'New Yorker' cartoonists confess to nightmare kitchens

This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross. My guests are two New Yorker cartoonists, Roz Chast and Jason Adam Katzenstein, who have teamed up to reveal a shameful problem they share. Their kitchens. Their new graphic memoir, The Two Saddest Kitchens, reveals it all in words and illustrations, including moldy food hiding in the back of the refrigerator, the shelf with plastic storage containers and lids, but none of the lids fit, dysfunctional appliances, and a couple of cockroach infestations. Chapter titles include The Undersink Cabinet of Doom and Our Kitchens Are Trying to Kill Us. In an era where cooking shows and food travel shows are very popular and fabulous kitchenware is prized, Chast and Katzenstein confess they don't much like to cook. The book is laugh-out-loud funny and Don't Tell My Kitchen, but I relate to their descriptions. Roz Chast last joined us after the publication of her graphic memoir, Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, about her changing relationship with her parents in the last years of their lives when their physical and mental health were deteriorating. Jason Adam Katzenstein is the author of the 2020 memoir in words and pictures titled Everything is an Emergency. It's about having OCD, which was at its worst when he was growing up. It's really funny, but you also feel his pain. and shame. Roz Chast, Jason Adam Katzenstein, welcome to Fresh Air. I want you to start with a dramatic reading from the book, kind of as if it were a play, because the book is based on dialogues between you. So if you can read the opening part, that would be great. Okay. Okay. What a disaster of a morning I've had. How was yours? A constellation of catastrophes, but I'm here. I am so relieved to be here with you, and not alone in my kitchen. Usually when we get together, we discuss things like death, anxiety, scary movies, Thomas Mann, comedy, our animals. But today, all we can do is fetch about kitchens. It's not just about the coffee maker or cooking, although yes, I'm a cooking disaster. It's the hums and the beeps and the drawers overflowing with useless junk and chipped mugs. There's Freon tubes, and rotting fruit and poisons under the sink, and those impossible-to-access cabinets with dust-encrusted liqueur glasses, which you will never, ever use, and dish towels with depressing stains. And I know the kitchen is supposed to be the heart of the home, but mine fills me with dread. And then I feel bad for feeling bad about this space that brings my friends and family comfort and joy. And then I feel lonely feeling this bad about a silly room. When I think about super-fancy Martha-stewardized kitchens, with their giant stoves and refrigerators, each costing as much as a house, and zillions of dishes and pots and pans and islands everywhere, and a special precious sink just for washing scallions or whatever, and seasonal linens, and everything is new, I start to feel upset. I can hear the voices of my lefty grandfathers. This is capitalism. Run amok. Nobody should have a hundred dish towels. And when some people do not even have one dish towel. On the other hand, admittedly, I'm a 34-year-old man who lives alone, but I do think I could probably splurge on having more than three bowls, zero plates, and one cheap, scary pan. I'm pretty tidy and minimalist. If you saw my kitchen, you'd probably think, cute, unassuming Brooklyn situation. But start opening up cabinets, the fridge, ask a few questions about what I cook and eat. On this lies only madness. Thank you both for reading that. That's really great. Did you have to overcome shame and embarrassment to write about how pathetic your kitchens are? I think that the kitchen thing for me tipped more over into funny. I mean, there's always, when you're writing about personal stuff, an aspect of embarrassment. But at this point, I feel like revealing anything that's personal, probably comes with some degree of embarrassment. So it's just like, how much can you handle? And even without revealing anything, just in general, there's a low level of embarrassment just any time I leave the house or open my mouth. Great. Yeah. And I've always found that the things that I want to run away from making work about are the things that I most need to make work about, or the things that are actually going to be interesting to explore. So have you each been in each other's homes, and can you vouch for each other's honesty about your kitchens? I have not been in Jason's kitchen yet. I was in your kitchen yesterday. Yes. And I think that had we not made this book, and were I a stranger entering your kitchen, I would think, what a lovely kitchen. I think that one thing that we discovered in making this book is that, a lot of the sadness and the scariness lurks inside the drawers, in the back of the fridge, underneath. Yes. But the facades are often not that scary, and your kitchen looks very cheerful to me. Yes. I would