 Red Room Writer Profile
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Jessica Anya Blau's Blog
November 2, 2009
- When I was growing up, my parents had a fairly loose policy of not driving me, my sister, or my brother around town. We biked to the dentist and doctor. To go anywhere else-school, the beach, the movies-we walked, rode the bus, roller skated, and hitch-hiked (the method of choice in high school). The no driving policy was cemented sometime before my sister, Becca, went away to college, ...
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August 31, 2009
- You might remember my mother, Bonnie Blau, from the interview I did with her earlier this year. We talked about the fact that she thinks she looks like Bruce Springsteen. You can read that interview here. As a follow up, here's an interview with my mother where I ask her about one of my favorite photos. It's the only picture I have of me as a little kid with my mother. Do you remember ...
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May 26, 2009
- My mother gave my father a Diane Arbus photo book for his birthday the year I was ten and he was thirty-four. The entire family (Mom, Dad, my older sister, Becca, and my younger brother, Josh) gathered around and slowly waded through it, picture by picture. The pages were thick and glossy and smelled remotely of plastic. Almost all the photos were portraits-people whose entire lives seemed ...
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March 28, 2009
- Persian Girls is a memoir but reads like the best fiction. There is so much suspense in this story, that I frequently found myself flipping to Nahid's biography in the back to remind myself that she survived it all and is now safely ensconced in the multi-cultural nest of New York City. As the seventh child born to her parents, well-off Persians living outside Tehran, infant Nahid was given ...
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March 18, 2009
- We were in my brother-in-law's car. A big, German, expensive car which my grandmother would have called "fancy." My brother-in-law, Ike, was driving, his apricot toy poodle perched on his forearm, front paws on the open window. His favorite CD, The Best of Air Supply, was playing and Ike belted it out in his nasally, off-key New York accent, And I need you tonight, and I need you ...
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March 5, 2009
- Scott and I met in our early twenties. We were in college, neither of us had either a phone or a television-we thought this was an interesting commonality. I rented a shabby room a couple blocks from the Berkeley campus. Scott lived in the gardeners' quarters of an estate. There was a live-in maid there, Margot, who smoked cigarettes and played black jack. She often cooked more than ...
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February 23, 2009
- 1. GOOD: You are not freaked out by the human body in all its shapes and forms—you have seen so many naked people that you understand that nudity is a normal human condition. This comes in handy when you have to help a sick hospitalized friend navigate some intimate part of her body with tubes and wires.BAD: You know what your father’s penis looks like because he always swims naked, and ...
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January 31, 2009
- I'm going to start posting some of the most embarrassing things that have ever happened to me. Here is the first in a list that I am sure will not end until I end! 1. My husband and I had moved from California to Toronto, one of my favorite cities in the world. After a few weeks in a basement apartment, we bought a creaky old row house in the Greek neighborhood not far from the ...
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January 3, 2009
- Air travel stories are like dreams--they're only interesting if you're in them. This information should be one of those things people tell you at some turning point in life: your Bar Mitzvah, your coming out ball, your wedding day. But I'm going to ignore my own advice and tell you my air travel story. You are not in this story, so you might want ...
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December 22, 2008
- Last winter, HarperCollins sent my book, The Summer of Naked Swim Parties, to Larry Doyle to see if he’d blurb it. He did and it was surely one of my favorite blurbs, and the one that ultimately ended up on the front cover. When I first read his blurb, I said to my editor something like, “Who is this guy? I love him!” She told me two things: he wrote and produced The Simpsons, and he ...
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December 14, 2008
- So, I was home last Saturday and I heard this ruckus in the walls. It sounded like something with very sharp nails scrambling around. In fact, it sounded like my dog, Pippa. I called for Pippa, she came. Clearly she wasn’t in the walls. I followed the sound. It moved. It tinkered. It bumped. It was weighty—thunking. Then it was in the ceiling of the second floor, tumbling ...
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December 1, 2008
- One question I am often asked by readers of my novel, THE SUMMER OF NAKED SWIM PARTIES, is, “Have your daughters read it?!” The question is always asked in a way that demands at least one exclamation point, as the novel is full of sex and has some mild drug use. The answer is one daughter has read it, the other has not. I’m not too worried about it—it’s a novel, it’s fiction. What ...
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November 1, 2008
- I met my mother when I was born. Since then she has progressed from a dress-sewing, dinner-cooking, hair in a high-bun housewife, to a nude swimming, pot-smoking artist to a grey-haired lady who thinks old age is an embarrassment to be treated like some hideous debilitating disease. The one thing that has remained constant in my mother is that she reads a couple novels a week (she ...
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