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 What is Dark at the Roots about? I like to say the book is about the food chain of humiliation, but really that is just to make me look smart. Why did you decide to write a memoir? Because I remember everything. That’s my one marketable skill, besides the ability to do sexy voiceovers. I have been writing and performing stories about my family for 15 years. I started my own zine, Thyrezine: The Annals of Paranoid Grotesquery, with the express purpose of promoting the mythology of my family. Initially, it was written by myself and my family members. As I got more involved in the New York comedy community, Thyrezine grew into a freewheelin’ free-for-all of comics, fiction, and manifestos written by all the funny people I knew that I could blackmail into contributing. I developed a lot of the material while improvising monologs with the Upright Citizens Brigade during their weekly show Asssscat. I was a featured essayist on the syndicated public radio show, The Next Big Thing. Lately, I performed my work at Sit ‘n’ Spin in Los Angeles.You’re such a snob in the book – why is that? Obviously, a superiority complex is really just a child’s way of masking an inferiority complex. I’ve outgrown that snobbishness. People who don’t are stupid assholes. How do your sisters and brother feel about being “characters” in the book? They don’t mind as long as I provide them with plenty of moderately expensive champagne and imported cigarettes.Are your parents gonna hate you when this book comes out? I hope not. My sole intention was to write a funny book, where alas, no lessons are learned. I wasn’t writing the book to get revenge or “rip off my scars,” as a certain memoirist recently put it. This book is more like gently lifting up the edge of an old scab and ridiculing what’s underneath.My mother tells me she is mortified, but when I go visit her in my old hometown, everyone from old schoolmates and her ironing clientele to grocery store cashiers and gas station attendants tell me “Your mama’s so proud of you!” She’s definitely talking me up, just not to my face. Perhaps I should give her some sort of commission for her local P.R work. My father is a bit more complicated, because as a child, I really saw him as a villain. We were estranged for many years. He got in touch with me after my first child was born and wanted to be a part of our lives. When he came to visit, I was all therapeutized and boundary-setting: “Hello, Father. We will see you on Tuesday from 10 AM to 12:15 PM.” That day was September 11, 2001. When he got to my house I was staring at CNN, crying. My son crawled up in my dad’s lap and played with his watch until he fell asleep. Dad ended up staying all day long, and I see him two three times a year. Our relationship is still awkward but he knows about the book and accepts it. Though I talk about abusive behavior in the book, I don’t think it’s all that unusual for my generation to have been spanked, or threatened darkly. Back in the olden times, parents weren’t exactly hip to the concept of self-esteem.You attended Catholic schools and were raised in a strict religious environment. Are you still religious today? Hell no. I think the breaking point for me was the Immaculate Conception: Mary has to do all this shit, and she doesn’t even get to have sex? What a gyp. And poor Joseph, he really gets the short end of the stick. Also, I never really bought into the whole transubstantiation thing: I liked my flesh well-done and dipped in A1 steak sauce. The last time I went to church it dawned on me: this is what people do so they don’t start drinking right away in the morning. I prefer to think people can be good because they want to be. As a result, I have a son who likes to wear a bejeweled crucifix necklace my mom sent me because “it looks pretty hip-hop, don’tcha think?” Listen
to an interview with Sarah |
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