Q&A with Jay Neugeboren

  

Photo by Michael B. Friedman

 

 

Jay Neugeboren is the author of the new book Dickens in Brooklyn: Essays on Family, Writing, & Madness. His many other books include the novel After Camus. He lives in New York City. 

 

Q: Over how long a period did you write the essays collected in Dickens in Brooklyn?

 

A: Although most of the essays were written in the last half-dozen years, several of them—e.g., “Meanwhile Back on the Ward,” (which became the first chapter of my 1997 book, Imagining Robert), go back to earlier decades.

 

Q: How was the book’s title--also the title of the first essay--chosen, and what does it signify for you?

 

A: I chose “Dickens in Brooklyn” because it’s about the three major themes that join the essays: family (how my family’s dramas paralleled those in Dickens’s novels; writing (Dickens’s novels—we owned a complete set—were my childhood inspiration for becoming a writer); and madness (the madness in my family that echoed characters and events in Dickens’s work). 

 

I also loved the mystery suggested by joining a great 19th century English writer’s name to the place in which I was born and grew up: in what way, a reader might ask, were they related?  (Dickens did, in his two American tours—1842 and1867—visit Brooklyn.)

 

Q: The writer Madison Smartt Bell said of the book, “Taken together, these remarkable essays, wide-ranging in both period and subject, amount to a sort of autobiography of one of the most ingenious, protean writers of our time.” What do you think of that assessment?

 

A: I like it! How not? And yes, I do think these essays, combined, do add up to an autobiographical book—a kind of sequel to Parentheses: An Autobiographical Journey (1970) and Imagining Robert: My Brother, Madness, and Survival (1997).

 

Q: What impact did it have on you to write this book, and what do you hope readers take away from it.

 

A: The 18 separate essays in the book were written in between the writing of novels, stories, screenplays, and books of nonfiction. 

 

Although publishers and reviewers call some of my books “memoirs,” like the tales in this book, I consider them to be essays-in-autobiography—narratives where I tell stories about moments in my life, yes, but moments that are about things other than me: about the effect of mental illness on a family; about surviving Auschwitz; about working on-the-line at a Chevrolet plant; about being yeoman on a merchant marine ship; about the fraying bonds of a large extended family; about being the single parent of three children, etc etc. etc.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I’m completing several projects: a new novel (The Nassofer Family Circle), a fifth collection of stories, a new collection of essays, and a screenplay (The Year Apart) that’s based on an early short story of mine.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: I’ll be 90 years old in May 2028, and am somehow in the most productive period of my writing life.  Lucky me—I wake up every day, eager and able to do what I love.   

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Jay Neugeboren.