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WORK TITLE: Little Panic
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://amandastern.com/
CITY: Brooklyn
STATE: NY
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born in New York, NY.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, journalist. Happy Ending Reading Series, founder, host, 2003-16. Also worked in film for Ang Lee, Terry Gilliam, Gregg Araki, Ted Hope, and James Schamus. Former on-air host for a cable network.
AWARDS:NYFA Fiction Fellow; residencies at MacDowell Colony and Yaddo.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including New York Times, New York Times Magazine, Interview, Salon, Post Road, Believer, Blackbook, Filmmaker, and St. Ann’s Review. Contributor to anthologies, including Love is a Four Letter Word , The Marijuana Chronicles, Women in Clothes, and Confidence, or the Appearance of Confidence: The Best of the Believer Music Interviews.
SIDELIGHTS
Amanda Stern is the author of the novel The Long Haul, and the 2018 memoir, Little Panic: Dispatches from an Anxious Life. She has also penned the nine-book “Frankly Frannie” middle-grade chapter-book series about feisty Frankie Miller under the name A.J. Stern, as well as two novels for young adults, You’re So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah! and its sequel, We Are So Crashing Your Bar Mitzvah!, both under the name Fiona Rosenbloom. In 2003, Stern founded the Happy Ending Reading series, which she hosted until 2016. Stern has also been a NYFA Fiction Fellow and held residencies at the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo. Her writing has appeared in numerous periodicals, including the New York Times, New York Times Magazine, Salon, Post Road and St. Ann’s Review.
The Long Haul
Stern’s debut work, The Long Haul, was published in 2003, and details the troubled six-year relationship between an unnamed college-age musician with a drinking problem who is called simply “the Alcoholic,” and his codependent girlfriend, who sometimes goes to college. The musician has a local following in a college town of upstate New York, and the book opens with the Alcoholic having a meltdown on stage for which his girlfriend blames herself. As she dips further into depression, the narrative also provides backstory to the genesis of the relationship, including the rescue of a child during a blizzard and the rape of the musician’s lover at another campus.
“With its self-destructive main characters, this moody novella will strongly resonate with those who came of age in the 1990s,” commented Library Journal reviewer Andrea Kempf. A Publishers Weekly reviewer also had praise for The Long Haul, noting: “Though the narrator is sometimes frustratingly passive, she is also articulate and skillful at telling her own sharp, dark coming-of-age story.”
You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah! and We Are So Crashing Your Bar Mitzvah!
Writing as Rosenbloom, Stern offers a pair of young adult novels with You’re So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah! and its sequel, We Are So Crashing Your Bar Mitzvah!. Thirteen-year-old Stacy Friedman is at the center of the former novel, preparing for her Bat Mitzvah party, longing for a super dress and a dance and possibly some kissing with the boy of her dreams, Andy Goldfarb. Then Stacy discovers her best friend, Lydia, making out with Andy and uninvites her to the party. Things seem to be falling apart generally for Stacy, when her mom–stressed by the father’s departure–buys her a hideous sequined dress, and her brother has suddenly ballooned in size. It looks like this Bat Mitzvah is going to be a disaster, but eventually, with luck and wit, all turns out fine. A Publishers Weekly critic had praise for You’re So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah! noting: “[T]his snappy novel shows the author’s keen understanding of adolescent social pressures and conveys universal truths about growing pains, friendship and young love.” Similarly, a Kirkus Reviews contributor commented: “Rosenbloom’s … girls are completely real: self-centered and peer-oriented, inextricably linked by cell phone and instant messaging and dying to be independent and grown up. … Light humor with a little lesson.”
Stacy returns in We Are So Crashing Your Bar Mitzvah!, ready to take her place, along with best buddy Lydia, among the cool girls in school, as they have been trained at summer camp in how to be cool. However, it is not they who are now in with the popular Chicas, but their other friend, Kelly, who has lost weight and is turning heads. Kelly is even invited to the exclusive, Hollywood-themed Bar Mitzvah of Eben, while no such invitation comes to Stacy or Lydia. Stacy will not take this snub lying down and decides to crash the party. In the event, they are caught and humiliated, but a kindly rabbi talks to the pair about friendship and kindness. “[Stacy’s] turnabout and subsequent actions feel too abrupt to be real, and while the book has the outward trappings of Judaism, it lacks the spirituality underneath,” noted a Kirkus Reviews critic of this sequel.
Little Panic
Stern turns to memoir in her 2018 work, Little Panic, which deals with Stern’s panic disorder. Stern grew up in the 1970s and ’80s partly on McDougal Street in Greenwich Village, leading a barefoot, bohemian life with her mother, but also spending time with her father in a much wealthier and stricter environment in uptown Manhattan. This bifurcated world did not help the unrelenting panic that Stern felt on a daily basis, where every good-bye was treated as a final one; she felt there was no one she could truly depend on. And then when a little boy disappeared down the block, Stern was sure that her own world would fall apart. The disappearance of Etan Patz, a six-year-old boy on his way to school, led to the missing child movement, but for Stern it confirmed her own worst fears. As the author notes, it was not until she was twenty-five that a therapist finally was able to bring some comfort, diagnosing her overblown anxieties as panic disorder. The memoir is written in short, essay-like chapters, detailing the stages of Stern’s life and also showing what it is like to be in the head of someone afflicted with panic disorder.
Writing in USA Today, Zlati Meyer was unimpressed with this memoir, observing: “There are no universal lessons in Little Panic. It reads like an incessant whine. And the whole time, the reader thinks, ‘Wow, these parents are lousy.’ … While sporadic bursts of beauty in Stern’s writing … prevent Little Panic from being unbearable, the uneven narrative tone and crass piggybacking on the Patz family’s tragedy make this [a] collection of dispatches to skip.” Others found more to like. A Kirkus Reviews critic had praise, noting: “Stern is such a skilled stylist–and such an unforgiving judge of herself–that the memoir radiates a morbid fascination.” A Publishers Weekly reviewer similarly termed this a “brave memoir of mental illness,” adding, “Honest and deeply felt, Stern’s story delivers a raw window into the terrifying world of panic disorders.” Likewise, New York Times Book Review Online contributor Ariel Leve dubbed this a “resonant and often funny memoir.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, October, 2006, Vonda Douros, review of You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah!, p. 161.
Kirkus Reviews, August 15, 2005, review of You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah!, p. 921; May 1, 2007, review of We Are So Crashing Your Bar Mitzvah!; April 15, 2018, review of Little Panic: Dispatches from an Anxious Life.
Library Journal, December, 2003. Andrea Kempf, review of The Long Haul, p. 169.
Publishers Weekly, October 20, 2003, review of The Long Haul, p. 37; August 29, 2005, review of You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah!, p. 57; March 26, 2018, review of Little Panic, p. 105.
School Library Journal, December, 2005, review of You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah!, p. 153; August, 2010, Stacy Dillon, review of Frankly, Frannie, p. 87; November, 2010, Jackie Partch, review of Doggy Day Care, p. 84.
ONLINE
Amanda Stern website, http://amandastern.com (July 30, 2018).
Booklist Online, https://www.booklistonline.com/ (April 18, 2018), Karen Springen, review of Little Panic.
Bookslut, http://www.bookslut.com/ (August 1, 2005), Janine Armin, “An Interview with Amanda Stern.”
Brain Pickings, https://www.brainpickings.org/ (June 20, 2018), Maria Popova, review of Little Panic.
Happy Endings, http://thehappyendingseries.com/ (July 30, 2018), “Amanda Stern.”
New York Times Book Review Online, https://www.nytimes.com/ (July 13, 2018), Ariel Leve, review of Little Panic.
Times of Israel, https://www.timesofisrael.com/ (May 25, 2016), Jen Maidenberg, “Israel Debut for NY-based Literary Series, Where Audience Throws Wrenches into the Plot.”
USA Today Online, https://www.usatoday.com/ (July 10, 2018), Zlati Meyer, review of Little Panic.
Woolfer, https://thewoolfer.com/ (April 29, 2018), “Woolfer Q&A with Amanda Stern, Author of Little Panic.”
Amanda Stern is the author of THE LONG HAUL and eleven books for children written under the pseudonyms A.J. Stern and Fiona Rosenbloom. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, The Believer, and Interview, among other places, and she has been included in a variety of anthologies. In 2003, she founded the popular Happy Ending Music and Reading Series in NYC which she ran until 2016, at Joe’s Pub (part of The Public Theater) and later at Symphony Space. Her current book is LITTLE PANIC, a memoir about growing up with an undiagnosed panic disorder in Etan Patz era Greenwich Village. It comes out on June 19, 2018 from Grand Central Publishing.
Amanda Stern
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Amanda Stern
Amanda Stern hosting The Happy Ending Music and Reading Series.
Background information
Amanda Stern, is an American writer and literary event organiser. Her fiction, non-fiction, and poetry have appeared in, among other places, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, Filmmaker, The Believer, Post Road, St. Ann's Review, Salt Hill, Hayden's Ferry Review, Five Chapters and Spinning Jenny - and her debut novel, The Long Haul ISBN 1932360069, was well-received[1]
Contents [hide]
1
Early work
2
Events
3
Writing
4
References
5
Further reading
6
External links
Early work[edit]
When she was a senior in high school, Stern starred in an off-Broadway production of a play she co-wrote, at the now defunct Kaufmann Theater. From there she turned to film, working for Good Machine, Hal Hartley, Ang Lee and Terry Gilliam, and later as a comic, co-hosting the Lorne Michaels' comedy series, "This is Not a Test", alongside host, Marc Maron at Catch a Rising Star. Soon after she became an on-air host for the Lorne Michaels' owned network, Burly Bear Network. In 1999 she left comedy all together in order to pursue a career in fiction.
