not woody allen

SISTER MISCHIEF: AN INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR

The definitive young adult fiction novel of my youth was GO ASK ALICE. I revered the main character’s angst, and her story profoundly affected me. But I didn’t relate to it, I romanticized it. My enjoyment in reading the text related to the image I associated with her as suburban, affluent, pretty and lily-white. I wasn’t her, I wanted to be her.

SISTER MISCHIEF does not mystify the white suburban experience but challenges it. Despite having a very different lived experience I see myself all over that book. And upon closing it, I felt proud of who I am instead of shameful about who I will never be—-white and anglo.

Author Laura Goode demands the reader to self-reflect and interrogate the role of race, class and sexuality without being didactic. Told through the lens of seventeen-year-old white and Jewish Lesbian, Esme, we are taken on the rarely honest voyage of the complicated process of teenage self-discovery that Goode avers is the “first Interracial-Queer-Hiphop-Jewish-Midwestern Lovestory.”  

 Goode encourages us to ask the questions: Am I kind to people that are different than me? In what ways am I different? How do politics shape my life? How does religion shape my life? Am I an independent thinker? Do I live in a homogenous environment? Am I part of a system that sustains that homogeneity or am I actively working outside of the social constructions that create homogeneity?

Esme is the daughter of a single-parent, Atheist father and an estranged Jewish mother. She and her father live in an affluent Minnesota suburb called Holyhill, which, according to Goode is the only autobiographical aspect to the book. Goode says, “Holyhill is based on the very white, conservative, affluent Edina, Minnesota, where I grew up. Though my relationship with Edina is conflicted, I felt as though the Midwest is underrepresented in literature, and especially young adult literature, and I wanted to give voice to that experience.” Holyhill is a conservative Christian bastion that, early on, the reader finds out is ill-accepting of those who identify outside of their proscribed Straight, White and Christian paradigm. Esme and her friends come together on the surface as lovers of HipHop lovers but are drawn together more generally by their inability to subscribe to Holyhill’s culture.

The other main characters are: Rowie, or Rohini, an American born of Indian parents and one of the few people of color in Holyhill; Tess, a white, devout Christian songstress whose faith is tested when she realizes the ways her congregation relies on exclusionary interpretations of the bible; and Marcy, yet another product of a single-father household who gets flack for being a tomboy.

So why is this an important Jewish text? Jews are no strangers to “outsiderness,” especially Jews Of Color. Esme and her friends’ embracement of outsider communities directly influenced Esme’s exploration and reconciliation with her Jewish faith. I sat down with author Laura Good to try and understand the ways in which Jewishness played into this powerful novel and understand her take on how faith can be a current for positive change in the whole movement toward universal equity.

CM: Okay religion! When I exchanged emails with you [Laura] you said of Judaism “I should tell you that I am not Jewish, but rather a lapsed Catholic suffering a lifelong case of Jew envy (which is to say a deep and abiding respect for Jewish values and people).” How did your religious experience or lack thereof and thoughts on religion inform the development of Esme’s character?

Laura: I wanted, in a less Jewish-specific way, for Esme to be an outsider, and to use Judaism as an inquiry into faith and morality, which I think is really a huge part of the adolescent experience.  So each character actually belongs to a different faith. In effect, I wanted to chart Esme’s journey toward faith as moving in an opposite direction to Tess’s questioning of her own.

CM:  The only practicing Christian in the group of four, Tess, asks Esme “where do you think you’ve learned what you do know about being a Jew” to which Esme responds “From her books, I guess…and Pops, and the ABCs of Minnesotan Jews; Al Franken, Bob Dylan and the Coen brothers.” Rowie, the daughter of relatively progressive Hindu Indian immigrants replied “The Minnesotan Jew, shit’s complicated, huh?” Without her mother around Esme lacks a Jewish influence, what went into creating Esme as a curious, but non-practicing Jew?

Laura: As I understand, if your mother is Jewish than you are. So there was this idea that the though her mother has departed, Esme’s Judaism was the most direct connection Esme had to her mother. The absence of Esme’s mother is exactly what leads her to inquire into what her faith means to her. So her Judaism reinforces Esme’s status as an outsider but, it also signifies her inquiry into her mother’s faith, and faith as a channel into better understanding her relationship to her mother. Esme’s is an active inquiry into the dual dynamic of being ethnically Jewish and claiming a Jewish identity…a two-level measure of her exclusion. She is angry at her faith because she’s angry at her mother, and she’s at a point where she needs to question and interrogate faith to accept it. The disruptive point is where she is.

