humor? I grew up in a very dysfunctional home. And my earliest memories of it were watching Saturday Night Live. And I didn't know what it was. And I didn't know why it was funny that this guy with white hair had a fake arrow through his head. But it made everybody laugh. And Friday night would come and my father would start yelling at my brother and my brother would yell back and

you can sense it coming. And I would just start doing impressions of the things I'd seen. I used to do a Nixon impression. I had no idea who Nixon was. You didn't realize he was president. I had no clue. It was like Dan Aykroyd doing it on Saturday Night Live and everyone laughed. And so I just did the same kind of hunching my shoulders over and flipping my wrists over. I had no idea what I was doing, but everyone started to laugh and the fighting stopped. And then it just sort of became, oh, this is interesting, like this thing. when i when i found books which unfortunately get labeled literature because that puts everybody off them but in my teens i found an old bookstore

and i started to read kafka and beckett and voltaire and flannery o'connor and all these people and no one told me they were serious or literary. I was just reading them because the booksellers, I said, what's funny? And he gave me these books. And I thought they were hilarious. And dealing with everything that I was dealing with, and either laughing at it, laughing at themselves, attacking it, wondering where it came from. And I thought, oh, this I can do. This seems like a way to get through all this. Do you believe in God? Only when bad things happen. I mean, I believe, I don't think there's a God, right? I think there's

probably not. I kind of like being agnostic about it all. I feel like not knowing is a pretty good place for humans to be, right? I don't know for sure that there is a God, so I'm not a rabbi, and I'm no atheist saying there's no way there's a God. I think a question mark makes for a pretty good tombstone. So I'm okay with not knowing. But what I have gotten to is the idea that there's a God who hates us or who judges us is entirely ludicrous. And not just ludicrous on the face of it, but if you think that not eating cheeseburgers is going to pacify that God, you're crazy.

Because Moses couldn't. And nobody could. Everyone sinned. So it seems it's when I hear people like that or see people like that, I passed a sign the other day right here, just a yellow sign on the side of the street saying, Beg Jesus for mercy. And I was like, why?

If you change Jesus to Frank, you're like, I don't think I like Frank. What is he up to? Why am I so bad? And what makes youth want to put a sign up on the 405 that tells me I'm bad? I just don't get it. And it comes from, I feel like this story that's become part of us. I'm curious, raising your children very differently than how you were raised, you're able to see maybe a version of yourself that didn't experience the things that you... For sure.

How do they interpret this idea of fae? My kids? Yeah. They have no connection to it whatsoever. They don't understand. Do you see it in them at all? No. No, I can see...

Look, they're not robots, so there are moments where it's like... They're human. Sadly. But they are. They're like, they get into their spaces where they don't feel as good or they're nervous or whatever, but it's at a normal level.

I remember reading that that was Freud's whole... I know Freud's persona non grata. But I do remember reading that he... and I put this in Happiest, where he said his whole goal wasn't to make people happy. It was to bring them

to a normal level of misery. And I think that's a very noble goal, whether he reached it or not. Shalom, Auslander. Thank you so much. Thank you. It's fun. Writer Shalom Auslander.

His new memoir is called Fae. Coming up, film critic Justin Chang reviews the new thriller Long Legs. This is Fresh Air. In the hit thriller Long Legs, Micah Monroe plays an FBI agent tracking a serial killer with a possible satanic connection. It also stars Nicolas Cage and Blair Underwood. It's the latest from writer-director Osgood Perkins, whose previous horror movies include The Black Coat's Daughter and Gretel and Hansel.