Events[edit]
In 2003 Stern founded the highly acclaimed and popular The Happy Ending Music and Reading Series in 2003 out of a small Chinatown bar. Cited by critics of The Village Voice, New York magazine, NY Press and The New Yorker as the best series in New York City,[2] with Time Out New York calling it the "most vital authors' series in NYC", and "consistently one of the most entertaining literary events in the city".[3] Stern's reputation as a skilled host and discerning curator grew, and in 2006, she was profiled in the "New York" issue of The New York Times Magazine as one of ten "New Bohemians, helping to keep downtown New York alive".[4] The Happy Ending Series quickly became a required stop for authors and musicians on tour.[5][6]
On January 7, 2009, after five years in the small bar, the well-loved series moved to uptown to NYC's premiere performance venue, Joe's Pub at the Public Theater becoming the pub's first ever ongoing literary series. She has welcomed over 600 artists, including: Laurie Anderson, Aimee Mann, James Salter, Moby, A.M. Homes, Rick Moody, Amy Hempel, Mary Gaitskill, My Brightest Diamond and Mark Eitzel.
The last event was held in May 2016.[7][8]
Writing[edit]
Stern has written eleven books for children under the pseudonyms A.J. Stern and Fiona Rosenbloom.[9] Her fiction, non-fiction, and poetry have appeared in, among other places, The New York Times,[10] The New York Times Magazine, Filmmaker, The Believer, Post Road, St. Ann's Review, Salt Hill, Hayden's Ferry Review, Five Chapters and Spinning Jenny Her debut novel, The Long Haul, released by Soft Skull Press can be found in bookstores nationwide.
She blogs about culture, and her series at http://www.amandastern.com. Stern has held several residencies at Yaddo and MacDowell. She currently lives in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, home to the novelists Colson Whitehead, Jennifer Egan and Jhumpa Lahiri, where she is working on her next novel.[11]
Amanda Stern is a fourth generation native of Manhattan; raised without an accent.
Her work has appeared in the New York Times; the New York Times Magazine; the New York Times Book Review; Filmmaker, The Believer, Salon.com, Blackbook, St. Ann’s Review, Post Road and themid.com among others. Her personal essays have been included in several anthologies: Love is a Four Letter Word , The Marijuana Chronicles, Women in Clothes and her Believer interview with Laurie Anderson was included in Confidence, or the Appearance of Confidence: The Best of the Believer Music Interviews, 2014.
Her first novel The Long Haul (Soft Skull Press) was published in 2003. Of her metaphors, the San Francisco Chronicle wrote, “they’re so fresh, they’re almost jarring.” That made her really happy, and relieved, because she’d been worried she’d over-similied and under-metaphored. Concurrent with the publication of The Long Haul, she launched The Happy Ending Music and Reading Series as an antidote to boredom. The series, designed around public risks, became a critical success, and its inventive model paved the way for the proliferation of music and reading series created in its wake. Happy Ending had permanent homes at Joe’s Pub in NYC and Symphony Space. In 2016, she ended the series with two final shows in Israel with Etgar Keret, Colum McCann and Gary Shteyngart. Amanda produced over 250 shows and has welcomed over 700 creative artists, ranging from Lena Dunham to Laurie Anderson.
She spent her 20s working in film–for Ang Lee, Terry Gilliam and Gregg Araki, but primarily for Ted Hope and James Schamus at the famed (and not forgotten) Good Machine, where she worked closely with Hal Hartley. After that she became an accidental comic, co-hosting the Lorne Michaels series, “This is Not a Test“ with host Marc Maron at “Catch A Rising Star.” She was the on-air host of a cable network owned by Lorne Michaels, the name of which is so mortifying she can’t even bring herself to tell me, the fake person pretending to write “her” bio. Later, in the music world, she worked for David Byrne, curating a narrative section of The Talking Heads Box Set, “Once In A Lifetime.”
Stern hosts, talks, moderates and curates for those who pay her. Some of these people and places are: the National Book Awards ceremony, “5 Under 35;” the BBC; Soundcheck; the MacDowell Colony; Brooklyn Public Library’s Gala with Paul Auster and at Powerhouse Arena. She’s also led storytelling workshops for Moleskine, Cirque du Soleil and Proctor & Gamble.
She’s published twelve novels, nine for children (the Frankly, Frannie, series for Penguin under the name, A.J. Stern), two for young adults (You’re So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah and its sequel, under the name, Fiona Rosenbloom) and one novel of literary fiction, The Long Haul, under her real name. Her most recent book is a memoir called Little Panic, which is coming out on June 19, 2018 from Grand Central. She’s held several fellowships at both The MacDowell Colony (once as the Philip Morris Company Fellow) and at Yaddo. In 2012 she was a NYFA fiction fellow. Because she is a writer, she is legally obligated to live in Brooklyn.
She has five lines, appears in two scenes and is on screen for a total of seven seconds in Hal Hartley‘s latest movie, MEANWHILE, starring DJ Mendel.
THIS IS HER BIO IN PORTUGUESE:
Amanda Stern nasceu e foi criada no Greenwich Village, em Nova York. Seus artigos e contos foram publicados em diversas revistas e sites literarios americanos e europeus. Por v‡rios anos, Amanda tambiem trabalhou como assistente de diretores de cinema como Terry Gilliam, Hal Harley, Ang Lee, Ted Hope e James Schamus.
In 2003, in preparation for her debut novel THE LONG HAUL, native New Yorker Amanda Stern approached local bars and asked about readings. Happy Ending, a Chinatown “massage parlor” turned bar, offered Stern their space for a series of her own.
Israel debut for NY-based literary series, where audience throws wrenches into the plot
Amanda Stern's Happy Ending heads to the Jerusalem Writer’s Festival, featuring authors Etgar Keret and Gary Shteyngart
By Jen Maidenberg
25 May 2016, 4:31 am
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Amanda Stern, creator and host of the Happy Ending series, will be bringing the show to Israel as part of the Jerusalem Writers' Festival (Jon Pack)
Remove the location from Amanda Stern’s description of where and when she grew up and you could almost imagine it was on a kibbutz in Israel.
“All told, there were around 20 kids, spanning in ages from infant to 18, and we had absolute and total freedom,” said Stern, American author and event producer. “Together, we wrote, directed and performed plays, made films, put on musicals and were generally very project-oriented. Childhood was a real collaboration.”
But Stern, who will arrive in Israel for the first time this week in advance of the Jerusalem Writer’s Festival, grew up in New York City — and the enclave she describes was located in the city’s Greenwich Village, in what was known as the MacDougal Sullivan garden.
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In a recent interview, Stern connected growing up in a tight community in the early 1980s with her desire to launch Happy Ending, the extremely successful performing arts series she hosts in New York and is now bringing to Israel.
“I realized, not long after I launched Happy Ending,” said Stern, “that I was simply recreating my childhood, trying in some way to rebuild the collaborative community that’s disappeared with time and gentrification.”
In the Happy Ending series, the collaboration is between literary and musical talents, Stern herself, and — in what the makes the event series extraordinary — the audience.
Creator of the popular New York literary series Happy Ending, Amanda Stern (Zach Hyman)
As part of the program, the guest author (Stern’s requirement is at least one published book) gives a public reading and the musical guest performs live on stage.
Additionally, however, the musical guest must try to get the audience to sing along to one song, and the author must take a “risk” on stage.
“My experience has been that the risk aspect of the night is where the connection between audience and author truly takes place,” Stern explained. “It allows for a relationship. The audience becomes a safety net, wanting the authors to succeed, prepared to support them if they don’t.”
Past risks have included karate-chopping wooden boards, prank calling one’s mother, and getting a pie to the face.
In 2012, however, Israeli writer Etgar Keret took Stern’s dare to a whole new level when he read in English from one of his works, while at the same time smoking a joint.
Keret, who will return to Happy Ending at one of two events scheduled, also worked with Stern and festival director Liran Golod to curate the Israel series.
Etgar Keret at the 2011 International Writers’ Festival (photo credit: Miriam Alster/Flash 90)
On Thursday, May 26, Keret will appear along with Anthony Marra, Colum McCann, and Nell Zink. The musical guest will be Tamar Eisenman. On Saturday, May 28, Stern will host authors Alex Epstein, Shelly Oria, and Gary Shteyngart, as well as musician Yali Sobol.
Not all the risks end up taking a comedic turn.
“I was very moved by Paul Rudnick’s risk,” Stern said. “He’s a well-known humor writer and everyone expected his risk to be hilarious. His mother died a few weeks before the show, however, and he decided that he’d talk about her for the very first time since her death.
“He told a hilarious and poignant story about his mother in her last days, and the depth and sadness coupled with the humor was unexpected, deeply effective, and utterly moving,” said Stern.
When asked if there would be anything uniquely Israeli about these Happy Ending events, Stern replied she thought the “Israeli flavor would come out organically” and that she might learn how to say a couple Hebrew words in the process. (The events will be in English.)
‘I enjoy the moments I’m actively bombing onstage because existing inside my worst-case scenario without dying feels like an achievement’
Stern launched the series in 2003 out of a small Chinatown bar. Since then, the show has significantly grown in scale, from an 80-person audience to upwards of 800.
