Feh

by Shalom Auslander

From the acclaimed author of Foreskin’s Lament, a memoir of the author’s attempt to escape the biblical story he’d been raised on and his struggle to construct a new story for himself and his familyShalom Auslander was raised like a veal in a dysfunctional family in the Orthodox community of Monsey, New the son of an alcoholic father; a guilt-wielding mother; and a violent, overbearing God. Now, as he reaches middle age, Auslander begins to suspect that what plagues him is something worse, something he can't so easily a story. The story. One indelibly implanted in him at an early age, a story that told him he is fallen, broken, shameful, disgusting, a story we have all been told for thousands of years, and continue to be told by the religious and secular alike, a story called "Feh."Yiddish for "Yuck."Feh follows Auslander's midlife journey to rewrite that story, a journey that involves Phillip Seymour Hoffman, a Pulitzer-winning poet, Job, Arthur Schopenhauer, GHB, Wolf Blitzer, Yuval Noah Harari and a pastor named Steve in a now-defunct church in Los Angeles.Can he move from Feh to merely meh? Can he even dream of moving beyond that?Auslander's recounting of his attempt to exorcize the story he was raised with—before he implants it onto his children and/or possibly poisons the relationship of the one woman who loves him—isn’t sacred. It is more-than-occasionally profane. And like all his work, it is also relentlessly funny, subversively heartfelt and fearlessly provocative.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Audiobook, Jewish, Biography Memoir, Religion, Judaism

368 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 23, 2024

About the author

Shalom Auslander is an American author and essayist. He grew up in an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in Monsey, New York where he describes himself as having been "raised like a veal".[1][2] His writing style is notable for its Jewish perspective and determinedly negative outlook.

Auslander has published a collection of short stories, Beware of God and a memoir, Foreskin's Lament: A Memoir. His work, often confronting his Orthodox Jewish background, has been featured on Public Radio International's This American Life and in The New Yorker. In January 2012, Auslander published his first novel, Hope: A Tragedy.

Reviews

[Roxane · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not sure how to describe this book. Original, uncomfortable, a relentless chronicle of self-loathing. Very voice-driven. I loved it.

[sharber · Rating 4 out of 5]

(4.7) what a rollercoaster of emotions... wow🔅🔆🔅
auslander should start making movies... we need more cynical jewish filmmakers that aren't woody allen

[Flynn Mcneil · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book made me feel less alone in the world, I would 10/10 recommend it to anyone!!

[Zehava (Joyce) · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. I read Shalom Auslander’s previous memoir many years ago and this seems like more of the same. (What does it say about someone who writes two memoirs by the age of 50?) Auslander is an excellent writer but his subject matter is pretty repetitive and just so utterly “feh” and relentlessly depressing. I imagine it’s pretty hard to live in his head. Excellent audiobook read by the author.

[Katie]

a bit of an irl Good Omens that asks, what if god is the bad guy and humans are the good guys?

"Stories are a powerful thing."

[Bianca Rogers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Shalom Auslander's memoir Feh offers a brutally honest exploration of self-loathing and human nature. The Yiddish title, meaning disgust, sets the tone for a narrative shaped by religious fear and strict parenting. Auslander's raw style blends dark humor with touching moments, creating a striking contrast throughout the book.

As the memoir progresses, it shifts to a more contemplative examination of humanity's core. Auslander posits that storytelling and self-loathing are uniquely human traits, adding philosophical depth to his personal reflections. This perspective invites readers to scrutinize their own identities and self-narratives, challenging them to confront uncomfortable truths about themselves.

Feh may challenge readers with its unfiltered prose and dark themes, but it powerfully demonstrates the value of honest self-reflection. Auslander's memoir acts as both a mirror and window, offering a raw, darkly humorous exploration of human complexity. For those willing to engage, it provides a thought-provoking journey into the contradictions of human existence.

[Judith · Rating 2 out of 5]

I liked the Yiddish at first and the biographical tidbits and twists on biblical stories but then I found the cynicism and repetition boring. In fact, this book inspired me to create a new shelf, “skimmed toward the end”. I skimmed from about page 200 to the next to last chapter.

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

Definitely a certain type of audience but it’s good. A LOT of self loathing but I guess that’s the meaning behind Feh.

[Carol · Rating 2 out of 5]

You know that one coworker who calls out and the whole office breathes a sigh of relief.... this guy is that coworker! Negative in every sense of the word. This was a tough one to get through.