CM: Anne Frank is present throughout the book. Esme identifies with her experience in more ways than one. At some points it seemed that Esme’s story foiled that of Frank’s. Can you speak a little bit to this relationship?

Laura: Yes, I think Anne provides an allusion or even a foil to Esme’s experience.  She seeps into Esme’s story.  It’s also metaphorical.  Esme, before she comes out, is walled into an annex of her own. And like Anne, the one place where she feels included is in reading and writing.  Anne was a really important figure to me as well as to Esme.  I remember in her first entry in the diary she uses the word “unburdening” to describe her motivation for keeping a diary.  I always thought that was a really beautiful and interesting word—I do think that the act of writing is an act of unburdening.  And the way that Esme unburdens herself of her “annex” of not being able to express her sexuality, as well as her lack of access to her Judaism, is through writing.

CM: Esme’s father says about finding peace with her mother: “In Jewish law, it’s customary for the children of departed parents to atone for those parents, but not vice versa. So maybe in finding your forgiveness of her, it might be helpful to understand that forgiveness as a Jewish one: it’s your sacred responsibility, in a sense, to find forgiveness for her.” This is one of the only moments in the book where an outward practice of Judaism is encouraged. I was a little bit surprised, but humbled by this section. As a non-practicing Jew, I also turn to the day of atonement as my meaningful high-holiday. But in this text I felt like Esme was so courageous and unforgiving that words like “atonement” wouldn’t be a part of her vocabulary.  What was the significance of inserting the Jewish day of “atonement,” Yom Kippur, as Esme’s only religious practice? Or do you think Esme is guided by Judaism in other ways as well?

Laura: I like the way Judaism constructs “atonement”—in Catholicism, we atone through confession as well as through prayer, which is definitely a concept that seeps into my work, but I love that Jews devote a calendar day to the act of seeking forgiveness and redemption,  One nugget of Judaism I discovered during a graduate school class on Allen Ginsberg’s Kaddish that I found lovely is that apparently, and correct me if I misunderstand this, in Jewish atonement children are meant to atone for the sins of their parents, but parents can’t atone for their children. I don’t think that Esme knows how to be a Jew—she doesn’t know the practices entailed within it—so engaging with the act of atonement specifically toward her mother is a singularly important act for her, a really significant first step in her motion toward a more active faith.

CM: Esme says: “Jews exist in a kind of weird in-between space in the American ethnicity spectrum, I ponder..Marcy and Tess and me were never the kids whose house smelled like spices no one recognized none of us grew up in the only brown family on the block.” Here you note that the ethnicity spectrum leaves you feeling like you’re always suspended in unfamiliar territory if you’re not a white Anglo-Saxon protestant. Is this part of Esme and Rowie’s bond? 

Laura: Jews are otherized, but not “colored,” for a lack of a better word, at least in the context of Eme’s surroundings. I wanted them to relate on their outsider status.

A common outsiderness draws Esme to Rowie; Esme feels Rowie is uniquely equipped to understand her experience because Rowie’s experience is, in a way, a more extreme version of her own.  One of my biggest concerns about the book is that people might think Rowie is fetishized; obviously it’s a complex thing for a white author to write characters of color.  And on some level Esme does fetishize Rowie, but in a way that’s not really racial—I think all adolescent love is kind of inherently fetishistic.  All you want to do is box your first lover up and soak up their juices…it’s adolescent fixation, obsession, hormonal lust.

CM: Hiphop. Obviously, hiphop is the most important character in the book. It is what binds everyone and everything together. Why hiphop? What does it do for the character in the book?

Laura: The “why” is just because I’m completely fascinated by it as a relatively new and hugely influential poetic language. Rap as rhythm and poetry is at the forefront of a mainstream public dialogue in a way that other poetry hasn’t been. And moreover, hip-hop as a musical form unites disparate parts into a whole, using its parts as a guiding principle toward a new art object.  As for the characters, these four girls themselves are an assemblage of religious, familial, and cultural disparity, unlikely parts that create a whole, and that whole is greater than any one of them.  Hip-hop is a common religion to them, totally singular to them as a representation of something they’re not otherwise finding in their sheltered suburban lives. 

At the end of SISTER MISCHIEF the reader is left with the understanding that Esme will use hip-hop not only as a platform for her religious exploration, but that hip-hop will be a part of her Jewish identity.  We are left with the understanding that one’s Jewish faith isn’t singular but can involve many different perspectives, practices and aberrations—-and all of those are all under the umbrella of Jewish. The novel is testament to the evolution of Judaism; and to the future of inclusion.