Guests have included authors Zadie Smith, Lena Dunham, and Joshua Ferris, as well as musicians Aimee Mann, Lisa Loeb, and Vampire Weekend.
While critics credit Happy Ending’s success to Stern’s reputation as a skilled curator and engaging host, Stern herself has been forthcoming that it hasn’t always been easy to get up on stage, as she suffers from anxiety — once even talking herself down from a panic attack while introducing a Happy Ending event.
Shteyngart is very open about his neurosis and says he’s been in analysis for 12 years. (YouTube screenshot)
“I got over my stage fright by repeatedly facing my fear,” Stern revealed. “I still get anxious, but it’s not as severe. In fact, it’s gotten to the point where I enjoy the moments I’m actively bombing onstage because existing inside my worst-case scenario without dying feels like an achievement. Each time I don’t die, it’s a win.”
Stern also is currently working on a book about anxiety.
When asked if she’s ever had to coach a nervous author in advance of a show, Stern said no, but she did indicate that part of the reason she has authors take risks is to “give them something outside their reading to worry about.”
“Reading your own work on stage can be harrowing,” Stern said, “but when you are focused on something else, the reading takes on less importance and allows the author to do their best without even realizing it.”
And what about Shteyngart, an author who has spoken publicly of his own anxiety — notably in an essay series in The New Yorker in which he writes about needing “forty-six Ativan tablets to battle stage fright” while on book tour: Would Stern take it easy on the author of Little Failure?
“Forty-six Ativan? That’s it?” she said, dryly. “What an amateur.”
Woolfer Q&A with Amanda Stern, author of Little Panic
by The Woolferupdated on June 22, 20181 Comment
on Woolfer Q&A with Amanda Stern, author of Little Panic
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Little Panic (a memoir, forthcoming June 19, 2018)
Pre-order now
What would Virginia Woolf say to your younger self?
Do not fear reality, write your truth with its pen.
Tell us about why you think Woolfers will love the book
So many of our posts circle around this question: Am I doing life correctly? I spent my entire life convinced that there was a right way to be human, and that I was doing it wrong. Because my panic disorder went ignored until I was 25, I spent much of my youth hiding every terrifying fear I had, assuming that my suffering was shameful. As an adult it took me decades to finally understand that my limitations and differences don’t mean I’ve failed at life. I can be a childless, unmarried woman with a panic disorder, who finds family in her community, and still be a valid and valuable person.
My goal was to write an autobiography of an emotion; to reveal my experience of being human in this life. My hope is that the Woolfers who read the book will identify with my so-called failures, relate to my dread and fear that something was wrong with me, and in that recognition they’ll feel seen.
Do you have a “room of your own” to write?
I write in my apartment or in my co-working space, but the room I do have of my own is the space that opens up when I’m writing. The relationship that develops between me and my work is private, a place no one else can see or touch or even know about. It’s just ours, and it’s there when I need to access it. Even when the door occasionally sticks, we will always find ways to pry it open.
What are you reading/excited to read?
I’m currently reading three books at once, which I don’t love doing, but often can’t help myself. Those three are: Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, which I can’t believe took me this long to read. Waiting for me on the floor are: Knots by Gunnhild Oyehaug, Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, The Line Becomes a River by Francisco Canto and Negroland by Margo Jefferson.
I’m super excited about How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee, That Kind of Mother by Rumaan Alam, There, There by Tommy Orange, Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot and Educated by Tara Westover.
And I’m always always always re-reading The Worry Cure by Robert Leahy, which is simply the best book ever.
August 2005
Janine Armin
features
An Interview with Amanda Stern
An article titled "Literary Readings: Cancel Them" was recently published in the self-confessed penurious but elitist literary journal n + 1, in which readings were declared to be pretty boring. For the most part this assumption rings depressingly true, but Amanda Stern has managed to circumvent the ennui with her Happy Ending Music and Reading Series held in New York.
As author of the addiction-swollen debut The Long Haul (Soft Skull, 2003), esteemed reading series impresario and artistic dilettante Amanda Stern knows she’s got a good thing going. Or more accurately, many good things going. An enviable combination of talent, insight and blatant charm have made her and her Happy Ending Music and Reading Series a success. The local musicians and open-shirted rogue bartender contribute to the enigmatic ambiance of the ex-massage parlor-turned-bar in New York’s Lower East Side that houses the readings. But the true exhilaration derives, believe it or not, from authors reciting their work.
In her spare time she is working on a new book of mysterious but certainly evocative content titled The Guthrie Test. Greenwich Village born, Stern thrives on the city that has gotten her where she is today. With such extensive and varied talents, it is not entirely strange to conjecture that New York City might hover above the source of the telluric currents, and Stern is tapping into their putrid though profound power. Then again, maybe she’s just really good at multitasking.
Via Internet from my humid city dwelling, to her Cape Cod summer incubate of further Stern activity, I attempted to understand her tireless artistic compulsion and how she has managed to strike the perfect balance between writer as outgoing promoter and introspective thinker.
What do you think makes your Happy Ending Reading Series so entertaining?
The last thing I wanted was to create a traditional reading series. I have to sit through it every week and God knows I could bore myself to death via C-SPAN, and at home nonetheless. So when I started mentally constructing the events, I tried to think about what it was I wanted to see, but more importantly, what it was I was trying to say. I arrived at this: Not all writers are as boring as carcasses. Sure, some are. But I’m not interested in spending time with them. I am interested not only in how writers think and view the world, but almost more so in the other things they can do. I’m always taken by the hidden talents of my peers, and so it was this aspect that I set the guidelines for Happy Ending. And the guidelines are that the authors must do something they’ve never done before onstage. They must take a risk, outside of reading in public. It’s not that the terms are so interesting, it’s what the authors do with these terms that make the events so entertaining.
The other aspect of the show involves musicians with stories of their own to tell. The musicians are usually local--emerging or accomplished--singer-songwriters, and they play five original tunes and one cover song of their choice (the first year, the musicians had to cover '80s songs only, and it was amazingly fun, but after a year, enough.) Underneath that, there are some other things that add to what’s already a semi-lighthearted event. For one thing, the venue is outstanding. It’s this unique blend of swank and kitsch that I love. Happy Ending used to be an old "massage" parlor, hence the name "Happy Ending" so if you skulk around you’ll come across some amazing little holdovers. The penis showers are still in place downstairs. The tone of the space combined with the levity of the events makes, I think, for a fairly unpretentious evening. That was the goal.
What prompted your reading series?
The summer before my novel came out (The Long Haul) in 2003 I was trying to set myself up with some readings. So, I asked my friend Oliver, who owns Happy Ending, if I could read. Instead of answering, he asked if I wanted to run a literary series. I thought about it and realized that I did. I spent that summer corralling friends and acquaintances to perform the opening night and asked everyone else I knew to submit material. When the season opened in September, I stood onstage, in front of about 130 people and realized that the answer to my original question to Oliver, can I read?, was in fact, no.
You seemed very confident at the readings I attended. Do you still suffer from stage fright when reading your own material?
I used to have tremendously bad stage fright, like throwing-up-before-going-on-stage type of fright, but that was many years ago and began when I was in an off-Broadway play as a teenager. It continued when I was doing comedy, and although the preshow throwing up subsided, I began harboring rituals: I couldn’t speak to anyone or let anyone touch me before going up onstage. In recent years I’ve learned to deal with the anxiety and now have a great deal of fun onstage, especially when I’m not reading, but when I have a story in hand I am always, without fail, nervous on my way to the stage.
Do you choose the musicians to complement the writers or vice versa? What came first, the music or the books?
I choose the authors first, and then once the tone is set I try and match it with the proper musician.
You’ve had wonderful writers as guests at Happy Ending, like Maggie Estep, Rick Moody, Jonathan Ames, Steve Almond...the list goes on. You’ve built a solid reputation for yourself--are there other events in the city that you would recommend? Or, alternatively, other cities?
Well, thank you. I don’t really know how I got so lucky, but almost every author I have asked to read has said yes. It’s really humbling. Same goes for the musicians. And at this point, I can sell the event to other authors based on the authors who have already read; it has absolutely nothing to do with me. It’s because those authors took a risk on me and my series that I have built something that seems to have legs. I really can’t imagine James Salter or Jim Shepard saying yes to me two years ago [hey’re kicking off the third season on September 14, 2005] without the roster of talent I’ve accrued.
Now, as far as other series... I have heard tons about the Little Gray Book Series, which I can’t go to because it’s on Wednesdays. But I’ve seen John Hodgman host, and he’s truly a special performer. Cupcake was a great venue for strong female voices, but they recently stopped. One Story is great, that’s over at Arlene’s Grocery. They usually have just one author read one story. That author also chooses a cheap and often good, strong theme drink. I’m reading at Freebird in October and I like the sound of it there; it’s a used bookstore and the idea of new books being read where old books are sold appeals to me. Out of town, pretty much anything that happens in Austin is amazing. Marfa, Texas, would be an incredible place for a reading series. You could have outdoor screenings and cook up some smoky dogs. I can also see someone doing something at the Old American Can Factory in Gowanus, but they probably already do and I’m the last to know. I also really like Sunny’s in Red Hook. That’s on Sundays and it feels very small-town and nurturing. Gabriel gets excellent people also. I’m sure there are a ton of others.
How do you feel about the New York writing community? Do you feel it is supportive?