say it's worn. It's not depressing when you walk in, but behind the scenes, it's really pretty chaotic. We did not look at the cabinet above the refrigerator, where, you know, that's definitely one of the hearts of darkness up there. What is the part of your kitchen that you don't want people to see, that you most don't want people to see, that you would be most embarrassed by? I think inside the refrigerator is pretty bad. You know what's terrible? I just realized I'm a little bit replicating my parents' refrigerator. I don't think Freud wrote too much. I don't think Freud wrote too much about this, but my parents, in their refrigerator, had this plastic bin that they called a cheesetainer. My mother made up this word. And all of the—if she bought, like, cheese and stuff—my father liked cheese, so there's always, like, different kinds of cheeses— and all the cheeses would sort of go into this plastic bin. And the worst part about this bin is that they had it for about at least 30 years. So over the years, it was plastic, and it would crack. And my mother, instead of buying a new one, she would fix it with masking tape. And there were places that were, like, patched and overpatched and overpatched, like, decades' worth of masking tape patches. And why—she didn't think, like, maybe it's time to buy a new cheesetainer bin. This is a mystery to me. But I see that I have now, in our fridge— we have a plastic bin that is this sort of repository now of things that I'm afraid if I put on a shelf are going to, like, either fall behind the shelf. And that is—the stuff that falls behind shelves and then, like, slips down the back of the refrigerator and then sometimes, like, gets half-buried beneath the, like, fruit and vegetable drawers, that's just some sort of sadness. That you don't really want to think too much about. And I don't want to deal with it. I don't want to clean it. I have so many other things I want to do. Yeah, time is the enemy of a clean refrigerator, for sure. Yeah. Jason, what would you like to confess to about the most embarrassing part of your kitchen? Well, I think it's the cabinets that I use for non-kitchen-related storage. The junk drawer? The junk drawer, but also underneath the sink, I have all of my lube. I have all of my loose comic books. That's the only place that they fit. So it's that, and it's inside the oven where I've stored all of the pots and pans that I don't use. But it's the fact that I use so much of it for storage. And when I say storage, I mean put things that I'm not ever going to look at and I just can't look at. And so I just—you know, you put them in the drawers that are too high up or too low down or just the ones that you don't want to open anymore. So when you have food that has expired, including milk, and I'm sure that this has happened to you a lot, judging from your book, do you taste it, smell it, and do you pour it down the sink or the toilet? I don't taste it, but sometimes I make my husband smell things. And sometimes I do make him taste things. Is it the same way? That if I think a plug is maybe bad or a burner on the stove and I'm afraid of turning it on, this is really bad, I'll make him sort of try it. And he'll say, if you think the stove is going to explode, why are you making me turn it on? And I can't really answer that. If you're in a position where you're choosing between, do I taste this? Or, If you're in a position where you're choosing between, do I pour it down the toilet? You should probably pour it down the toilet. Yeah. I deal with it. A third thing, which is I just leave it. I say, I'll get to this later, and later never comes. I do have a completely empty thing of oat milk in my fridge, but it expires on my birthday, and I feel kind of sentimental about it. Do you know what I hate? When I'm trying to figure out if something that's, like, canned or in one of those, like, carton kind of things, you know, like a broth, I'm trying to see if it's expired. And the expiration date is sometimes totally invisible. You have to hunt and hunt to find it. Does that get on your nerves? Oh, yeah. It's like leftover roulette. That's kind of profound to me. Don't we all just have expiration dates that we can't quite see? Yes, or that we don't want to see. Yeah, when we did our chapter on expiration dates, we went so quickly to death. Yes, yes. I think it's. They're really kind of a kissin' cousins, you might say. And you have something on refrigerator magnets, and I love the example that you give. Roz, do you want to say what it is? Yes, this is from the Sad Fridge Magnets. We have coffin-shaped Golden Valley coffins for all your funerary needs. 1-800-COFFINS-ASK-FOR-ED. And, Roz, you've got another. Fridge magnet I'd like you to describe. This is a roach problem, and the drawing is of a giant cockroach waking up in his bed with a stricken look on his face, and it says, Roach problem? Call Gregor Samsa. 