[Bridget · Rating 3 out of 5]

A pretty sad book about a man who relentlessly hates himself. I didn’t see any character development or growth. Author is a very talented writer but after 100 pages of self loathing I felt like I was reading the same thing over and over.

[AdiTurbo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some books rekindle your belief in the power of literature. This is one of them. One of the best reads of the year for me, it was raw, merciless (mainly towards the author himself) and so much more candid than what is usually expected from a "candid" memoir to be.
Contrary to most memoirs, this one manages to transcend way beyond the narcissistic, and transform personal pain into original and, may I say, even helpful musings on life, culture, religion, capitalism and consumerism, parenting, couplehood and, most importantly, love of all kinds.
As a Jew and an Israeli, I identified with all of it, but you really don't have to be any of those to enjoy it thoroughly.
I've been following and reading all of Auslander's writing since his very first (excellent) novel came out. Like him, and like Depeche Mode, I, too arrived at the conclusion that "God's got a sick sense of humour." The only way to keep you going in the twisted world that we live in is by reading books like this one. I really need another fix like this from Auslander soon. Thanks so much for this, Shalom!

[Dana K · Rating 3 out of 5]

{3.5 stars}

Thanks to Riverhead Books for the gifted copy. All opinions below are my own.

Feh is the Yiddish word for yuck and the author uses this word to describe the uncomfortable parts of being human. He starts early with a Bible story about God creating Adam from dirt and that is the underlying theme that pervades his life. He struggles with mental health, pornography and drugs aiming for a momentary escape from the Feh-ness of life. Told through snippets of his life from childhood on through adulthood he gives us stories of religious expectations, gender roles and trying to help others find acceptence even though he seemingly has no ability to give that gift to himself. He continues to weave biblical stories throughout as he experiences the ickiness and heavyiness of humanity. As a writer he has several brushes with Hollywood and gives us the real stories behind his projects.

This one gave me David Sedaris vibes, it's entertaining but deals with some of the heavier topics of humanity with a new eye.

[Alissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Deeply resonant for a fellow “feh” who grew up evangelical. A moving, hilarious, depressing, wonderful piece about internalized shame, Philip Seymour Hoffman (may he rest in peace), and the stories we tell ourselves. I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

[Jeanette · Rating 2 out of 5]

Audiobook, still counts.

Two stars may be on me—I assumed this would primarily be my favorite memoir genre, escape from religious extremism. Whoops.

The Philip Seymour Hoffman stuff was interesting.

I’m also done with reading about middle school aged boys’ sexual awakening. Enough.

[Megan Bros · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really touching tribute to Philip Seymour Hoffman at points. Overall, a really great piece connecting childhood trauma, experiences, and strict religious culture together to provide a unique worldview.

[Chris]

Dnf

[Ori Lefkovitz · Rating 5 out of 5]

sometimes I don't understand how anybody but me specifically loves Shalom, but I love Shalom and this book gave me all the feels even if they are dark

[Erin Bookishness · Rating 5 out of 5]

Both bleak and funny, with fantastic literary references.

[Nicola · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really appreciated this book. Listening to him read it on audio was essential to the experience. With that said, I think I will also be purchasing a hard copy of this book to take these lessons, thoughts, reflections with me in a more tangible form.

[Joelle Klein · Rating 4 out of 5]

Funny, quirky, repetitive, self-loathing overload.

[Laura Cruickshanks · Rating 3 out of 5]

He reminds me of David Sedaris, but like… way more depressing.

[Becjoy13 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow

[Sharon]

DNF
I do not think I am the intended audience.

[Pam Cameron · Rating 5 out of 5]

First off, you should know that I'm a Shalom Auslander fangirl. I pre-ordered "Feh" weeks before it came out and was already expecting to love it before I even opened it.

I am absolutely biased.

As expected, I loved it. I laughed out loud many times. Shalom has wicked gallows humor which I appreciate.

I was horrified at how unhealthy he has been and how desperately dark his mind got during the pandemic. My guess is the events in this book take place from 5 years pre-Covid until now.

There's no getting around it, if you haven't read Shalom's writing before, be forewarned, it is very, very dark. He talks about wanting to die, about hating himself, about poisoning himself . And then he'll write something hilarious in the next sentence.

He writes about raising his sons and trying to scrape together enough money to pay bills and moving across the country. It's all relatable stuff. I've never been to the depths of self-harm he has, but I understand what he's saying.

We're all on this planet together and if you go on Twitter or watch the news, you will be told depressing stories about how we're all doomed. Shalom shows us what happens if we really believe that and live it out. The results are not pretty.