The world that I’m in is quite supportive. I’m amazed actually at how unbackstabby it is. I have some dear friends who are writers and a ton of acquaintances who are writers, and I truly feel we could all get together in one big dining hall and not be undermining or defensive. I don’t know how I got so lucky, but I’ve managed to surround myself with some pretty extraordinary people. I try and recreate the sense of security I feel in my own writing world as much as I can at Happy Ending. There have been tons of professional, artistic, personal and even romantic connections made at my series, and I’m incredibly proud of that. I would love to continue to foster that sense of community there. I’ve wanted to do more--to host Happy Ending parties for the participants at the end of every season--but I can’t seem to get it together enough. Maybe next season...But, all in all, yes, I feel supported here.
Are you a dedicated supporter of the small presses? Do you have any opinions on how to get around the disparity between the big and the small?
I am a supporter of small presses, of course. And mom-and-pop bookstores (though you’d need to drive out of town for those) and of course, penny-candy and general stores. Soft Skull published my first book and I adore them and believe that I was completely spoiled by their attentiveness to me and my tiny little book. The disparity between big and small presses and getting around that has to do with self-esteem, I think. People are so focused on status and the lure of the name brand. It’s the same with agents. People think you’ll get more if you have a huge corporation tooting your horn instead of an independent agent who has chosen you in order to nurture your career, not just sell your book and wait for the next one. There are exceptions everywhere, and I don’t mean to make blanket statements, but overall I feel this is true, that a lot of people think this way. A book is not going to sell because a large house is the publisher or because it’s represented by an agency behemoth. A book is going to sell because it hits some collective G spot at the right time. Often, it’s luck. Or marketing. But I have witnessed Richard Nash, at Soft Skull Press, perform the impossible with one arm tied and his eyelids taped down.
You do a lot of different things: writing, drawing and literary-promoting among them. Are there different times in your life during which one of these pulls more strongly? Do you operate on many levels all active at once and mutually influential?
I am always a writer but only an artist in phases. Meaning, while I write daily, my visual artistic pursuits arrive like mini-drug addictions. I went through a painting phase for a while a few years back where I was constantly making paintings for all my friends who were getting married or moving into new homes, or just wanted one, and when I wasn’t painting I was working on these Xerox-based graphic poems (that I’ve done nothing with) layering them into paintings, or sewing them onto canvases, or starting to put together a chapbook. And when I wasn’t doing that I was very big into street photography, so I was constantly shooting. I haven’t been in one of these artistic frenzies in a while, which I’m grateful for because they came when I was quite depressed, but at the same time, I miss them. The way I’ve been expressing myself lately has been more domestic, which is strange and fun. I’ve taken to crocheting and sewing a lot. I’ll pull apart clothes in order to make new ones, or crochet clothes I want that I see in stores. But I guess the long-winded response to this question is that yes, there are different times in my life in which I get caught up in certain activities; my goal, I suppose, would be to incorporate all these activities as much into my daily life as I can. I think that would make me inherently happy.
The Long Haul is pretty harsh in terms of subject matter. Are you considering pursuing fiction that would confront similar themes like addiction?
Yes, the themes I work with are most likely going to be recurring ones in my future work. I am very interested in issues of mental health, the thin line between wellness and illness, normal and different. I am dedicated to pursuing addiction and compulsive behavior as themes. The novel I’m working on now is a lot about addictive behavior and the ways in which bad habits are handed down from one generation to the next. But, at the same time, I’ve been doing a lot of research on intelligence testing and that’s going into this book as well. I suppose when it comes down to it, the real questions I’m consumed by are ones that have to do with normalcy, or rather, difference.
The book is also very experimental and allegorical. Is opening up new modes of writing a goal in many of your projects?
Funny, I don’t view my novel as experimental in the least. But then I don’t think it’s so dark, and lots of people do. I have no conscious ideation to open up new modes of writing, but if that’s how it ends up, then I’ll take it. I think I am very visual, so I write how I see things or even conceive things. For instance, with The Long Haul, I was listening to a couple albums on a loop when I wrote the book (real albums, not CDs) and I would sometimes lift the needle and play certain parts of songs over and over again and I found that I wanted to write my stories much in the same way I was listening to these songs: move forward, repeat, move forward, repeat. It wasn’t necessarily a conscious choice, it just felt like that’s how the stories needed to be read, the same way I was listening to these songs. With my new novel, I think I’m doing some things that are a bit unconventional (and I’m conscious of this) but I’m not certain if it’s a new mode. If anyone ever publishes it, you can tell me.
Your website is so explanatory. First I would like to say thank you for that. But also, there are some very revealing negative things ("Rejection Letters," "Ugly Teen Photos") and although those links are funny they’re rooted in painful memories we all share. Some writers err on the side of isolationist. Is identifying with your readers very important to you?
The strange thing about me, being a writer and all the implications of solitude that comes with, is that I am very social. I always have been and being part of a community has always been a vital and essential part of my life and who I am. I think that I’m always wanting to engage in some way with other people, whether it’s light and shallow or more penetrating. So the idea with the website was to start some sort of collective conversation, to connect now, more publicly, over things that occurred privately. We are all in this together--not the writing life, necessarily--just the living part.
What are you working on now?
I’m working on a novel called The Guthrie Test, which once again explores addiction and compulsive behavior. Right now, it’s about three generations of one family and the way that addiction is handed down. I can’t talk about it too much because it’s still taking shape and I don’t want to ruin what it might become by pretending I already know what it’s about.
Who is your favorite living versus favorite dead writer?
I don’t have just one favorite writer but I can tell you who I love...
Alive: Denis Johnson, Frederick Barthelme, Mary Gaitskill, Murakami, John Irving, Kevin Canty, Gary Lutz, James Salter, Joan Didion and Melanie Rae Thon (among many others and all those I’ve yet to discover).
Dead: Richard Yates, Raymond Carver, Graham Greene, James Baldwin, Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers, Rilke, Primo Levi, Isaac Babel (also among many others and all those I’ve yet to discover).
Where do you go for inspiration?
Lately, I’ve been doing some of my best writing in Cape Cod. A friend of ours (my boyfriend’s and mine) has a house he very generously offers us when he’s not using it. When I arrived home from MacDowell in December I realized that I loved nature. Having been born and raised in Greenwich Village I was an avowed concrete elitist, but that’s been slipping with age, and I get a lot of perspective when I leave here. More opens up--literally-- and that makes room for the figures to emerge. I’ve just discovered the Berkshires. My new favorite word is Tangelwood.
What is your favorite literary journal?
Is In Touch magazine a literary journal?
I’ve always been a fan of Spinning Jenny. I also like Noon. Swink is excellent. Saint Ann’s Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review are also great. To be quite frank, I don’t read literary journals as much as I use to. It’s not that I love them any less, it’s that I need to read so much for Happy Ending, submissions and books and what not, so the spare reading time I have goes toward books.
QUOTE:
Stern is such a skilled stylist--and such an unforgiving judge of herself--that the memoir radiates a morbid fascination.
Stern, Amanda: LITTLE PANIC
Kirkus Reviews. (Apr. 15, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Stern, Amanda LITTLE PANIC Grand Central Publishing (Adult Nonfiction) $27.00 6, 19 ISBN: 978-1-5387-1192-7
Stern (The Long Haul, 2003) offers a searing memoir about her lifelong panic disorder.
In a series of mostly brief chapters, most of which could function as stand-alone mini-essays, the author proves, as other memoirists have before her, that looking away from a train wreck can be nearly impossible. The riveting story is mostly chronological, as Stern deals with her daily fears up to age 25, the age when a therapist finally provided the proper medical term for her outsized anxieties. "The matter-of-factness with which [the therapist has] said all these life-altering things astonishes me," she writes of that revelation. "I've spent my entire life battling some impossible, invisible plague no one ever seemed to see, and this guy did it with such ease, as though panic disorder is easy to establish, obvious to anyone who would take the time to ask what my symptoms were; textbook, even." At times, the author jumps ahead to the current decade, as she approaches 50. In her recent years, she has been thinking seriously about becoming a mother. As a result, she explores the science of freezing her eggs until she can identify a suitable sperm donor. Eventually, she decided that the move would be too risky. With a loving mother, a compassionate stepfather, stable siblings, admirable schoolteachers, and at least a couple of competent therapists, the author seemingly faced good odds of shedding her panic disorder and resulting anxieties. However, as she shows, she has had to battle anxieties nearly every day, with occasional patches of worry-free hours. In one of the chapters, Stern shares with readers a day-by-day account of a full week, conveying what it is like inside her head. At the end of selected chapters, the author includes actual paragraphs from the reports of multiple therapists she consulted, sometimes willingly, sometimes under duress.
Stern is such a skilled stylist--and such an unforgiving judge of herself--that the memoir radiates a morbid fascination.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Stern, Amanda: LITTLE PANIC." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Apr. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A534375100/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b1d335e3. Accessed 30 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A534375100
QUOTE:
brave memoir of mental illness.
Honest and deeply felt, Stern's story delivers a raw window into the terrifying world of panic disorders.
