Bookpod

What, you think it’s nothing to walk in on your wife making it with your boss — in your bed? Think it’s nothing to lose your father too and then get to spend a week with your newly lesbian mom and your scrabbling brothers and sisters?

Listen to Jonathan Tropper talk about This Is Where I Leave You, his novel about the craziness of family when your life goes off the rails.

You and your dad always scoffed at religious fanatics. Time passes and suddenly he gets a little too interested in Judaism. What’s a nice Jewish girl to do?

Listen to Risa Miller talk about My Before and After Life in Bookpod, a weekly podcast that features writers of lasting value.

How’s it feel to expose your humiliation to your family? Jonathan Tropper has written a novel called This Is Where I Leave You on this very subject. 

Listen to Tropper talk about his fifth novel in this latest installment of Bookpod (7 min. mp3; pdf available).

I would like to throw out a challenge to the software development community to come up with a Jewish Mother GPS that will capture the best of the deprecatory voice that has made me the neat, book-reading adult I am today.

(From bookpod.wordpress.com)

When you are young, your expectations about travel sound like a message in a Chinese fortune cookie: You will meet a handsome stranger. You will party ’til you drop. But when you finally arrive at your destination, people think of you as happy, stupid and fat. You feel as lost as a moth in a mitten.

North Carolina-based writer Randi Davenport talks about The Boy Who Loved Tornadoes, the book she wrote about riding a healthcare merry-go-round in her quest to find appropriate care for her psychotic child. 7-minute Bookpod episode (mp3).

It all started when two couples decided to swap husbands. Maybe this was fun for the adults for a while, but the four kids were devastated. Listen to Jane Alison talk about all this in her 6-minute podcast episode. Part of the Bookpod series.

My mother cannot imagine why I would rather be like her than like me. For one, she’s noble and I’m not.

Peter Mayle started the trend with A Year in Province. More recent time-bound books include Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life; Julie Powell’s My Year of Cooking Dangerously, and William Alexander’s 52 Loaves. 

Maybe I spend too much time on the New Jersey Turnpike, but it occurred to me while driving home from my parents’ house in the southern part of the state that I might have a “year-of” book in me too. It’s called My Year of Eating Heavy Eastern European Cooking Copiously. 

Orson Welles’ daughter talks about the filmmaker, writer and magician whom she knew as a self-absorbed artist and one of the most humane influences in her life.

This 6-minute mp3 file is part of the Bookpod podcast.