Jennifer Weiner On Her New Book, Her Boyfriend & Tweens With Santa Envy

By Cara Paiuk for Raising Kvell

Thirteen years ago, a friend gave me a book to read saying that I would love it. And I did. A curvy, Jewish girl who had a neurotic dog and is dating a doctor? Check, check, and check. I felt an immediate kinship with Cannie Shapiro and the woman who created her. With each subsequent book by Jennifer Weiner, I, and thousands of other women, fell deeper in love with her heroines and their creator.

I sat down with Jen to discuss her fantastic new book, “All Fall Down,” about a suburban mommy blogger who succumbs to an addiction to prescription meds, her boyfriend (he loves her kids!) and what makes her kvell (same thing as most of us!).
What was the hardest part of writing “All Fall Down”?

People tell me they’re reading it with their hearts in their throats because every time Allison takes a pill, it’s like, “Is this going to be the one where there’s a real bad consequence?” And the hard part for me was my dad died of an overdose. It was sort of like putting myself into that headspace of: you know you shouldn’t be doing this, you don’t really want to be doing this, but you’re addicted. So your body is telling you “no” and your brain is telling you, “Oh just one more, doesn’t matter, no big deal.” And you know, Allison puts her kid at risk, so basically, just even imagining doing it, just writing the character of a mom who’s an addict, was hard.

Do you like Allison Weiss? Is she someone you would be friends with?

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Invisible City

A book by Julia Dahl; Jewish Book Council

Just months after Rebekah Roberts was born, her mother, an Hasidic Jew from Brooklyn, abandoned her Christian boyfriend and newborn baby to return to her religion. Neither Rebekah nor her father have heard from her since. Now a recent college graduate, Rebekah has moved to New York City to follow her dream of becoming a big-city reporter. But she’s also drawn to the idea of being closer to her mother, who might still be living in the Hasidic community in Brooklyn.

Then Rebekah is called to cover the story of a murdered Hasidic woman. Rebekah’s shocked to learn that, because of the NYPD’s habit of kowtowing to the powerful ultra-Orthodox community, not only will the woman be buried without an autopsy, her killer may get away with murder. Rebekah can’t let the story end there. But getting to the truth won’t be easy—even as she immerses herself in the cloistered world where her mother grew up, it's clear that she's not welcome, and everyone she meets has a secret to keep from an outsider.


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Meet Tom Freud, Sigmund's Famous Niece

by Cheryl Kempler for Jewniverse

You’ve probably heard of Lucian Freud, Sigmund Freud’s grandson, and a master of 20th-century painting, but he wasn’t the first member of the famous clan with visual acumen. The famous psychoanalyst‘s niece, Martha, who went by the name Tom Seidmann-Freud (1892-1930), was an imaginative illustrator and author whose work from the 1920s is avidly…

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Rivka Galchen’s Short Stories Transport Readers Into Magical Worlds

Israeli Writer Tells Surreal Stories of Culture Shock

By Shoshana Olidort for The Jewish Daily Forward

The stories in Rivka Galchen’s “American Innovations,” aren’t all fantastical — although a fair number include elements of magic realism and science fiction — but even the most realistic stories in this collection have a kind of magical quality about them that transports the reader into a world that feels at once real and surreal.

In “Real Estate,” the narrator moves into a haunted building where she meets a man, or imagines she meets a man, Eddy, who she will never see again. Opening her fridge, she finds not the Armenian string cheese she thought she had purchased too much of, but the apples she thought she had “only contemplated buying.” At a nearby gyro place she encounters a man who reminds her of her dead father, and whom she begins to refer to as “my dad.” She wonders: “Had I slipped through a wormhole of time?”

Galchen gives phantom and reality equal space in her stories, as if to underscore the fact that for her characters, the distinction between these two spheres is less important than the recognition that the imaginary and the actual are both a part of the experience of life. In the title story, the protagonist wakes one morning to find herself newly endowed with a third breast on her lower back. She consults a doctor, who asks a series of personal questions about the patient’s family life and emotional well-being, because, as she says, “It’s very common to manifest these things in our body… Your body speaks a language. It’s like a foreign language we all speak but have forgotten how to understand.”


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