* Little Panic: Dispatches from an Anxious Life
Publishers Weekly. 265.13 (Mar. 26, 2018): p105.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Little Panic: Dispatches from an Anxious Life
Amanda Stern. Grand Central, $27 (400p) ISBN 978-1-5387-1192-7
Stern (The Long Haul) courageously lays open her excruciating experience with 25 years of untreated panic disorder in this brave memoir of mental illness. From the time she was a small child growing up in New York City, Stern found terrifying possibilities in everything--what would happen if she lost her mother or she herself was kidnapped, what if her family lost their house, what if the constant testing of her intelligence revealed what she suspects, that she is different from all other children. She is eight years old at the time her worst fears are made real in 1979, when six-year-old Etan Patz--who lived mere blocks from her family's , Greenwich Village row-house On MacDougal Street--disappears without a trace, and Stern's close friend Melissa dies of a brain tumor. Before she found her considerable talents in the theater and in writing, Stern tried coping through unhealthy behaviors, including an increasing dependence on cocaine. Failed relationships further reinforced Stern's feeling that there was something broken inside her, along with the heartbreaking belief that her constant worrying kept those she loved safe from harm. Readers who have had panic attacks or have experience with a similar disorder will instantly relate to Stern's experiences; those who do not will come to understand the disease's terrifying power--and the utter relief that comes when it is finally identified and treated. Honest and deeply felt, Stern's story delivers a raw window into the terrifying world of panic disorders. (June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"* Little Panic: Dispatches from an Anxious Life." Publishers Weekly, 26 Mar. 2018, p. 105. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A532997178/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f34c7e65. Accessed 30 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A532997178
QUOTE:
With its self-destructive main characters, this moody novella will strongly resonate with those who came of age in the 1990s.
Stern, Amanda. The Long Haul
Andrea Kempf
Library Journal. 128.20 (Dec. 2003): p169.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2003 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Soft Skull. 2003. c.144p. ISBN 1-932360-06-9. pap. $12. F
Stern's poetic depiction of codependency enhances this heartbreaking story of a young college student who becomes the girlfriend of an alcoholic rock musician. The unnamed narrator spends years catering to her lover's addiction, betraying her own poorly developed sense of self as she relates their life together. The couple rescues a child locked out of her house during a blizzard, the narrator observes the self-mutilation of a fellow student, and on a visit to another campus, she is raped while the musician is oblivious to her plight. Each haunting vignette demonstrates her identification with the lost, the damaged, the brutalized. Stern is a writer and poet with the ability to select just the right phrase to create the sense of despair and hopelessness that her protagonist experiences. Her first novel has a ring of truth that comes from close observation and/or personal experience. With its self-destructive main characters, this moody novella will strongly resonate with those who came of age in the 1990s. Recommended for most fiction collections.--Andrea Kempf, Johnson Cty. Community Coil Lib., Overland Park, KS
Kempf, Andrea
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Kempf, Andrea. "Stern, Amanda. The Long Haul." Library Journal, Dec. 2003, p. 169. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A113856066/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=6d5b1158. Accessed 30 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A113856066
QUOTE:
Though the narrator is sometimes frustratingly passive, she is also articulate and skillful at telling her own sharp, dark coming-of-age story.
The Long Haul
Publishers Weekly. 250.42 (Oct. 20, 2003): p37+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2003 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
AMANDA STERN. Soft Skull, $12 paper (144p) ISBN 1-932360-06-9
Stern's slim debut, centered on the tumultuous six-year affair between a needy, self-absorbed young musician referred to only as "the Alcoholic," and the unnamed, enabling narrator, paints a rich picture of mid-1990s undergraduate and postcollege anomie. Details of the Gen-X experience--drinking at dive bars; going to rock shows attended by a "United Nations" of "fraternity brothers, "sorority sisters, punks, skater kids, techno freaks"--are cleanly rendered, and Stern's tone is a spot-on mix of nostalgia, sympathy and ennui. The story begins with the Alcoholic, a locally successful musician, self-destructing on stage at the unnamed college he and the narrator attend in upstate New York, a victim of his own drunken melodrama. The narrator blames herself--as she will continue to do throughout the novel--convinced that her fib about a former love caused his meltdown. Her slow slide into a depression caused by the Alcoholic's superficial, controlling love, and the Alcoholic's overwhelming need for validation are the forces that drive the narrative. Juxtaposing the couple's life upstate with their later days in New York City, Stern shows the dysfunctional relationship in its moments of light (the first blush of affection; an ill-conceived nighttime quest for a corkscrew) and darkness (fighting; a miscarriage; an attempted rape). Though the narrator is sometimes frustratingly passive, she is also articulate and skillful at telling her own sharp, dark coming-of-age story. Agent, Andrew Blauner 25-city author tour (Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Long Haul." Publishers Weekly, 20 Oct. 2003, p. 37+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A109354859/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=7b6c9d9f. Accessed 30 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A109354859
Stern, AJ. Doggy Day Care
Jackie Partch
School Library Journal. 56.11 (Nov. 2010): p84.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2010 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
STERN, AJ. Doggy Day Care. illus, by Doreen Mulryan Marts. 128p. (Frankly, Frannie Series). CIP. Grosset & Dunlap. 2010. Tr $12.99. ISBN 978-0-448-453514; pap. $4.99. ISBN 978-0-448-45350-7. LC 2009053389.
Gr 2-3-Frannie Miller continues her quest to join the workforce. This time she's set her sights on becoming a dog veterinarian. After some practice with her stuffed animals, the precocious child finally gets a chance to work with real ones: her aunt has broken her leg and needs someone to help care for her pets while she attends an important business meeting. However, despite the best intentions of Frannie and her friend Elliott, the pet-sitting job nearly ends in disaster. Impulsive kids may identify with Frannie, who tends to jump right in before thinking through her ideas. Marts's illustrations effectively capture the girl's expressions as well as those of her animal charges. However, Frannie's breathless narrative, full of adverbs (sometimes she uses them correctly, sometimes not), can distract from the story. Sara Pennypacker's Clementine (Hyperion, 2006) and Jessica Harper's Uh Oh, Cleo (Putnam, 2008) also feature spirited female heroines and have stronger narratives.--Jackie Partch, Multnomah County Library, Portland, OR
Partch, Jackie
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Partch, Jackie. "Stern, AJ. Doggy Day Care." School Library Journal, Nov. 2010, p. 84. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A241413100/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f250561b. Accessed 30 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A241413100
Stern, AJ. Frankly, Frannie
Stacy Dillon
School Library Journal. 56.8 (Aug. 2010): p87.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2010 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
STERN, AJ. Frankly, Frannie. illus. by Doreen Mulryan Marts. 127p. Grosset & Dunlap. 2010. Tr $12.99. ISBN 978-0-448-45349-1; pap. $4.99. ISBN 978-0-448-45348-4. LC number unavailable.
Gr 2-3--Frannie, known this week as Frankly, is a girl on a mission. After she gets over the initial relief of being allowed to go with her class to the local radio station--the last field trip involved some unauthorized touching of papers that led to soggy results--she decides that it is time to get a job. She fashions her own business cards and resume, which she plans on leaving at the station during the trip. But Frankly can't help being her curious and do-gooder self, and things do not go as planned. Instead of finding a job, she finds a whole lot of on-air trouble. This beginning chapter book will find readers among fans of Ramona and Clementine, but Frannie is a personality all her own. Illustrations and changing fonts pepper the pages and add to the reading experience. A perfect addition to the growing collection of feisty girls in early-chapter-book series.--Stacy Dillon, LREI, New York City
Dillon, Stacy
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Dillon, Stacy. "Stern, AJ. Frankly, Frannie." School Library Journal, Aug. 2010, p. 87. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A234147647/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5baae6ac. Accessed 30 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A234147647
QUOTE:
Rosenbloom's seventh-grade girls are completely real: self-centered and peer-oriented, inextricably linked by cell phone and instant messaging and dying to be independent and grown up.
Light humor with a little lesson.
Rosenbloom, Fiona: You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah!
Kirkus Reviews. 73.16 (Aug. 15, 2005): p921.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2005 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Rosenbloom, Fiona YOU ARE SO NOT INVITED TO MY BAT MITZVAH! Hyperion (288 pp.) $15.99 Sep. 1, 2005 ISBN: 0-7868-5616-5
When Stacy Friedman discovers her best friend, Lydia, kissing the crush of her life, Andy Goldfarb (the boy she dreams of kissing, or maybe marrying, at her Bat Mitzvah party), she does what any respecting seventh grader would do, she uninvites her to the party. For seventh grade is all about friendship. Luckily, for Rabbi Sherwin, the Bat Mitzvah is about more than that, and his advice to her to perform three good deeds before the ceremony actually works: Her mother is bouncing back from her father's departure; her embarrassing younger brother loses weight; and she, herself, acquires a boyfriend. And yes, Lydia comes to her party. Rosenbloom's seventh-grade girls are completely real: self-centered and peer-oriented, inextricably linked by cell phone and instant messaging and dying to be independent and grown up. They will be welcomed by readers at that same awkward stage. Light humor with a little lesson. (Fiction. 10-14)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Rosenbloom, Fiona: You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah!" Kirkus Reviews, 15 Aug. 2005, p. 921. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A135662411/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e42b2b30. Accessed 30 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A135662411
QUOTE:
her turnabout and subsequent actions feel too abrupt to be real, and while the book has the outward trappings of Judaism, it lacks the spirituality underneath.
Rosenbloom, Fiona: WE ARE SO CRASHING YOUR BAR MITZVAH!!