1-800-ROACH-BE-GONE. I love it. In the book, it's mentioned mugs that are stained inside, and I have that problem with my white mugs, and I always try to figure out, is it from my teapot? Is my teapot getting, like, rusty? Is it from grains from my filter? What is it? Whatever it is, it's probably fatal. Yeah. I would throw those away. We have that, too. You have it, too? Yeah, I don't want to throw them away, though. I like them, but I do worry about poisoning myself. Very slow. Slow poisoning. Yeah. That's good, right? Oh, yeah. It'll catch up with everything else. It'll be listed, like, number 47 on cause of death. It's so true. Yeah, there are so many things that you have to worry about even more. Yes. So just kind of file it away. Did your parents or grandparents cook, and did they cook well? Was the food good? My mother is an amazing cook. Really? Yes. She loves it. She doesn't follow recipes, and she cooked dinner every night when we were growing up. And it is her happy place. It is calming for her. And all of my siblings are great cooks, and I don't know what happened to me. I became a cartoonist instead. And, Roz, what about you? My mother did not cook. I don't think she enjoyed it. I think she saw it as yet one more boring thing that she had to do. To keep my father and me from dying of starvation. And, yeah, she didn't take any real delight in it, and she wasn't particularly good at it. And I never saw my father cook anything. So I never even saw him make toast. He boiled water. Even though he was afraid of hot liquids? No, he was afraid of cold liquids. Oh, yes. Sorry, sorry. Yeah, anything that was, like, you know, directly at her. He would boil a little bit of water so he could kill the chill of something, like, juice that came from the refrigerator. Because in his universe, if you drank something straight from the refrigerator, you might as well, you know, be jumping off, you know, the top of Mount Everest. Jason, you live alone. And, Roz, you lived alone for a few years. Yes. In an apartment where you could only cook on a hot plate. That sounds bad. Oh, yeah. When you live alone, or when you lived alone. Did you feel like it's not worth it to cook? It's just me? Yes. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I have an apartment, a little studio apartment in the city now, and I'm there a lot. And I've never used my stove. Yeah, I have a kitchenette. My kitchen is in my living room. And I live alone. But I love, you know, yogurts and fruits. And I like to do scrounging. I scrounge more than I cook. Yeah, I had written a thing in The New Yorker about what my husband and I, we use the term fending for, like, when I'm not going to cook and we're not going to eat out. My husband will just say, you know, should we just fend, which is short for, like, fend for yourself. And then I asked people on my Instagram page, like, what word do you use? Like, you use scrounge. Yes. We use fend. And people sent in the most wonderful terms for this activity. I'm interested if you've had any kitchen catastrophes where, like, something's blown up or, you know, caught on fire, including a sleeve, or you've poured, like, hot liquid on, you know, accidentally spilled hot liquid from the pot onto you. So can you each mention a kitchen catastrophe? I have a page in the book. It's called Pizza Putts. And it's about the time in college that I decided this was a really brilliant plan I had. I was going to put a frozen pizza in the oven while I also got really high. And then I was going to eat it and then run off to a night class because I was 20 years old. What I did is I turned the oven on, forgot what I was doing, was late for class, went to class. And got a distressed call from my roommates when they came back to the dorm because our dorm had filled up with smoke. I had left the oven on. And I had never even checked what was in the oven, which was because, again, we were all 20. It was a plastic cutting board that we were storing there. And so what I did was I lit plastic on fire and melted it onto the oven and filled the whole dorm with smoke. And we probably all inhaled poison that is doing its work to this day. Wow. And what about the frozen pizza? Oh, it stayed in the freezer. I never even took the pizza out of the freezer. There are a few things that I did wrong in that story. And I see that now. Roz, do you have a kitchen catastrophe story to share? I have a kitchen catastrophe story, but it's not from my own kitchen. Which I think the reason. And we have not had catastrophes is that I am so panicked about the possibility of having one that I do try to prevent them whenever possible. But I do have a friend that had, I think, I don't know if this one can be topped. She and her husband were going off on vacation. But before they went on vacation, in the months before, they decided that they really needed to replace the cabinets in their kitchen. And her husband and her father decided that it was going to be a do-it-yourself job. So they replaced the cabinets. They put the cabinets up themselves. And it was just this really wonderful thing. It was great. So then they went on vacation. And while they were on vacation, the cabinets pried themselves off the wall and smashed into the kitchen. When they came home, the kitchen was just a wreck. There was a massive pile of wood and smashed crockery and broken glass. But it gets worse because one of the cabinets had hit a burner on the stove and the kitchen was filled with gas. Oh, God. Yeah. And then they had to call the fire department. And luckily, nobody lit a match because it was pretty terrible. But, yeah, I think that's – it's kind of like a Rube Goldberg meets the Grim Reaper. Wow. Wow. The Grim Goldberg. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. The Rube Reaper. Yeah, the Rube Reaper, definitely. Have you cleaned out your kitchens since publishing the book? Nope. No. Is that because you want to be true to the nature of your book or because you can't be bothered? There's just so many more interesting things to do. Yeah. I think we made the book because we're really like this. My guests are New Yorker cartoonists Roz Chast and Jason Adam Katzenstein. They wrote the graphic memoir about their kitchens, The Two Saddest Kitchens. Katzenstein also wrote a graphic memoir about growing up with obsessive compulsive disorder. That one's called Everything is an Emergency. We'll hear more of the interview after a break. You can keep up with Fresh Air by subscribing to our podcast and leave us a review. It helps a lot. Thank you. I'm Terry Gross, and this is Fresh Air. So, Jason, I'd like to talk with you about your OCD memoir. It's a graphic memoir in words and pictures. You have OCD, and it's not, my understanding is it's not nearly as bad as it was when, you know, during your formative years, but it's not like you no longer have OCD. So how does OCD affect, like, your food life? Well, I tend to go to the same few places and get the same few things, and same with groceries. I long for decisions to be taken out of my hands, and so I just kind of, you know, I rely on familiarity in terms of portions, in terms of what I eat and where I go. But one result of doing a lot of exposure and response prevention therapy is that when I worry about these things, rather than try to reassure myself by finding explanations for why, in fact, don't worry, these things can't be too contaminated, I'm encouraged to go in the opposite direction, and to go, you're right, it's all poisoned. And that's why, when you bring up the stained mugs, that my impulse is to go, yeah, it's poisoned, we're all slowly poisoning ourselves, because when you exaggerate some of these anxieties, they turn into jokes, and it takes away some of their power. And it's a tactic that I've used in ERP therapy. And that's exposure response therapy. Exposure and response prevention therapy. Prevention therapy, yes. And that's when you expose yourself to some of the things that you're afraid of, to convince yourself that it's not really going to harm you, and you're going to survive? Yes. You're training yourself, where instead of, if you avoid some of these things, then it makes them feel more and more powerful. You know, if there's a contaminated doorknob, every time I don't touch the doorknob, I'm going to feel more and more powerful. If I don't touch the doorknob, I reinforce for myself that there's something scary about the doorknob. But if instead, I seek out the doorknob, and then instead of washing my hands afterward, I do something like touch my face, and instead of trying to reassure myself, it'll all actually be okay, don't worry. People rarely die from doorknob touching-related events. Instead of doing that, if I say, oh, this is a disaster, any second now, and I make myself laugh about it, and I kind of, turn it into a parody, it takes away some of the power of the anxiety. So where are you now in terms of the OCD? After therapy and antidepressants? Because I know it's helped you, but. Yeah, I would liken it to, I have friends who are in AA, who have been sober, and you still go to meetings, and you tell your story. You do your reps, like you go to the gym. And that's where I'm at, where OCD is not usually the top story in my day, which is incredible. I didn't think when I was younger that I would ever wake up and not have the top five things that I was attending to be obsessive thoughts or compulsive behaviors. But I do feel really lucky to say that that is the case, and it's a combination of, you know, therapy, antidepressants, and also just knowing kind of how the machinery of OCD works a little bit more. One of the most important things to do is to identify when something is OCD. And in that way, you can often nip it in the bud. It'll be before it becomes like a chronic problem. Yeah, exactly. Do you tell friends? Who you're first meeting, that you have OCD? And if so, like, at what point do you feel comfortable mentioning it, as opposed to like ignoring it or consciously hiding it? Well, growing up, before I knew it was OCD, I felt really ashamed of