Photography by Kevin A. Roberts
Rebecca Schuman lives in a big, cheerfully messy loft in a former shoe polish factory across from a Central West End coffeehouse, where we talked at length about German philosophy, literature, politics, and—with her 3-year-old—dragons who burp salsa. Publishers Weekly and a slew of other booksellers all lauded Schuman’s Schadenfreude, A Love Story as one of the funniest and/or best books of 2017, and none other than Dave Barry pronounced her “super-smart and very funny.”
Your subtitle is “Me, the Germans, and 20 Years of Attempted Transformations, Unfortunate Miscommunications, and Humiliating Situations That Only They Have Words For.” I gather it gave a few folks the wrong impression? People actually said, “I was expecting an ethnography of Germany and was very disappointed. It was fine for what it was and very funny, but I wanted it to be a different book.” One star.
What they wanted was the book you originally set out to write. Yeah, and after trying to write four other books that were not personal narratives, I realized that in order to get the things I wanted to talk about—Kafka, Nietzsche, the way the German literary and cultural philosophical tradition can change a person—I had to talk about how it changed me.
You didn’t plan a memoir? I’m not the kind of person who writes a memoir. One of the reviewers said the more remarkable your book is, the lower its literary value. I wouldn’t say this myself, I’m too self-loathing, but to him my book was an embarrassment of literary riches. There are people who have unremarkable lives but no shame, and that was me.
You’re skilled in the art of self-deprecation—any tips? Oh, that can’t be taught. It’s a combination of feeling very self-involved and very self-critical. You can’t be self-deprecatory without thinking about yourself all the time.
What was the high point of your book’s success? When Lucy Lawless took a picture of it and said she was reading it. Because she has a cameo in the book, and I don’t think she even knew that. Also, I’ve gotten to be really picky about what I write. I’ve got a collection in the works with Paris Review. Guernica [Magazine]has solicited me. I’ve gotten to get out of the constant pitching grind and retire from what I call the outreach industrial complex, where you tell people things they already know they can’t do anything about. “Here are things you can get even more infuriated about.” It has not, however, meant an uptick in my rate, because this is 2018 and most people write for free.
How’d you manage to become funny without suffering? That’s easy. I’m half Jewish, I just finished translating a book about the holocausts of Jewish Switzerland. Pogroms, more pogroms, a break from pogroms and institutionalized persecution instead… The history of Judaism is a history of suffering.
What interests you? Non-automotive forms of transportation. I just really like bicycling. And futuristic modes of transportation. I’m interested in motherhood, but I’m also interested in why other people don’t find motherhood interesting; why the subject is considered niche. I’m interested in gymnastics. Racial justice. Any television show that Mindy Kaling is involved in. German news and politics, because Germans make the perfect the enemy of the good—a lot. They value order, but they do not value orders. They just got a functioning government again after eight months, because it was so important to them that the various parties not compromise on various ideals, and that made the entire government fully ineffectual.
Is that bad? No, it’s interesting. Germans will argue with you about politics until the sun comes up, but they will never tell you who they voted for—and you can’t tell, because they vote a straight party ticket, and there are, like, 10 parties.
Do you pick up any residue of German culture in St. Louis? No, I pick up German-Americanness. There’s a large German diaspora here, but it’s like six generations old, so it’s morphed into its own thing. And it is fascinating in its own right.
Why is there such an anti-intellectual streak in this country? I think it has to do with the religious roots. If you take the Bible literally, you trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. There’s a lot of discouragement of introspection in the Bible. Intellectualism and religiosity have since the founding of this country been seen as diametric opposites. I know enough brilliant theologians just on Twitter alone to know that’s not the case. But the post cultural backlash of the ’80s was profoundly anti-intellectual. It’s made it so that I can no longer level valid criticisms against a system that needs to incorporate those criticisms to survive without aligning myself with the people who want to destroy it.