Kirkus Reviews. (May 1, 2007):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2007 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Rosenbloom, Fiona WE ARE SO CRASHING YOUR BAR MITZVAH!! Hyperion (Children's) $15.99 Jun. 1, 2007 ISBN: 978-0-7868-3890-5
Determined to "take eighth-grade by social storm" by finally becoming a member of the elite crowd, 13-year-old Stacy Friedman leaps for the heavens and falls flat on her toches. What happens in this first-person cringe-comedy is that although Stacy and her best friend Lydia think they've become cooler than cool over the summer, the popular girls or Chicas don't agree. Meanwhile, Stacy's other buddy, Kelly, formerly a chubby duckling, has become a Chica-worthy swan, winning a coveted invitation to Eben's fabulous bar mitzvah. Stacy, who is understandable but hard to like, decides to crash the bar mitzvah along with Lydia. In a scene that is more likely to make readers wince than laugh, the girls, though initially successful, make total fools of themselves; then they're caught, roundly humiliated and shunned. Some personal reflection and a conversation with a wise rabbi helps Stacy learn that real friendship and kindness are more important than popularity. But her turnabout and subsequent actions feel too abrupt to be real, and while the book has the outward trappings of Judaism, it lacks the spirituality underneath. (Fiction. 12-14)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Rosenbloom, Fiona: WE ARE SO CRASHING YOUR BAR MITZVAH!!" Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2007. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A169082388/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=2b32ce99. Accessed 30 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A169082388
QUOTE:
this snappy novel shows the author's keen understanding of adolescent social pressures and conveys universal truths about growing pains, friendship and young love.
Y
ou Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah!
Publishers Weekly. 252.34 (Aug. 29, 2005): p57.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2005 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah! FIONA ROSENBLOOM. Hyperion, $15.99 (288p) ISBN 0-7868-5616-5
Through the voice of a stressed-out seventh grader, first novelist Rosenbloom sheds a humorous light on a Jewish girl's coming of age in this contemporary novel set in Westchester County, N.Y. Thirteen-year-old Stacy Friedman is looking forward to the "joyous occasion" of her upcoming bat mitzvah. However (as she confides to God) there are a few concerns she needs to address: namely, having to sing a portion of the Torah, having to dress up like an "American Girl doll" for her mother and having her rather conspicuous younger brother (who has "recently almost doubled in girth") attend her party. Besides being plagued with these anxieties, there's the matter of Stacy having a crush on Andy Goldfarb--whom she catches making out with her best friend, Lydia. Stacy, feeling betrayed, uninvites Lydia (and a few other classmates who stand up for Lydia) to her bat mitzvah, and it begins to look like the "joyous occasion" may end up a humongous disaster. Rosenbloom portrays Stacy as convincingly prickly but also shows her tender side in some poignant moments with her brother and mother, making this near-teen a flesh-and-blood character readers will recognize. Culminating in a unique bat mitzvah speech, which is sure to make even shiksas smile, this snappy novel shows the author's keen understanding of adolescent social pressures and conveys universal truths about growing pains, friendship and young love. Ages 12-up. (Sept.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah!" Publishers Weekly, 29 Aug. 2005, p. 57. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A135816312/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=47a80cc4. Accessed 30 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A135816312
Rosenbloom, Fiona. You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah!
Rita Soltan
School Library Journal. 51.12 (Dec. 2005): p153.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2005 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
ROSENBLOOM, Fiona. You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah! 190p. Hyperion. 2005. RTE $15.99. ISBN 0-7868-5616-5. LC number unavailable.
Gr 5-7--Stacy Friedman, 12, is in the midst of preparing for her Bat Mitzvah. For her, the "mitzvah" translates to three imminent concerns: to wear a $250 designer-label dress, to be popular with her friends, and to acquire a boyfriend. Add to her woes numerous misunderstandings with her friend Kelly and you might have a comedic, lighthearted novel. Unfortunately, this one reads like bad reality TV. While the author tries to be hip, her writing appears to be little more than one large advertising campaign for designer-label merchandise. In a poor imitation of Judy Blume's Margaret, Rosenbloom's protagonist speaks to God: "Okay, God, we really, seriously, without a doubt need to have a one-on-one here. WHERE ARE YOU?" While it is realistic that the 12th year of a Jewish girl's life is stressful and that many cannot fully appreciate the religious concept behind this ceremony, Rosenbloom fails to create a rounded character who grows or awakens to at least some of the values and meaning behind the ritual. Instead, Stacy is flat and shallow and, in a sitcomlike climactic scene, realizes the importance of the day and makes an apologetic cell phone call to Kelly in the middle of her speech. She then resumes an adlib version of her understanding of the meaning of "sacrifice and giving of yourself." Sarah Darer Littman's Confessions of a Closet Catholic (Dutton, 2005) provides a much better view of Jewish values from a preteen's witty perspective.--Rita Soltan, Youth Services Consultant, West Bloomfield, MI
Soltan, Rita
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Soltan, Rita. "Rosenbloom, Fiona. You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah!" School Library Journal, Dec. 2005, p. 153. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A140523849/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=7e675d0f. Accessed 30 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A140523849
You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah
Vonda Douros
Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy. 50.2 (Oct. 2006): p161.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2006 International Literacy Association
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This novel takes place in White Plains, New York, where Stacy Friedman feels her life is falling apart. Her parents aren't together, her father is dating another woman, and her morn rarely leaves the house. As if that isn't enough, Stacy's little brother, Arthur, is what she calls a "clueless nerd."
Stacy is determined to have the best Bat Mitzvah ever, and she is positive this will only happen if three things occur. First, the perfect Bat Mitzvah includes wearing a dress that is the latest fashion trend. Stacy chooses a spectacular dress, but her mother disapproves, and Stacy is forced to wear a dress she absolutely hates. If this isn't bad enough, "The Boys," a clique of the most popular boys in school, call her "Bridezilla" after seeing her in the dress. She is devastated, but Arthur comes up with a plan to get rid of the ugly dress. The second part of a perfect Bat Mitzvah includes becoming a member of the most popular female clique in high school, "The Chicas." This seems like a reasonable goal, because Stacy is already friendly with these girls. The third, and last, item to make a perfect Bat Mitzvah is to kiss the boy of her dreams, Andy Goldfarb, at the event. This seems almost impossible to achieve, however, after she sees Andy kiss Julie Hansen. She is able to deal with this, somewhat, but is devastated when she sees one of her best friends, Lydia Katz, also kiss Andy.
As Stacy's Bat Mitzvah quickly approaches, she believes if she does good things for others she will be rewarded with everything she wants. Arthur gets beaten up because he has a weight problem so she asks a friend, Dante Decosimo, to teach her brother how to dance in an attempt to get him to lose weight. Then, because her father is taking a date, Stacy doesn't want her mother to go alone and finds her a date using an online dating service. Her plan backfires, however, when the date shows up at the door and her mother refuses to go anywhere with him. Oh, and about that boy, Andy, well--there is a surprise ending.
You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah is a delightful coming-of-age story and is best suited for girls ages 14 and up. The main character deals with things that most high school girls think about--finding the perfect dress, joining the coolest clique, and kissing a dream boy. The book is typical of a teenage life and the stress that is associated with it. Girls will certainly enjoy this book!
Fiona Rosenbloom. 2005. New York: Alloy Entertainment. 190 pp. US$15.99.
Reviewed by Vonda Douros, Lakeside, Arizona, USA.
Douros, Vonda
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Douros, Vonda. "You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah." Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, vol. 50, no. 2, 2006, p. 161. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A153705328/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=06154f66. Accessed 30 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A153705328
Little Panic: A Literary Laboratory Exploring What It Is Like to Live in the Stranglehold of Anxiety and What It Takes to Break Free
“This terrible truth binds us all: fear there’s a single, unattainable, correct way to be human.”
By Maria Popova
“Life and Reality are not things you can have for yourself unless you accord them to all others,” Alan Watts wrote in the early 1950s, nearly a quarter century before Thomas Nagel’s landmark essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” unlatched the study of other consciousnesses and seeded the disorienting awareness that other beings — “beings who walk other spheres,” to borrow Whitman’s wonderful term — experience this world we share in ways thoroughly alien to our own.
Today, we know that we need not step across the boundary of species to encounter such alien-seeming ways of inhabiting the world. There are innumerable ways of being human — we each experience life and reality in radically different ways merely by our way of seeing, but these differences are accentuated to an extreme when mental illness alters the elemental interiority of a consciousness. In these extreme cases, it can become impossible for even the most empathic imagination to grasp — not only cerebrally but with an embodied understanding — the slippery reality of an anguished consciousness so different from one’s own. Conversely, it can become impossible for those who share that anguish to articulate it, effecting an overwhelming sense of alienation and the false conviction that one is alone in one’s suffering. To convey that reality to those unbedeviled by such mental anguish, and to wrap language around its ineffable interiority for others who suffer silently from the same, is therefore a creative feat and existential service of the highest caliber.
That is what author, Happy Ending Music & Reading Series host, and my dear friend Amanda Stern accomplishes in Little Panic: Dispatches from an Anxious Life (public library) — part-memoir and part-portrait of a cruelly egalitarian affliction that cuts across all borders of age, gender, race, and class, clutching one’s entire reality and sense of self in a stranglehold that squeezes life out. What emerges is a sort of literary laboratory of consciousness, anatomizing an all-consuming yet elusive feeling-pattern to explore what it takes to break the tyranny of worry and what it means to feel at home in oneself.
