Deborah Eisenberg This is Me

Education

 Web References

1. 1. A superhero of the short story - Arts & Leisure - International Herald Tribune

   rasa.iht.com/articles/2006/03/ - [Cached]

   Published on: 3/2/2006   Last Visited: 3/10/2006

   NEW YORK 'I just want to be on my own branch twittering," said Deborah Eisenberg, author of the acclaimed new short story collection "Twilight of the Superheroes." At 60, Eisenberg looks like a large, slender bird with her heavy eyelids, beaked nose, small chin. She wears a gray sweater with big, winglike arms. She lives with her companion of more than 30 years, Wallace Shawn, the playwright and actor, in a New York loft whose main room is an unearthly white. The windows are covered with filmy white material, the books hidden behind semitransparent plastic, to make them look like "a dream of books," Eisenberg said. There is a wrought-iron daybed with a white mattress that is not inviting. "There's nowhere to sit," she said, in a not unfriendly way. "It discourages visitors." With her fifth book of stories, Eisenberg has achieved the kind of grand attention usually given to novelists. The New York Times Book Review pronounced her "one of the most important fiction writers now at work" and praised her stories as "machines of perfect revelation deftly constructed by a contemporary master." The characters in Eisenberg's stories are full of hidden sorrows and anxieties. She approaches them obliquely, circles around, then comes in for the kill. Their emotions rise inexorably to the surface, bubbles on molten lava. In the title piece, "Twilight of the Superheroes," a group of friends witness the World Trade Center explosions from their terrace. Years later, "they've been able to hang out here on the terrace without anyone running inside to be sick," Eisenberg writes, "or bursting into tears or diving under something at a loud noise." Yet, she writes, they seem to be "in some kind of holding pattern - as if they're temporizing, or muffled by unspoken reservations." In "A Flaw in the Design," a man works in the oil business, devastating the environment. His family's suppressed guilt erupts in the son's angry outbursts. "I can see everything, Ma," the son explodes. "Sometimes I feel like I can see through skin, through bone, through the surface of the earth." Meanwhile, the mother takes solace in a secret affair. Eisenberg said: "We're all walking around trying to deal with a certain amount of shame, to repress it. And we restrict our mental lives to smaller and smaller areas." She has never written a novel. Good short stories are "vertical novels, sort of layered," she said, "ephemeral, mysterious, condensed in the way of poetry." I like "the synaptic jumps of short stories," she said. "The reader has to participate very actively in the experience." Eisenberg has reached the pinnacle of what has become a lonely genre.
   ...
   It took Eisenberg eight years to finish the six stories in "Superheroes." "A long time," she sighed. "I'm a very spoiled writer," she said, with typical self-deprecation. "I need to be indolent, to waste a lot of paper. I'm inefficient." Eisenberg grew up in Winnetka, Illinois, dark-haired, Jewish, an outcast amid the blond students at school. The community was "anti-Semitic and restricted," she said. To make matters worse, she wore a metal and leather brace from her thighs to her ears for scoliosis. Her father was a pediatrician, and her mother did not work. "My mother was difficult; I was difficult," she said. "I was considered a behavior problem, something of a dolt." Off to boarding school she went, then to Marlboro College in Vermont. But she left for New York, "with a guy I was crazy about." Generally, she said, "I was a catastrophe." Eisenberg, who finished college at the New School in New York, was working as a waitress when friends introduced her to Shawn.
   ...
   "I thought he was the strangest person I had ever met," Eisenberg said. "He thought I was a drug-crazed Satanist." "I fell in love," she said. "It was timber." For his part, Shawn reacted to being asked about Eisenberg as if sitting in a dentist's chair undergoing an extraction.
   ...
   Eisenberg said, "It's very romantic, an affair with somebody that's lasted over 30 years."
   ...
   Meanwhile, it's been a year now since Eisenberg has gotten any traction writing, she said. "I'm completely sailing under false colors," said Eisenberg, with a sigh.