what I, you know, labeled as just these really weird thoughts and behaviors. And I was very ashamed. And what I learned, in group therapy, really, was it was, it was so powerful to talk out loud about these things. And the reason that I made everything as an emergency is because it's the book that I wish I had when I was younger. There's something really lonely about being ashamed and hiding these things. So I don't know that, you know, I say, Hey, I'm Jason. Nice to meet you. I've got obsessive compulsive disorder. And I'm wondering if, you know, my shirt is offending me. Is offending you in a way that's going to ruin your day. And then it's my fault. But, you know, I might do that. But in general, I've made it an ethos to be really open about this stuff. I got so tired of being ashamed. So, Jason, in your memoir, you become a character who has OCD. I mean, it's you, you're writing about yourself with your name. But still, you're turning yourself into a character on a page. In a book. And I'm wondering if that kind of standing apart from yourself and looking at yourself from the outside is therapeutic as well. And Roz, I'd like you to answer that too. So, Jason, let me let you answer first. Absolutely. And in fact, everything as an emergency began as a therapeutic exercise. I was doing exposures. And then you're encouraged instead of doing a compulsive response, to take 10 minutes and focus on something that feels calming. And then after 10 minutes, check in and go, do I still want to wash my hands? Do I still want to check the internet? Do I still want to perform the compulsion? So in that 10 minute window between exposure and response, what I would do is I would make comics that were little jokes about OCD. And also, I'm not great at, you know, sleeping, eating regularly, attending to kind of my, physical and mental health needs, but I take comics very seriously. And one thing I was thinking about when I was making everything as an emergency is, I don't take my mental health seriously enough, but I take comics very seriously. And what if I make comics about mental health? Will it help me actually attend to these things in real life? And it did. When we were working on Two Saddest Kitchens, I thought that I would become a gourmand and a great chef. And I did not. You can blame me. I don't blame you at all. Roz was the one who wanted to do cooking. We did a few, we would zoom from our kitchens and cook together. But I think it descended very quickly into gripes and kvetching, which is our forte. Roz, do you find it helpful to stand outside yourself about things that make you uncomfortable in the world or about yourself and do a comic about it? Some things, definitely. But then there are two sort of, well, there's a lot of fields of things that make me very anxious, but medical things and driving things. And I have made jokes about those things, but I can't say that they've helped. I mean, I have seen a psychiatrist for years about this. And at this point, I mean, I think he just sort of realized that these things like, well, she's beyond help. So I'm, I see him like, I see him four times a year, mainly for meds. But my driving issues, I can drive locally. But if I had something that where I knew I would have to drive in an area from one point to another area, it would be on my mind like 24 seven. Is your concern about driving outside of the neighborhood, about getting lost, about getting in an accident, about being an incompetent driver? It's something about going fast, and then realizing you're going in the wrong direction. I don't understand the blind spot. I don't even like the phrase. I get like car hypochondria, where I think I hear something or I think I smell something. and that's a bad thing. It's not good. You ever get the light with the exclamation point? Oh, yes. There's the light with the exclamation point, which in my car has been on practically since I got it, which I think is really, what that means is that it's queuing into my psyche and it has nothing to do with a car at all. It is just like. What a terrible ominous light that is. It's a horrible light. It's nonspecific. Yeah, it's just like. There's a problem. What is it? Something is bad. We won't tell you. Something's bad. Something's bad. That's all it is. It's just screaming at you. Something's bad. I think the kitchen should have exclamation lights for you're not roasting the chicken correctly. Yes. The microwave has a popcorn button, so I feel like we can get specific with these things. But I don't like the microwave either. I don't really. I don't really understand it. I don't have one. You don't have a microwave? I don't have a microwave. Because. There wasn't one in my apartment when I moved in, and I didn't want one. Well, let me reintroduce you both. My guests are New Yorker cartoonists Roz Chast and Jason Adam Katzenstein, authors of the new book, The Two Saddest Kitchens. We'll be right back. This is Fresh Air. I want you each to just say something about your