Do you find yourself seeking out small pockets of intellectualism? I wouldn’t even call my house a pocket of intellectualism, ’cause we mostly talk about diapers. I can’t even feel comfortable saying this in public now, because it will align me with the wrong people, but I never liked hanging out with academics. They’re also guilty of going into this false binary of “You’re either with us or against us.” And trying to prove that you are smart to someone who doesn’t view what you know as valuable is a sort of pig-wrestling situation: You both get dirty, and the pig has fun. So I don’t even try.
Who do you hang with? I’ve been a loner for so long, I don’t know if I’ll ever have a meaningful group outside of my own home.
How come? Fear of rejection. Unwillingness to deal with all the things that need to be done to get a babysitter just to go out and feel alienated from a conversation for three hours.
What about your husband? Even more introspective. I’m the social butterfly, and I have, like, five friends in the world.
What was your first impression of St. Louis? The architecture blew me away. So many architectural treasures just around every corner. Many in need of a little TLC, but in the decade we’ve been here, many have been given that TLC. This was nothing for a while, then a crossfit gym, then condemned, and now it’s this gorgeous new wine bar [Scarlett’s]. And the second impression was that it was an easy and affordable place to live. Our value system involves a lot of living and not that much—we both work hard, but we are not careerist. Any work we do is so we can spend as much time together as a family not working as possible. [She leans toward 3-year-old Halina, who’s giggling over a computer game.] Is it too much funny? Is it dragons love tacos? [Then she’s back, smoothly.] We always wanted to live in the city, not the county.
You understood the divide from the start, then? Well, not the full nuances with all the attendant casual and not so casual racism. That came later. But we definitely knew we wanted to live somewhere that was walkable and urban. My husband’s from New York; he knows from walkable and urban.
You’re young to be so intentional. We’re Gen Xers. We’re not that young. We come from a time where it was very cool to be authentic and alternative but not cool to be ambitious. We both tried really, really hard in grad school, but in my case, by the time I decided to be a ruthless careerist, it was too late.
What’s next in your writing? A new collection on Longreads.com, a wide-ranging exploration of pop and highbrow culture in the ’90s. The first installment is about the man-child heartthrob of GenX cinema. The ’90s was supposed to be this decade of extreme political correctness, but every single member of the Ally McBeal practice would be in jail for sexual assault right now. There’s a lot from the ’90s that warrants a closer and more weathered look.
Give me five words for the decade? Um, like, OK, I guess. It was about not really being too enthusiastic about anything. The second anything gained popularity, it was dead to us. Reservoir Dogs, good. Pulp Fiction, bad. Nirvana's first album, good. Second album, bad. “I liked them before they sold out” was what people said. [She grins.] I approach everything with a lot of cynicism.
Even your daughter? Her personally, no. The vicissitudes of early childhood, yes.
What’s your generation’s reputation? I think Baby Boomers thought we were slackers and didn’t do anything. They were disappointed in our lack of ambition.
Is that valid? No. I think ambition is highly overrated. Millennials, though, are driven—often toward success for its own sake. I just got an ad for “sudden coffee. We have taken brewed coffee’s essence…” Congratulations. You have just invented instant coffee! “It’s like Uber but it’s bigger and a lot of people take it”—that’s a f—king bus! They’re so ahistorical, they just tried to get $2 billion of venture capital to reinvent a vending machine. They grew up learning to drill for tests. It’s an inherently uncurious generation.
Does it seem like we hear more about Millennials than we ever heard about GenXers? Probably because their generation is bigger, and it’s had way more of an economic impact. When the whole raison d’etre of your generation is to be unambitious, and the culture of your pop culture is to be unpopular, the impetus to market to you is diminished.
You have strong feelings about those young ’uns. The teens are going to save the world. but the 20somethings baffle me. It’s a return to the Reagan ethos except that they’re addicted to Instagram not coke. It makes sense, because they all grew up with George W. and the teens grew up with Barack. They have this incredible mixture of earnestness and cynicism.
How do you temper your own cynicism? To quote one of my favorite bands, ’90s mainstay Blur, “I’m a professional cynic, but my heart’s not in it.” It’s a line to walk. You can’t be successfully cynical without first interacting earnestly with the material of your cynicism. You have to earn your cynicism.
