Rachel Shukert is coming out with a new book this week, Everything is Going to Be Great, a memoir of her years in Europe, and SMITHMAG has published a thought-provoking and funny interview with her. In 2003 Shukert went to Vienna to be in an experimental play and after that was over, ended up settling in Amsterdam. The memoir, in the interviewer’s words, is naturally very funny, but it also “captures perfectly how contemporary Europeans’ posthistorical cosmopolitanism, so sincere and sacred, is often no match for old tribalisms. Finally, it hits a more poignant note of how her adventures in Europe add new meaning to Shukert’s Jewish heritage, a theme that culminates nicely in the book’s happy ending, when she meets and marries her husband, Ben. Funny, insightful, moving — the memoirist’s Molotov cocktail.” In the interview Shukert offers her reflections on how memoirists need to reinvent the form, so that it’s not just something novelists turn to on their off days. It’s a good read.
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