2. 2. A superhero of the short story - Arts & Leisure - International Herald Tribune

   www.iht.com/articles/2006/03/0 - [Cached]

   Published on: 3/1/2006   Last Visited: 3/1/2006

   NEW YORK 'I just want to be on my own branch twittering," said Deborah Eisenberg, author of the acclaimed new short story collection "Twilight of the Superheroes." At 60, Eisenberg looks like a large, slender bird with her heavy eyelids, beaked nose, small chin. She wears a gray sweater with big, winglike arms. She lives with her companion of more than 30 years, Wallace Shawn, the playwright and actor, in a New York loft whose main room is an unearthly white. The windows are covered with filmy white material, the books hidden behind semitransparent plastic, to make them look like "a dream of books," Eisenberg said. There is a wrought-iron daybed with a white mattress that is not inviting. "There's nowhere to sit," she said, in a not unfriendly way. "It discourages visitors." With her fifth book of stories, Eisenberg has achieved the kind of grand attention usually given to novelists. The New York Times Book Review pronounced her "one of the most important fiction writers now at work" and praised her stories as "machines of perfect revelation deftly constructed by a contemporary master." The characters in Eisenberg's stories are full of hidden sorrows and anxieties. She approaches them obliquely, circles around, then comes in for the kill. Their emotions rise inexorably to the surface, bubbles on molten lava. In the title piece, "Twilight of the Superheroes," a group of friends witness the World Trade Center explosions from their terrace. Years later, "they've been able to hang out here on the terrace without anyone running inside to be sick," Eisenberg writes, "or bursting into tears or diving under something at a loud noise." Yet, she writes, they seem to be "in some kind of holding pattern - as if they're temporizing, or muffled by unspoken reservations." In "A Flaw in the Design," a man works in the oil business, devastating the environment. His family's suppressed guilt erupts in the son's angry outbursts. "I can see everything, Ma," the son explodes. "Sometimes I feel like I can see through skin, through bone, through the surface of the earth." Meanwhile, the mother takes solace in a secret affair. Eisenberg said: "We're all walking around trying to deal with a certain amount of shame, to repress it. And we restrict our mental lives to smaller and smaller areas." She has never written a novel. Good short stories are "vertical novels, sort of layered," she said, "ephemeral, mysterious, condensed in the way of poetry." I like "the synaptic jumps of short stories," she said. "The reader has to participate very actively in the experience." Eisenberg has reached the pinnacle of what has become a lonely genre.
   ...
   It took Eisenberg eight years to finish the six stories in "Superheroes." "A long time," she sighed. "I'm a very spoiled writer," she said, with typical self-deprecation. "I need to be indolent, to waste a lot of paper. I'm inefficient." Eisenberg grew up in Winnetka, Illinois, dark-haired, Jewish, an outcast amid the blond students at school. The community was "anti-Semitic and restricted," she said. To make matters worse, she wore a metal and leather brace from her thighs to her ears for scoliosis. Her father was a pediatrician, and her mother did not work. "My mother was difficult; I was difficult," she said. "I was considered a behavior problem, something of a dolt." Off to boarding school she went, then to Marlboro College in Vermont. But she left for New York, "with a guy I was crazy about." Generally, she said, "I was a catastrophe." Eisenberg, who finished college at the New School in New York, was working as a waitress when friends introduced her to Shawn.
   ...
   "I thought he was the strangest person I had ever met," Eisenberg said. "He thought I was a drug-crazed Satanist." "I fell in love," she said. "It was timber." For his part, Shawn reacted to being asked about Eisenberg as if sitting in a dentist's chair undergoing an extraction.
   ...
   Eisenberg said, "It's very romantic, an affair with somebody that's lasted over 30 years."
   ...
   Meanwhile, it's been a year now since Eisenberg has gotten any traction writing, she said. "I'm completely sailing under false colors," said Eisenberg, with a sigh.