This conversation with
happened live on the Substack app on July 9th.In the early days of Substack there was a small and mighty team of four (
, , , and I) that did God’s work and recruited writers to this platform. Our job was to get them to try it, which was a nearly impossible task either due to time, money, pride, and quite often due to prejudice.Back then I would spend my days going through lists of writers I could somehow reach, and composing polite emails to them with the care of someone who was likely to get ignored. Like Diogenes begging for alms of a statue, I saw it as an exercise in humility. I would be lying if I told you I had the foresight to know what Substack would become one day. All I knew, watching the dashboards of the writers who were active on the platform, was that Substack was a good thing, a thing I had not encountered before in my career in publishing—that is, a thing which gave me hope—and therefore worthy of the toil and vanity of preaching and convincing.
And so it felt like a small miracle when one day in January of 2021 I received an email from
’s London-based agent, asking for a meeting. Etgar, he told me, had heard about Substack and was keen to try it and publish new fiction on it.I took pride in knowing and loving the work of Etgar Keret. I first discovered him from a story published in the New Yorker, and later saw him live at the NYPL, in conversation with their then director of public programs, Paul Holdengräber.
In his introduction that evening, Paul read Etgar’s short story Asthma Attack, which is only fourteen lines long:
When you have an asthma attack, you can’t breathe. When you can’t breathe, you can hardly talk. To make a sentence all you get is the air in your lungs. Which isn’t much. Three to six words, if that. You learn the value of words. You rummage through the jumble in your head. Choose the crucial ones – those cost you too. Let healthy people toss out whatever comes to mind, the way you throw out the garbage. When an asthmatic says ‘I love you,’ and when an asthmatic says ‘I love you madly,’ there’s a difference. The difference of a word. A word’s a lot. It could be stop, or inhaler. It could even be ambulance.
Etgar suffered from asthma attacks as a child. Perhaps that’s how he learned the value of words and how to invest in them. His stories, which range in length from a few paragraphs to a handful of pages, can hold the complexity of entire novels. They are the space-food equivalent of fiction in nutritional value, only far more pleasant to consume.
His latest collection, Autocorrect, is my favorite work of his. The stories in it are naturally more mature, both darker and funnier than his earlier work, as well as more profound. A lot happened over the course of his writing them: a pandemic, the death of his mother, a war. The longer you live the more you lose. But wisdom is best served as hard-earned knowledge that manages to preserve a note of romanticism, and lets cynicism settle like sediment only at the bottom of the cup. Autocorrect is worth every sip.
I am sharing here a story from the book that I reference in our conversation, which not only reminded me of the spirit of Asthma Attack but also captures Etgar’s spirit perfectly. To paraphrase Sam Hazo: the shorter the story the keener the wit, the keener the wit, the surer the touch, the surer the touch, the truer the art that knows when one word more will be a word too much.
I hope you will enjoy listening to Etgar speak. Every time I have the luck to do so I leave a little more enlightened.
Shoutouts: This was my first time using our Live tool, and I fell a little more in love with Substack because of it. It's intimate, inviting, and genuinely wonderful. If you've been on the fence about trying it, don't hesitate! It’s pure fun and a fantastic space for writerly conversations. It even made luddites like me and Etgar feel right at home. So here’s a big shoutout to all the brilliant (and kind!) people at Substack who built it, you are magicians in your own right. I know
and , who tuned in, are two of them. I can’t believe , , , , , , took precious time out of their busy days to watch the live video. I saw you in there and love you for it. Also a shoutout to the very talented for giving me a hair color I don’t hate even in video form, where I hate everything else about watching my mug. She of course also happens to have a great Substack.
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