Our film critic Justin Chang has this review. I have friends who can handle just about any kind of horror movie, except for the ones involving demonic possession and the occult. Oddly enough, that's the subgenre I've always found the most comforting. Some of these movies, like this year's Immaculate and The First Omen, may exploit religion for easy scares, but they can also confront and affirm matters of faith with a sincerity that Hollywood rarely attempts. That's why The Exorcist is not just one of the

great horror films, but also one of the great religious films. It gives the devil his due, but it puts the fear of God in you, too. There's nothing remotely comforting, however, about the occult activity going on in Longlegs, a tense and frightening new movie in which evil is everywhere and God seems entirely absent. Part of what makes the film so effective is that it doesn't really depend on secrets or surprises. The writer and director Osgood Perkins summons an atmosphere of dread so intense it's practically spoiler-proof. We meet the nightmarish villain known as Longlegs in the very first scene. He's a small-town oddball played with a big fright wig and creepy prosthetic makeup by an almost comically terrifying Nicholas Cage. The authorities are

stumped by Longlegs, a satanic serial killer who never once lays a finger on his victims. His crimes all appear to be clear-cut murder-suicides, in which a husband and father kills his family before taking his own life. But at each crime scene, Longlegs leaves behind a letter written in a code reminiscent of the Zodiac Killer that makes clear there will be more murders to come. To help crack the case, the FBI taps an upstart agent, that's Lee Harker, played by Micah Monroe, who has psychic abilities. The clairvoyant detective is a cliche, but Perkins treats it with a conviction that makes it feel almost fresh. In one suspenseful early scene, Harker is out in the field with an agent, Fisk, who makes the mistake of ignoring one of

her premonitions. Some time later, Harker debriefs what happened with another agent, Carter, played by a wonderfully world-weary Blair Underwood. Tell me your version of what happened in Colfax with the shooting of Agent Fisk. It's hard to explain, sir. It's like something tapping me on the shoulder, telling me where to look. You identified a suspect's house.

No prior knowledge, no real indication that it was any way different than all the cookie cutters all around it. Anything like that ever happen to you before, Agent Hawker? From time to time, sir. Come on. Maybe we'll just call you highly intuitive. Yes, sir. Micah Monroe came to fame fleeing supernatural terrors in the movie It Follows, and she was quietly mesmerizing a few years ago as a woman being stalked in the Hitchcockian thriller Watcher.

Here, even when she's playing the hunter instead of the hunted, she seems terrified, even haunted, by what she uncovers. Of all the movies that inspired Longlegs, the clearest influence is The Silence of the Lambs, with its serial killer cat-and-mouse games. Harker is basically the Clarice Starling to Longlegs' Hannibal Lecter. Reinforcing the connection between the two movies, Longlegs is set in the 90s, which explains the lack of cell phones. That's not the only way in which Perkins' movie seems to have emerged from an earlier era. You've seen bits and pieces of this story countless times before. The crime scene photos, the indecipherable puzzles, the killer's sadistic taunts, the detective's dogged persistence. Longlegs reminded me of many other mysteries

in which killers take an insidious, hands-off approach. From Agatha Christie's 1975 novel Curtain, to Kiyoshi Kurosawa's brilliant 1997 thriller, Cure. But if elements of the story can feel derivative, Perkins' filmmaking rarely is. Using eerily precise compositions and dimly lit interiors, he finds a brooding menace in seemingly ordinary places. Even when he unleashes a jump scare or a sinister home video-style flashback, his control of tone never wavers. He gets sharp performances, too, from actors like Alicia Witt,

as Harker's fanatically religious mother, and Kiernan Shipka, as the one known survivor of Longlegs' crimes. As for Nicolas Cage, he's as memorable as you'd expect. The actor may be no stranger to going wildly over the top, but I can't recall him ever having played a figure of such pure, unmitigated evil. And it's that sense of evil, with no hope of escape or redemption in sight, that gives Longlegs its unsettling power. Even so, some of that power does dissipate in the closing stretch, when it's finally revealed, so to speak, what the hell is going on. The solution makes a certain sense, but it's also a little deflating.

And it's a reminder that sometimes an explanation has a way of ruining things. A joke, a mystery, and even a good scare. Justin Chang is a film critic for The New Yorker. He reviewed Long Legs. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with technical and engineering help from Adam Staniszewski. Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nesper. Thea Chaloner directed today's show.

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