Support for this podcast and the following message come from Dignity Memorial.

When your celebration of life is prepaid today, your family is protected tomorrow.

Planning ahead is truly one of the best gifts you can give your family. For additional

information visit dignity memorial.com. This is fresh air. I'm Tanya

Mosley. Today my guest is writer Shalom Oslander.

For decades, he's written with humor about what it was like to grow up in a dysfunctional household,

within an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community near the Catskills, in the town of Muncie New York.

He describes how it was drilled into him from a very young age that he was born into

sin, which meant he was broken, shameful, and in constant need of redemption.

Now in his middle age, Shalom Oslander explores the weight of trying to shed those feelings

and a new memoir titled, Fe.

Fe is the Yiddish word for Yuck.

A pervasive feeling of self-contempt Shalom

has battled with his entire life.

In his attempt to rewrite his story,

he faces some of the darkest parts of himself, which include

addiction, thoughts of harm, and contending with the loss of his good friend, actor Philip

Seymour Hoffman, whom Shalone says also battled with feelings of shame.

His first memoir, Four skins Lament, was about his childhood years and his estrangement

from his religious community in its traditions. His work has been featured on this American life and in several publications including the New Yorker, Esquire magazine, and the New York Times.

And Shalom Oslander, welcome back to Fresh Air. Thank you. Glad to be here. Can I

have you read a passage from Fe to get us started? Sure. The story of Fe is just the first story in a long book of similar stories, the collection of which is a book called You Suck.

...