dream life, if that's okay. Because, um. Roz, you've talked about lucid dreaming, where you're dreaming and you know you're dreaming. Yes. And, um. And, Jason, you've written about nightmares. So, Jason, dreams? Nightmares? Dreams, nightmares. Well, I depict this recurring dream that I had in Everything is an Emergency in which there's a woman petting her cat, and I have to compliment the cat, or the woman and cat will turn into this kind of monster. And. I really. realized when I was making the memoir that that dream kind of is an expression of OCD. It's a depiction of how OCD feels. You mean to have dreams like Persona 5 feelings? Yes. I have a lot of dreams that I've lost my dog. Those are my nightmares these days. I have dreams sometimes where I have too many birds. Sounds like Alfred Hitchcock. Like, I have two birds, but I have had dreams where I have, like, 15 or 20 birds. That is too many. That's way too many. And they're, like. Some of them are in cages. Some of them are just, like, walking around a room. And then I. It's. The dreams would fall under the heading of too many birds and not enough cages. And I have no idea what that means. And this is when I try to. I get a bird. Like, suddenly I have a canary, which I don't have. And then I have to find, like, a small cage for the canary. And I have to put it in a cage with a bigger bird. And then I'm worried about that. But that's a recurring dream, definitely. It sounds like you invented an idiom. Like, how are you doing today, Ross? Oh, you know, too many birds, not enough cages. Oh, yeah. So true. That sounds about right. Yeah. It's a kind of anxiety dream. And most of my dreams are anxiety dreams. For sure. So, you're both friends. And you're both New Yorker cartoonists. Are your competitors, too? Because the New Yorker has a lot of cartoons. But, you know, it's limited space. There's a lot of cartoonists who do things for the New Yorker. So, can you talk about being friends and maybe also competitors? I think Linda Barry said that cartooning was a very rickety profession. And I think in many ways it feels like we're all in the same boat that we're the cartoonists at the New Yorker, the young ones, the old ones. We're doing this because we love to do it because or at the very least it feels worse to not do it than it does to do it. Because it's not always like the most fun thing when you're having a day where you don't feel inspired, when you don't feel funny. When, you know. Then it's just awful. But to not work feels worse than working. And I feel like everybody I know who's a cartoonist, we're all in the same boat in a way that there are so few markets for cartoons. I don't know. It's almost past the point of being competitive because it's like we're competing in a profession where nobody is going to. We're not going to be like super successful or some kind of thing. We're doing this because we want to do it. I mean, the generation of cartoonists at the New Yorker who I got to meet when I first came in to pitch, you were all my heroes. And it is a bummer that people who I always put on a pedestal are also having to make do in an ecosystem that is sort of squeezing us out a little bit. And I've talked to folks about how do we do this. Meeting George Booth. When I met George Booth, he summoned me from across the room and he said, do you know why I called you over here? Because you look like a cartoonist. And, yeah, I think you could say, you know, this town ain't big enough for both of us. But I haven't really found that to be the case with the New Yorker cartoonists. So, Jason. You read in your memoir, I want to be with friends who want to make things with me. And the book that you, Jason, and you, Roz, have collaborated on together about your kitchens, that's exactly what you were asking for, Jason. I know. I feel so lucky to get to work on this with you, to get to have made this book. It really is, to me, when I read it, it's the story of a friendship. Yeah, I think that's, for me, too. I mean, it's a collaboration, which is what a friendship is. It is a kind of collaboration. And I also, you know, I wanted to rise to your level. Like, when you would make a drawing that was hilarious or exciting to me, then, you know, it was like, well, let me make something that'll make Roz laugh. And it's such a solitary profession. And so to be able to do it collaboratively. And to have somebody else that you're showing the work to make something that is often lonely turn into something that is really joyful. And it's the most that art making has ever felt to me like a conversation. Well, thank you for the book. It brightened my day. And thank you for coming on Fresh Air. I really enjoyed talking with you both. Thank you, Terry. Thanks for having us on your show. It's really great to talk to you again. Yeah, this was wonderful. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thank you. Girlfriend and eventual wife. This is Fresh Air. A new series called BiblioShorts is publishing great short fiction from around the world in standalone book form. The work that kicks off this series is called Seven Stories About Tammy by celebrated writer Elizabeth McCracken. Book critic Maureen Corrigan has a review. I've been thinking a lot lately about the famous opening sequence of Up, the Pixar animated film. That movie begins. It begins with a wordless montage of a marriage, Carl and Ellie's marriage, its youthful giddiness, the pain of infertility, and the long goodbye of Ellie's death in old age. The montage takes less than four and a half minutes and yet contains the emotional depths of a much longer film or novel about a marriage. Relying solely on words, Elizabeth McCracken's Seven Stories About Tammy. Does much the same for the family saga. As its title bluntly announces, Seven Stories About Tammy is composed of seven interrelated short stories about a family's encounters with their eldest son's girlfriend and eventual wife, an older woman named Tammy. McCracken's story sequence has appeared earlier in a literary magazine as well as in the 2025 anthology. But having it available in stand-alone book form is just the right vessel for this family montage. Not every piece of fiction, after all, fits into the prefab format of a novel or a single short story. The only downside is that this 70-page book is so tiny, the size of a pamphlet really, that I misplaced it repeatedly around the page. around my house. house. Whenever I found it again, though, I felt like something rich and strange had been returned to me out of the jumble of the mundane. We first meet Tammy when the Harkin family does, in the mid-1970s, when eldest son Morris, who's been living in Florida, brings her home to Boston for dinner. Here's our omniscient narrator describing that first encounter. They had never met anyone from Florida, only people who ended up there, as if by gravity. Tammy was tall and angular, stood with her hands in her own back pockets, blue jeans, ironed. Morris's jeans were ironed now, too. By her? Or had she put Morris to work at the office? She seemed like that sort of woman, efficient and ruthless, with beautiful manners. On that evening, the family parlor game of how old is she will begin, because we're flatly told Morris was 27, she wasn't. In the third story, set about 15 years later, insecure middle child Victoria visits Tammy and Morris, now married, at their high-rise apartment in Philadelphia. Victoria, who struggled with seesawing weight all her young life, is served a shallow bowl of soup. Here's some dinner table dialogue. Do you want more? asked Tammy in a friendly way. Oh no, thank you, Victoria said. I'm saving room for dinner. In the pause that followed, she understood that this was dinner. There was no further course, not so much as a cheese plate. She began in her head to tell the story to her mother. Mortification could be useful if you could convert it to a story, though usually you had to sit with the mortification a while to be able to soften it up enough to fashion it into something for somebody else to admire. What do we make of this moment? Is Tammy really a woman who, as Victoria thinks, was never so happy as when other people were stupid? Or is that a judgment born out of Victoria's own self-loathing? Wielding precise but plain language, McCracken engages that central question of whether or not we ever really see ourselves or each other, twisting it like a helix, both within stories and throughout the long arc of this story sequence. In the penultimate story, the family, minus dad Dennis, who's died, gathers at a rental house in Rhode Island for the holidays. Younger Harkin's son Porter, a recovering alcoholic, takes center stage here. Years ago, his drunken kiss of Tammy's shoulder on the night of her and Morris' wedding changed the course of Porter's life. Or so goes the story he tells himself. Porter, naturally, blames Tammy for his diminished status in the family, the effort he has to make to be picked up on the family radio. However you categorize it, Seven Stories About Tammy is a brilliant piece of writing. This book is so funny, profound, and short that you may just want to read it over again immediately, as I did. Maureen Corrigan is a professor of literature at Georgetown University. She reviewed seven stories about Tammy by Elizabeth McCracken. Tomorrow on Fresh Air, the gay poet Federico Garcia Lorca was murdered during Spain's Civil War, leaving behind four pages of an unfinished play. Our guests will be the two Spanish filmmakers known as Los Javis, who've turned those pages into an epic called La Bola Negra. The film won the Best Director Award at the Cannes Film Festival. I hope you'll join us. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air. Fresh Air's executive producer is Sam Brigger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Yakundi, Anna Bauman, and Nico Gonzalez-Whistler. Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. Our co-host is Tanya Mosley. Tanya Mosley. I'm Terry Gross.