YA New York

Matthue Roth is the author of Losers, a fantastic novel about a dorky Russian boy named Jupiter, who somehow goes from being smashed into lockers to crashing parties to hanging at the hippest Philadelphia cafes, all in a few chapters. It’s a fascinating book, which I highly recommended not too long ago.

Matthue has also written several other novels, a memoir, poetry and music, much of which is about his Jewish heritage and religion. Which means we had a ton to talk about. Without further ado …

Question One

Me: Can you tell us a little bit about Losers, the book, not the people?

Matthue: Basically, my first book, Nevermind the Goldbergs, was my kind of idealized fantasy of the person that I’d like to be, if the person I’d like to be was a seventeen-year-old girl. … Jupiter is everything that I was at seventeen, although more so: He’s totally socially awkward, has relationships that exist entirely in his head, and he lives in a factory.

Question Two

Matthue: What did your bedroom look like growing up?

Me: I moved a lot, so I had a lot of different bedrooms, but one thing stayed the same throughout, which is that I plastered my walls with photographs of my friends; since I only had two or three friends at a time, the same people would often appear in the pictures.

Question Three

Me: You didn’t live in a factory growing up, but you did live in Philadelphia. What was your childhood like?

Matthue: I always wanted to live in a factory. I actually really wanted to move into the basement, which was a big area that had a few couches and a lot of pillows and some seventies furniture that no one had used for years. I thought the wall would be filled with books and the floors would be filled with gigantic Lego sculptures. I spent a lot of time alone as a kid.

Question Four

Matthue: Of those two or three different friends that you’d always have, what friendship do you miss the most?

Me: My best friend when I lived in Germany, on an army base outside Stuttgart, was a girl named Keisha. Unfortunately, her last name was Smith, so I’ve never had any luck tracking her down. She taught me how to roller skate, she got me in trouble for “Doin’ the Butt” at her birthday party, and the two of us spent hours trying to boil eggs over steaming manhole covers. So … readers … if you know a thirty-year-old woman named Keisha, point her here to this blog.

Question Five

Me: According to your website, you were raised a Conservative Jew, but then became Orthodox later in life. What is religion about for you?

Matthue: I was raised in the Conservative movement, whatever that means. It always felt like anthropology in action. It’s like you’re taught about everything but you don’t actually do any of it. … I got very involved in the punk rock third wave feminist DIY scene where what you believed and what you did had to match up. … For awhile I hated saying I was Orthodox. I said I was just hard-core Jew or something. … I think that the essence of being religious is just being aware of everything around you. Maybe that could be the essence of being an atheist or not being religious, too, but for me being religious is about remembering that there are things in the world greater than you are and that you’re just this single measly pixel in the middle of all of it … and how insane and amazing it is.

Question Six

Matthue: What do you think of God?

Me: I was raised in a very conservative, hellfire and brimstone, John Calvin/Jonathan Edwards kind of household. Oh, and my father was a minister. I saw a lot of things that people clung to, word for word, that didn’t match up with my sense of justice, which actually led me down a path toward conversion to Judaism. But I never finished my conversion because I still had too many questions, and cannot at any point accept the concept of “I am right and everyone else is wrong.” So … me and God? I guess I’m kind of like Margaret from that Judy Blume novel right about now.

Question Seven

Me: How does your religious perspective affect your writing?

Matthue: Writing is that [aforementioned] humility to an extreme. On one hand you’re taking this blank sheet of paper and filling it all and making a world out of it, and on the other you’re realizing that the story is meant for people that are not you … people don’t want to know about your waking up and brushing your teeth in the morning. They want to read about passion and adventures and take all the boring stuff away. So it really is about taking your life and stripping it down and only leaving what matters on the page.

Question Eight

Matthue: If you were writing Losers or if you were jumping into the Losers universe, who would you be?

Me: I wish I could say I’d be that cool girl in the music store, or one of the cool girls at the cafe, but when I was in high school, I would probably have been more comparable to Reese Witherspoon in Election than to any character in your book. Which is to say, I would have been an intolerable know-it-all extracurricular geek.

Question Nine

Me: You are only thirty years old, and you have four books under your belt already, plus you’ve had stories and poetry published in collections, so you’re clearly pretty prolific. HOW? How did you do it? How have you published so many books already???

Matthue: It’s less how and … I don’t even know. I mean, I’ve been writing forever. I wrote my first novel when I was thirteen and it was 210 pages. Writing for me is one of these things that I can’t contain. Now that I have a baby and I have a job because I have a baby, the only time I have free is on the subway, and I write for two hours standing up on the subway every day. I think I just need to do it, and the publishing stuff is just I’ve been really really lucky and really really fortunate.

Question Ten

Matthue: Where do you read?

Me: I read in bed, in the bathtub, at the table, walking down the street, while cooking, while brushing my teeth, in a special little chair by the window overlooking my back yard, and — though not very often — sometimes I’ve been known to sneak a peek at a book while behind the wheel of a car. But only at red lights. And only peeks. Really.