I will say though, it doesn't end on a depressing note. Not at all. He takes us all the way through the darkness and at the end there is a light.

For this last part, I'm going to write about his psychiatrist:

His psychiatrist, who he has written about before in his other memoir, is named Dr. Ike. About halfway through the book I put 2 and 2 together and realized that Dr. Ike is the same Dr. Ike as the villain in The Shrink Next Door (podcast and Apple Plus TV series). Shalom loves Dr. Ike. And from everything he wrote, it sounds like they had a good, healthy, professional relationship. I don't think he believes the accusations that were brought against Dr. Ike. He seems very unhappy about the Apple Plus series.

It's interesting. And it relates back to the theme of "Feh" which is, you choose the story you believe. Life is complicated, and the way I feel is, some people are very different depending on who is around. I have had great experiences with men who were, at that moment, abusing women. I'm telling the truth when I say my experience was good and they are also telling the truth when they say their experience was awful.

[willowbiblio · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Perhaps they just had to get to a place where they were so tired of being silenced by themselves that they finally screamed, a place where the need to speak overwhelms the need for approval, where the desire to be heard overwhelms the desire to be loved, where the voice whispering *speak!* becomes louder than the one shouting *Feh*”
———————-
This book was consistently humorous and hilarious which served to cut the earnestly serious topics so well. I thought the parallel between the flawed diamond and flawed self was beautiful, but it belied a much deeper and more persistent self loathing that I would come to understand as I moved through this memoir.

I loved how Auslander was healing generational trauma by supporting his son’s identity and buying his wigs. This was an opportunity to choose better than his own father, and he took it.

I liked the use of reinterpretation/retelling of biblical stories as a vehicle for anecdotes and personal history. I could really relate to his drive to get away from himself and sympathize with his search for oblivion through anything that would work. The quote about poisoning himself as self punishment was heartbreaking.

I really loved thar this ended with a vision for change and some hope. Like many of us, seeing the good displayed at Steve’s coffee shop and in others is what brings Auslander to the conclusion that maybe change and self belief is possible for him too. I wouldn’t have picked this up on my own, but I’m really glad I read it ☺️

[Clay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like everyone on this website, I read and love a lot of books and a lot of authors. It's a rare thing to find an author that vibrates at such a similar frequency to your own, that like a tuning fork, it lights your soul afire with a resonance that is alarming, powerful, and beautiful.

Foreskin's Lament affected me to the core and was a formative read for me in a tumultuous time. Feh and Auslander's description of just how deep and overwhelming shame, disgust, and self-loathing can be, has given tangible form to a harrowing intangible feeling many of us live with.

His remarks, relationship, and interactions with Phillip Seymour Hoffman alone are worth the price of admission.

If anyone has problems empathizing or understanding the damage that scrupulous religious upbringing can cause, no matter how well-meaning, read Auslander's writings.

[Caroline Meehan · Rating 1 out of 5]

Slogged my way through this one because the author is clearly a great writer and I kept hoping it would improve. Alas, for me, it never did. Sometimes I read a book for which I can tell I’m not its target audience but I keep reading it to maybe learn something new. In this case, I learned that being in the author’s head must be exhausting.

[Leslie · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was feh. His humor, though amusing, did not mitigate his negativity enough. Getting through this felt like a slog. And he clearly needs a good therapist, not one who lost his license for apparently very good reason!

[Greg Talbot · Rating 4 out of 5]

How do we reckon with the character of Job?

Job, the titular book of the Bible about the man who gives it all. His wife, his children, his prosperity, his happiness, his future. But he gives it all away at God’s commandment. Piles of pain but the devotion aibdes. The measurement of material things is temporal, but faith abides. In the words of Shalom Auslander, "Job is the man who did nothing wrong, and was wrong. Job says at the end of the story - I despise myself. That’s the happy ending” (p.65).

“Feh”, the devaluing Yiddish word of disgust or interjection, is examined. We as a reader can not escape it, because it's in the air we breathe. The wide canvas of Western religious expression, alarmist journalist and economic injustice all built on the historical stories we tell about ourselves. Writing in the closing sentences of chapters, Auslander reminds us, stories are powerful things.

Auslander shares in his memoir stories of growing with a disapproving father, a grim ultra-orthodox yeshiva, and humiliation from unexpressed erotic desires. Whether it was the Victoria’s secret catalogues, or bids for affection from a girl at school, Auslander contends with the entrapment of an emotionally fraught father and merciless rabbis in his budding years. It will of no surprise that he found corners away from the proscribed life toward one he could build himself. He takes on the “feh”, and its entire worldview. What it all comes down to is that God is not the good guy. The stories are full of misery. A downer. A bummer. He states “My life would be immeasurable better if they’d taught me 'The Three Little Pigs' instead” (p.10).

