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If we could meet our ancestors, what would they think of us?
Shes too young to have been in school, so she doesnt miss it because shes never experienced it.
I cant imagine having to give a shot to teach a child to read now.
I recently took a 23andMe test and found out that Im 99.6 percent Ashkenazi Jew and .4 percent Neanderthal.
So every part of me thats human is Jewish.
I am not very observant as a Jew.
I know very few Yiddish words, and [the ones I know] all mean penis.
So the story was really born out of a lot of self-hatred and shame.
I met with Seth and Evan [Goldberg] and just begged them to read it.
They had just doneThis Is the End,and I was a fan of that movie.
Ive been a fan of theirs for longer than my career.
I grew up watching and lovingFreaks and Geeks.I loved their work onDa Ali G Show.
I was so excited for a chance to work with them and learn from them.
Thats how long these things take.
Where was that?In Washington, D.C.
They ran grocery stores.
None of them, to my knowledge, sold pickles, although they might have.
Its the reason why we came to this country.
A lot of my favorite writers have wrestled with that.
That kind of disconnect is at the core of a lot of my favorite Jewish writers work.
Your stories often include fantastical elements like time travel, monsters, and robots.
And Im always looking for a strong metaphor to dramatize a universal experience.
If I wrote about my actual literal life, it would be unbelievably boring.
Typically the strongest ones I write relatively quickly.
Ill edit them a few times, but they dont take that long.
The thing that takes so long is generating enough of them.
Its more about the trial-and-error process than the endless tweaking.
With my stories, Im a little looser.
I usually know how the story will begin and how it will end.
Its important as a fiction writer to know when a story really only wants to be about 30 pages.
At this stage in your career, are you still getting rejected?Absolutely.
But every year it stings a little less.
Thats just how it goes.
You have to just really love doing it, because otherwise its exhausting.