Question Eleven

Me: You just mentioned that you have a new baby and a new job. Can you tell us a little bit about both?

Matthue: My baby is amazing and her name’s Yalta and she’s named after this famous woman in the Talmud that nobody’s ever heard of, who’s really fiery and gave a lot of wisdom that people don’t necessarily realize comes from her. Yalta, my daughter, generally eats a lot of toys and listens to They Might Be Giants and Prince, so basically the same thing.

My new job is being the associate and blogger at MyJewishLearning.com. It’s really cool. Today I just interviewed Francesca Lia Block, who is one of my favorite writers ever. Day jobs suck, but as they go, this is a good one to have.

Question Twelve

Matthue: What’s your favorite food to cook?

Me: I make the single most awesome kosher lasagna in the world, and I am only saying that because it’s true. Back when I was a kosher vegetarian, I spent a lot of time looking for the right sauces and cheeses and other ingredients that would pass the strictest of tests. And it’s my favorite food to eat, too.

Question Thirteen

Me: Why is your name spelled M-A-T-T-H-U-E?

Matthue: It started as a joke. I signed my name that way in an e-mail to a friend, then I kept writing it that way, and I got the website matthue.com because I’m a huge dork, and I kept spelling it that way and then my first book came out and I saw my name spelled that way and I was like, “I guess there’s no turning back.”

Question Fourteen

Matthue: What was the first band that rocked your world?

Me: I fell in love when I was fourteen. I fell madly, passionately, obsessively, insanely in love with (…dramatic pause…) Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. I am not as insane or obsessive as I once was, but to this day he remains my favorite musician of all time.

Question Fifteen

Me: Right back at you: what was the first band that rocked YOUR world?

Matthue: They’re in the book. The Dead Milkmen. They’re a punk rock band from Philly. When I was seven years old I listened to this totally kid-friendly radio show where they just happened to play “Punk Rock Girl” in regular rotation, and it was a Dead Milkmen song, and they were the first band I loved. (I should say the Cure because all of the chapter titles from Losers are mostly based on Cure songs.)

Question Sixteen

Matthue: What’s your book like?

Me: It is made of awesome. It is the single most important piece of literature ever written. It is unfinished. It is un-agented. It is a memoir about my own childhood, or adolescence, and it’s about being crazy, and it’s about being driven crazy. Also, I probably lied when I said it was the single most important piece of literature ever written.

Question Seventeen

Me: What are you working on now?

Matthue: I can’t get Jupiter out of my head, and even more the other characters [in Losers]. In one way Jupiter is about growing up with my best friend who just died, and then I wrote/am still writing this book about his death which is kind of about me and Anne Frank hanging out. … I don’t know if anyone will like it but me, but it’s my heart. I just took my heart out and stuck a bunch of knives in it and this is what I got.

Question Eighteen

Matthue: What’s the difference for you, writing a memoir and writing fiction?

Me: Well, fiction for me is kind of the way I see things, or the way I would like to see things, or the worst case scenario … it gives you a million opportunities to change directions. A memoir is in certain aspects already written for you. You can’t change history, but you can change the way you present it. So it’s actually a form that offers more structure, I think.

Question Nineteen

Me: What’s the best book you’ve read in the last twelve months?

Matthue: Lydia Millet’s book Oh Pure and Radiant Heart. It’s about a librarian who witnesses a shooting and then Robert Oppenheimer and a bunch of the scientists who invented the atomic bomb are instantly transported into the present day and she has to take care of them. It’s supremely geeky, but Lydia Millet writes with pure emotion about the atomic bomb and its creation and the way people reacted to it.

Question Twenty

Matthue: Have you ever read the Sandman by Neil Gaiman?

Me: No.

Matthue: Inside the world where everybody dreams there’s a library, and it’s a library of all the books that have never been written. What book would you have that you have not written in your dream library?

Me: It is a very, very good thing that this book will never be written, but here’s the idea: I was interested in villains and their relationships with their fathers, and I was thinking about how Voldemort had a bad relationship with his father and how a lot of historical villains had bad relationships with their fathers … and basically the whole thing led me to the idea of a villain whose aim was to become the father of every boy on earth. So, anyway, that book will never be written. Unless you’re an agent and you want me to write it.

Question Twenty-One

Me: What is your favorite thing about Losers?

Matthue: You know that moment where you’re writing a story and you lose control of it? Where you’re writing a story or a poem and then you’re like, “I know how this should be,” and then you don’t know how it should be but it’s already taking form and you’re just letting it float through you? I felt that about Losers, but not just about the story, about the people. Like there are all these people in the book that are jostling with each other and fighting with each other and struggling to get out. It’s this whole world that kind of reminds me of my life and my high school but is so much more real and there’s so much more going on and it’s so much more dangerous than my life ever is or was. I still look at it and it surprises me, and that’s my favorite thing about Losers.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 19th, 2008 at 5:37 am and is filed under Interviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.