Art by Catherine Lepange from Thin Slices of Anxiety: Observations and Advice to Ease a Worried Mind
Part of the splendor of the book is the way Stern unspools the thread of being to the very beginning, all the way to the small child predating conscious memory. In consonance with Maurice Sendak, who so passionately believed that a centerpiece of healthy adulthood is “having your child self intact and alive and something to be proud of,” the child-Amanda emerges from the pages alive and real to articulate in that simple, profound way only children have what the yet-undiagnosed acute anxiety disorder actually feels like from the inside:
Whenever I am afraid, worry sounds itself as sixty, seventy, radio channels playing at the same time inside my head. Refrains loop around and around my brain like fast jabber and I cannot get any of it to stop. I know there is something wrong with me, but no one knows how to fix me. Not anyone outside my body, and definitely not me. Eddie [Stern’s older brother] says a body is blood and bones and skin, and when everything falls off you’re a skeleton, but I am air pressure and tingly dots; energy and everything. I am air and nothing.
[…]
My breath flips on its side, horizontal and too wide to go through my lungs.
The grave paradox of mental illness and mental health is that, despite what we now know about how profoundly our emotions affect our physical wellbeing, these terms sever the head from the body — the physical body and the emotional body. A century after William James proclaimed that “a purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity,” Stern offers a powerful corrective for our ongoing cultural Cartesianism. Her vivid prose, pulsating with a life in language, invites the reader into the interiority of a deeply embodied mind that experiences and comprehends the world somatically:
A burning clot of dread develops under my ribcage. One hundred radios are trapped in my head, all playing different stations at once.
Art from Emotional Anatomy: The Structure of Experience
“I was born with a basketball net slung over my top ribs, where the world dunks its balls of dread,” she writes as she channels her young self’s budding awareness that something is terribly, fundamentally wrong with her:
The kids around me are carefree and happy, but I’m not, and life doesn’t feel easy for me, ever, which means I’m being a kid in the wrong way.
You can’t see the wrong on my outside, but I wish you could because then my mom would get me fixed. My mom can fix anything; she knows every doctor in New York City.
And so Amanda is put through a series of tests. Although she is so small and slight as to be literally off the height and weight distribution chart for children her age, the medical tests fail to find the locus of her anguish:
I am a growing constellation of errors. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, only that something is, and it must be too shameful to divulge, or so rare that even the doctors are stumped.
Psychological tests follow. “Amanda equates performance with acceptability,” one clinician reports in the original test results punctuating the book like some ominous refrain of wrongness. Then there are the IQ tests. Growing up in an era well before scientists came to understand why we can’t measure so-called “general intelligence,” well before Howard Gardner revolutionized culture with his theory of multiple intelligences, the young Amanda does poorly on the tests — lest we forget, test-taking itself is an immensely anxiety-inducing act even for the average person unafflicted by a panic disorder. Deemed learning-disabled and held back a grade, she reanimates that first school day of her second second year in sixth grade:
The air is fresh, the slight coolness in front of each breeze carrying the smell of change and beginning, except I’m not changing; my worries keep repeating themselves, just like the rest of my life.
Looking back on this disorienting and rather punitive experience, Stern writes:
There was a version of me that felt out of alignment with who I really was. The adults’ version had me learning disabled, and the other version — mine — had me devoured by mental anguish.
It would be more than a decade until that mental anguish is finally correctly diagnosed as a severe panic disorder. But the intervening time — those formative years when one’s sense of self sets in as the child morphs into a young adult — is filled with a growing, gnawing shame of otherness. It takes root in the child’s conscience as she finds herself unable to learn to tell time. Her world is governed not by clocks and calendars but by countdowns tolling her acute separation anxiety — the suffocating dread of being away from her mom:
Away is what time is made of; away is counted in fear-seconds, not number-seconds.
[…]
Time moves everyone forward, but it’s always forgetting to bring me.
Art by Harvey Weiss from Time Is When by Beth Youman Gleick
Perhaps the most savaging aspect of anxiety is how it kidnaps its victims from the present moment and hurls them into the dungeon of a dread-filled future. Channeling the early experience that becomes an overtone of her young life, she writes:
Sometimes I feel like I’m watching a movie about myself. I am always in the future somehow, separated from my body, and it’s from there I feel sad for the moment I’m living. Soon this moment will be gone; it will turn into another moment that will go, and I think I must be the only person who feels life as though it’s already over. This is the weight I feel every time the sun goes down. No matter how hard I try to stop the feeling, I can’t. Even if I run from it, it meets me wherever I land.
At night, when I’m in bed, I try to hear the house sounds that comfort me: the low mumblings of my siblings, the tamped down warble of the radio, the needle’s skipped return over scratches inside a song, the ceramic clatter of plates being rinsed, and the first turbulent bumps of the dishwasher before it coasts into its varoom lulling hum. My mother’s voice talking on the phone curls its way to my room, and I pull it toward me, past the other sounds, and try to swallow it inside me.
Anxiety warps time and space for this young mind trying to navigate the world’s topography of dread:
When people try to explain that uptown is not far, or that a weekend isn’t long, it makes me feel worse, more afraid that my worries are right, and that the world I live in is different from the world everyone else lives in. That means I’m different, something I don’t want other people to figure out about me. Something is wrong inside me; I’ve always known that, but I don’t want anyone to ever see that I’m not the same as they are.
This sense of being a problem to be solved becomes the dominant overtone of young Amanda’s life, until it swells into the aching suspicion that there may be no solution to it at all — that she is doomed to a life marked by the wrong way of being human:
There is a way to be and I’m not being it, and I don’t know how to change. Is there someone I should be the exact copy of, and they’ve forgotten to introduce me? Or maybe a person is supposed to be a fact, like an answer that doesn’t change, and I’m more like an opinion, which the world doesn’t want?
This terrifying suspicion seeps into the fabric of her being, permeating every aspect of her life. It leads her into confused and conflicted relationships that distort her understanding of love and leave her with a version of the same question:
Is this what real life is then? An endless effort to match the story of yourself someone else tells?
Art by Lisbeth Zwerger from a rare edition of Alice in Wonderland
When she is finally diagnosed with a panic disorder that gives shape and validity to her lifelong experience, she meets her diagnosis with elated relief. (A century earlier, Alice James — Henry and William James’s brilliant sister — had articulated that selfsame elation in her extraordinary diary: “Ever since I have been ill, I have longed and longed for some palpable disease, no matter how conventionally dreadful a label it might have, but I was always driven back to stagger alone under the monstrous mass of subjective sensations, which that sympathetic being ‘the medical man’ had no higher inspiration than to assure me I was personally responsible for, washing his hands of me with a graceful complacency under my very nose.”) Stern writes:
I feel weirdly solid, like I’m a valid human being. I didn’t even realize my feelings were categorizable as symptoms. Panic disorder. The air is softer, expansive, as though the world has suddenly opened and is unfolding every opportunity my panic had once ruled out. Every single thing in my life now makes perfect sense: the connections I couldn’t bridge; the choices I couldn’t make; the strange switches the natural world and all its sunsets turned on and off in me.
From this deeply personal experience emerges the universal assurance that what doesn’t kill you makes you more alive. Stern writes:
Over my life I’ve worried so much and feared so many things, and though many of those things actually happened, here I am, still alive, having survived what I thought I couldn’t. I didn’t turn out the way I thought I would: I didn’t get married and I didn’t have kids, and the not-having didn’t kill me either.
[…]
We are all just moments in time, a blink in a trillion-year history, even if our existence sometimes feels endless.
Art by Derek Dominic D’souza from Song of Two Worlds by Alan Lightman
With an eye to the centrality of anxiety in her own blink of existence, she telescopes to a larger truth about this widespread yet largely invisible affliction that seems a fundamental feature of being human:
When did it start? It started before I was born. It started before my mother was born. It started when friction created the world. When does anything start? It doesn’t, it just grows, sometimes to unmanageable heights, and then, when you’re at the very edge, it becomes clear: something must be done.
Left untreated, anxiety disorders, like fingernails, grow with a person. The longer they go untended, the more mangled and painful they become. Often, they spiral, straight out of control, splitting and splintering into other disorders, like depression, social anxiety, agoraphobia. A merry-go-round of features we rise and fall upon. Separation anxiety handicaps its captors, preventing them from leaving bad relationships, moving far from home, going on trips, to parties, applying for jobs, having children, getting married, seeing friends, or falling asleep. Some people are so crippled by their anxiety they have panic attacks in anticipation of having a panic attack.
I’ve had panic attacks in nearly every part of New York City, even on Staten Island. I’ve had them in taxis, on subways, public bathrooms, banks, street corners, in Washington Square Park, on multiple piers, the Manhattan Bridge, Chinatown, the East Village, the Upper East Side, Central Park, Lincoln Center, the dressing room at Urban Outfitters, Mamoun’s Falafel, the Bobst library, the Mid-Manhattan Library, the main library branch, the Brooklyn Library, the Fort Greene Farmer’s Market, laundromats, book kiosks, in the entrance of FAO Schwartz, at the post office, the steps of the Met, on stoops, at the Brooklyn Flea, in bars, at friends’ houses, on stage, in the shower, in queen-sized beds, double beds, twin beds, in my crib.
I’ve grown so expert at hiding them, most people would never even know that I’m suffering. How, after all, do you explain that a restaurant’s decision to dim their lights swelled your throat shut, and that’s why you must leave immediately, not just the restaurant, but the neighborhood? If you cannot point to something, then it is invisible. Like a cult leader, anxiety traps you and convinces you that you’re the only one it sees.
In a sentiment that calls to mind poet Nikki Giovanni’s remark to James Baldwin that “if you don’t understand yourself you don’t understand anybody else,” Stern adds:
For better or worse, we can only teach others what we understand… Each person begins, after all, as a story other people tell. And when we fall outside the confines of our common standards, we will assume our deficits define us.