Fortunately, Auslander moves from Moses and Solomon to Kafka, Becket, Vonnegutt, and Carver. He looks to modern writers like Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Nogozi Adichie, who cautions us about the dangers of a single story. “This is the secular, the free, the accepting” (p.144), he writes, finding an identify beyond his staid jewish upbringing. Literature and humor become the languages of defiance and self-expression. Pornography from Penthouse or downtown sex shows give an eye into a non-judgement world. In his writing, he rcontextualizing Bible stories like “the man who was lazy”, “the man who deserves it”. It gives some breathing room to the reader to laugh distance from all the suffering.

At times Auslander balances a blistering contempt with a tender hopefulness. The prohibitive religious lifestyle, that turned his innerworld into a Kafkaesque nightmare is one he never wants for his sons. It can make for some beautifully expressive writing too. “This is the story i’ve endeavored to raise our sons with: You are loved, without question, without reservation, no matter what you do, no matter what you become, from the moment you were born until the end of time. The end (p.65). It’s a remarkable spin away from the Old Testament view of the merciless and punishing God. The story of a man and a woman banished from Eden, because of the theft of an apple. These stories can be in use, like flickers of discord or judgement, but we are the storytellers and storytold. Creators and created. And despite the centuries of suffering expressed or provoked by thinkers from Schopenhauer to Rand, we may have the ability to tell a different story.

Auslander has a gift of pulling these different narrative threads together. Bible stories. Religious education. Philosphical treasties. Screenwriting travels with Phillip Seymour Hoffman. Encounters with the unhouses on the streets. Documentary experiences with his son and their LGBTQA+ group. We get these amazing portraits of Aucklander encountering suffering. He is at a cocktail event celebrating a succesful wrap of a pilot episod, only to learn the primary actor is dead. He winds down a cigarette looking onto his three-bedroom property. He shares contempt for a wig store employee's belitting father.. And pelts out insults at the news anchors and actors who feast on the stories of the dispossesed. It often feels like we are riding with a creative writer who in need of a life raft from all the tribulations of daily existence. Some story to make sense of all the pain, not rooted in a tempestuous God.

This is a really great read. It made me think of some of the brilliantly shocking work of David Sedaris or late Coen brothers movies ("A Serious Man"; " The Ballad of Buster Scruggs"). Commeting on the facileness of the entertainment industry, the freakish attitudes of the wealthy in Los Angeles, and the wanton poverty on the streets, Auslander reminds us that there is money to be made off all the "Feh". It's never been a better time for prophets of doom, from industry and religion, to profit from us. We can't go on, but somehow we go.

[Arthur Goldgaber · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoy reading memoirs and I sometimes wonder while reading them, has the author shared any details that they are disclosing about their family or friends before the book is published? If not, did the people mentioned in the book get upset or even want to sue the author?

For example, earlier this year I read "I'm Glad My Mom Died." A memoir by Jennette McCurdy based on her one-woman show of the same name. The book is about her career as a child actress and her difficult relationship with her abusive mother who died in 2013. In this instance, the mom passed away before she published the book, but other family members or other people she mentioned may not be pleased with it. In the case of "Feh" by Shalom Auslander, he does not just burn bridges; he blows them up like in the movie, "A Bridge over the River Kwai." He has some terrible stories about his family and Hebrew school teachers. He was raised in an ultra-Orthodox community in Monsey, New York, but he moved away from the Orthodox practices after he moved out of the house. I've read other books by Auslander, such as Foreskin's Lament: A Memoir, which is very funny. This book has it funny moments, but many things that he describes make for tough reading.

Shalom introduces us to concept of feh, Yiddish for yuck early in the book and uses the term many, many times. People who read it on kindle probably can get a count of how many times he used the term. He also said he was fat many times.

I found the first few chapters difficult to read and I almost decided not to finish the book. I think he is an entertaining writer. He tries to bring some clarity or meaning to our very strange and divided world. I liked how he found goodness in some small acts of kindness and that brought him some measure of happiness. I liked his descriptions of his family life, his interactions with his wife and his two sons. I particularly enjoyed his description of helping his older son's class produce a short documentary. The story has great insight on today's pre teens.

He points out the irony of searching for happiness based on a TV show he wrote. I'm curious about what other people on Goodreads thought about the book. I think readers who enjoyed some of his previous books will enjoy this book the most.