[…]
My fear and my conviction were the same: that I was the flaw in the universe; the wrongly circled letter in our multiple-choice world. This terrible truth binds us all: fear there’s a single, unattainable, correct way to be human.
Little Panic stands as a mighty antidote to that universal fear. Complement it with Catherine Lepange’s illustrated meditation on anxiety and Seneca’s millennia-old, timeless wisdom on how to tame this psychic monster, then revisit William Styron’s classic masterwork accomplishing for the kindred monster of depression what Stern accomplishes for anxiety.
QUOTE:
there are no universal lessons in "Little Panic." It reads like an incessant whine. And the whole time, the reader thinks, "Wow, these parents are lousy."
While sporadic bursts of beauty in Stern's writing – "a growing constellation of errors," for example – prevent "Little Panic" from being unbearable, the uneven narrative tone and crass piggybacking on the Patz family's tragedy make this collection of dispatches to skip.
'Little Panic': How the Etan Patz kidnapping terrorized author Amanda Stern
Zlati Meyer, USA TODAY Published 3:18 p.m. ET July 10, 2018
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(Photo: Little, Brown)
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Our increasingly complicated world makes childhood more stressful and worry-filled. Gaining insight into how youngsters feel as their cocoons are invaded by anxiety and fear – and what can be done to help them – is tremendously valuable.
"Little Panic: Dispatches From an Anxious Life" (Grand Central, 385 pp., ★★ out of four) tries to do that. The book offers a glimpse into the maelstrom churning in the mind of Amanda Stern, who shares in-depth recollections of her childhood.
The memoirist grew up in New York City's Greenwich Village in the 1970s and '80s, presumably with all the makings of a smooth-sailing life. But starting from early childhood, she was wracked with an all-consuming sense of worry and dread.
It took years to diagnose Stern, who also suffered from having a checked-out dad and a clueless mother. Many chapters begin with excerpts from the author's psychological and school evaluations over the years.
Stern tries to convey how wracked she was with nervousness, uncertainty and fear; for example, she was convinced her mother would die or move away. To prevent that from happening, the then-elementary-school-age Stern believed she had to keep a watchful eye on her mom.
Author Amanda Stern.
Author Amanda Stern. (Photo: Jon Pack)
Her worry reached a fever pitch after 6-year-old Etan Patz vanished in 1979. He was a neighborhood boy whom Stern (who was then 9) didn't know, but whose disappearance is credited with bringing national awareness to the plight of missing children.
She became so obsessed with the case that once she called a police officer over, thinking she'd found Etan – until the cop pointed out that the child she'd found was Chinese.
Interspersed among these more bitter-than-sweet chapters are snapshots of Stern's life as an adult, including tales of a failed relationship with a long-term, loser boyfriend, and the grief that comes from the sale of one's childhood home.
The problem is that unlike many other autobiographies, there are no universal lessons in "Little Panic." It reads like an incessant whine. And the whole time, the reader thinks, "Wow, these parents are lousy."
This combination of images shows a family photo and
This combination of images shows a family photo and a New York City police poster of missing child Etan Patz. (Photo: HO, AFP/Getty Images)
Also detracting from the kvetchy autobiography is Stern's voice as a writer. In memories from her childhood, Stern writes with a erudite elegance that a kid simply wouldn't have – even one who grew up in a sophisticated household and attended private school.
"One day I'll have to live on the street side of life. On the garden side we look after one another ... If only this were the entire world. If only the garden could hold us all"? No young child thinks like that.
"The night is fast-forwarding its heaviness and I feel it coming for me"? Please.
While sporadic bursts of beauty in Stern's writing – "a growing constellation of errors," for example – prevent "Little Panic" from being unbearable, the uneven narrative tone and crass piggybacking on the Patz family's tragedy make this collection of dispatches to skip.
Follow USA TODAY reporter Zlati Meyer on Twitter: @ZlatiMeyer
These new books will keep you busy through beach season. USA TODAY
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resonant and often funny memoir, “Little Panic,” we learn that only at 25 did she discover the culprit for her symptoms: panic disorder
The Illness That Had No Name
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By Ariel Leve
July 13, 2018
LITTLE PANIC
Dispatches From an Anxious Life
By Amanda Stern
Illustrated. 389 pp. Grand Central Publishing. $27.
Amanda Stern knew there was something different about her but it didn’t have a name. As a child, she recognized that her brain and body were not in sync with the world around her. Maybe her mother would die or forget that she loved her. “How come no one except me understands that my heart must be near my mom’s heart in order for us both to survive?” she wondered. She resolved to stay close to home; her very existence was at stake.
Image
Amanda Stern
CreditJon Pack
Early on in Stern’s resonant and often funny memoir, “Little Panic,” we learn that only at 25 did she discover the culprit for her symptoms: panic disorder. Her story, set largely in childhood and adolescence, hinges on her quest to understand why her operating system is out of whack.
When she finds out that what she’s suffered from all her life has a name, this news is delivered matter-of-factly by her mother’s therapist. “I don’t understand how it’s taken this long for someone to diagnose you,” he says. I wondered the same thing.
Beginning at an early age, Stern was tested by doctors, specialists and tutors. She was evaluated for visual, learning and hearing disabilities; cognitive impairments; ambidexterity; motor-skill deficits. She was measured and scored by an endless array of adults, all of whom seemed oblivious to her actual symptoms. Stern believed herself to be defective, crazy and dumb.
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Upon receiving her diagnosis, she reflects, “I’ve spent my entire life battling some impossible, invisible plague no one ever seemed to see, and this guy did it with such ease, as though panic disorder is easy to establish, obvious to anyone who would take the time to ask what my symptoms were.” The statement is all the more remarkable given that Stern was raised in Manhattan, the epicenter of neurotic behavior — not to mention shrinks. Yet everyone, including her mother, seemed to be looking in the wrong place, colluding in a misplaced vigilance focused on Stern’s intellectual performance, physical health and adaptability rather than her feelings.
As a child, Stern shuttles between a brownstone in Greenwich Village, which she shares with her bohemian mother and siblings, and her remarried father’s apartment in an affluent neighborhood uptown, where “a weekend lasts an entire month.” When 6-year-old Etan Patz disappears nearby in 1979, the police come to Stern’s mother’s house asking about the boy, and Stern internalizes an ominous message: “My mom always tells me bad things like that don’t happen to kids. But I know they do.”
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Patz’s disappearance haunts her for years to come. When the “Still Missing” posters in SoHo are plastered over, she is furious. How will anyone find him? When she and her mother walk past buildings, she wonders whether he’s inside, waiting to be discovered. In college, during a spiral of panic, she is overcome with guilt. Maybe she didn’t look for him hard enough, or in the right places.
As the narrative moves through Stern’s middle and high school years, ordinary slights, like being left out of a group sleepover at a friend’s house, take on catastrophic proportions, triggering what she doesn’t know at the time are panic attacks. As a teenager, she finds fleeting relief in drugs and inappropriate sexual encounters. But panic remains a knot she can’t untangle.
At times, Stern’s obsessive ruminations can be exhausting. I wanted to shake her and say, “Get some perspective,” but this is precisely the point: For a person with panic disorder, perspective is impossible.
While the supposed tension of the book rests on a discovery — the diagnosis Stern finally receives — the real tension lies in how and whether she will evolve in spite of it. Do the cumulative insights lead to ways to tolerate discomfort and uncertainty? After her ailment is named, she writes, “the relief, like my panic, is all-encompassing and everywhere. It’s in the pollen dusted on cars, the dirty pacifier lost in the gutter.” Yet it will take her 20 more years before she can manage the feelings of helplessness that accompany her attacks.
Eventually Stern learns that she’s not made of paper and won’t blow away. All the times she thought she would die, she didn’t. And some of the “terrifying” things she thought would happen actually did; she didn’t get married, she didn’t have children. But nevertheless she adapted and flourished in other ways, like founding the Happy Ending Music and Reading Series. “Here I am now,” she writes, “living inside the very future I feared, imagining it would kill me. Yet I am O.K. I am alive.”
Ariel Leve is a journalist and the author of a memoir, “An Abbreviated Life.”
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A version of this article appears in print on July 14, 2018, on Page 18 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: An Illness With No Name. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
Little Panic: Dispatches from an Anxious Life.
Stern, Amanda (author).
June 2018. 400p. Grand Central, hardcover, $27 (9781538711927); e-book, $13.99 (9781538711910). 616.85.
REVIEW.
First published April 18, 2018 (Booklist Online).
Despite its title, this book is big. In 44 chapters with headings like “Maybe I Am Not a Person,” Stern writes about how anxiety shaped her life, and not for the better, beginning with her childhood, when she dreads leaving her beautiful, eccentric mom, who she believes needs her protection. Somehow, Stern has succeeded in writing an often-funny tale about mental illness. For example, she explains her belief that a local Mafia figure, Jimmy Alcatraz, keeps her Lower Manhattan neighborhood safe. Stern recounts how, though clearly intelligent, she performs poorly on traditional school tests, which causes problems with college admissions: “I can’t even get into what is other people’s safety school.” A guy stalks her; she chooses a bad boyfriend. Until she turns 25, she doesn’t know what’s wrong with her. Today, at 47, she realizes that “left untreated, anxiety disorders, like fingernails, grow with a person.” Don’t expect a traditional happily-ever-after ending; but don’t expect a gloomy one, either. Stern’s story is a good reminder that all people, including those who “learn differently,” need empathy and human connection.
— Karen Springen