Editor’s Note: Read an interview with Sara Freeman about her writing process.

Everything overheard in those days. German on the streets, my mother and my father on the phone. They’re only children. My mother, Philip, and I: three bodies stuck inside the bright-yellow cage of a phone booth. He was in Bosnia on assignment. Assigned to what? We didn’t know. We were only children. We knew far away; we knew war-torn; we knew 10 days, maybe two weeks, maybe more. We knew we had moved to Berlin earlier that summer and turned a page we could no longer turn back.

The flight home to Toronto was a year away, a lifetime in our little lives. By August I’d stopped wishing for the rec center and its too-chlorinated pool, for the park near our house and the counselors who brought us there, those miraculously stoned 14-year-olds, letting us climb on the monkey bars and making us necklaces out of marigolds and calling it “camp.” I missed my best friend Eva, but not as much as I’d thought. And even when I missed her, I liked it, my missing, this nothing the same anymore, this everything suddenly in the past tense. I had been made for the habit of missing, living out of a single suitcase with the same four T-shirts and two pairs of soccer shorts, the one jean dress, which I wore only because it made my mother smile, the same way she smiled when she looked at herself in the mirror, a smile equal measures modesty and conceit. The smile of a discerning woman. I lived for those smiles, the rare exception of them; we all did.

It was my brother, Philip, 18 months older, who had a hard time of it. He would turn 13 that summer but had started wetting his bed like a much younger boy. Not every night, no, but once and then again and then again. Back at home, I might have let myself enjoy it, even gloat a little. He who could do nothing wrong, he who had been everyone’s favorite, my mother’s particular pet. But here, instead, I sat on the foldout chair in the kitchen of the cavernous short-term-rental apartment and watched as my mother stuffed the soiled single sheet into the too-small washing machine and turned to me with her index finger to her lips, lifting her coal-dark eyebrows, and I thought about how I was being asked to keep a secret all the time now.

One evening, waking up uneasy, aware of something happening just outside my reach—moving out of bed with the inevitability of a dream. My mother on the patio, cigarette in her mouth, like the movie star she was not. I let out a little yelp. Her words, their sound escaping my mouth, How could you? She looked surprised, although less alert than I would have thought; stubbed the cigarette out on the balcony railing, and came over to me, smelling of a stranger, cigarettes and something else, a new smell blossoming from somewhere deep. When she tucked me back in, she pointed to the other sliver of bed where my brother slept, his face contorted and red; Stumm, she whispered, our favorite German word. Our second secret. My brother’s bad habit and hers. She was training me, I was beginning to understand, to store them away.

In the daytime, walking in the Tiergarten. My brother’s mouth pressed to the spout of a water fountain, my mother not even saying don’t. The junkies sitting around the entrance of the Zoologischer Garten, girls not much older than me, with their agitated German shepherds barking at their own tails. I asked my mother why the dogs were like that, and she told me fleas reflexively, and I thought about the tiniest facts and how adults accrued them, how many there were that I had yet to encounter. How would I ever catch up?

Every evening, sharing an ice-cream cone from the Häagen-Dazs on Kurfürstendamm, my mother not even complaining about the tourist prices. With my father away, bills were dispensed from the neat stack in my mother’s wallet like a magic trick, ta-da, not a perpetual rummaging in deep pockets, coins jangling, my father’s nervous habit. You’re in Europe now, he’d warned us when we’d arrived at Tegel Airport. We needed to keep an eye on prices and remember the exchange rate, which could sneak up on us at any moment. My brother perked up then, literal-minded as he was, terrified of those calculations, the exponential dangers of being abroad. My father, before leaving on assignment, had even loaned him his cheap Casio calculator. No matter where we went, Philip set to converting the price of each purchase from deutsche marks into Canadian dollars, even though the currencies were nearly on par.  

How many phone conversations inside those yellow phone booths, with the playing-card-size ads for call girls papering every side? My mother calling Realtors in German that sounded like her native French—a language she had always kept from us—those guttural sounds made pert and pinched in her mouth. Breasts everywhere. In ads on the U-Bahn and plastered to buildings and construction fencing. The Beate Uhse Erotik Museum taking up an entire city block, with its displays of tasseled and G-stringed mannequins. One night, on our way back from ice cream, two women—girls, really—waiting in their miniskirts and go-go boots by a lamppost, their eyes surveying the road. I stopped and looked: a car slowing down, a beat-up shoebox with a man inside it with an ugly mustache, the woman looking to one side and then the other, and then her head dropping down to meet the mustache. A strangely elegant dance. My mother telling me, Don’t stare. I couldn’t tell if she disapproved of the scene, or if she didn’t want to make its actors feel uncomfortable. She didn’t seem to mind about anything in those days, or her minding was different, a kind of loose minding I’d always envied in other mothers.

And then, not a secret anymore. She smoked continually, inside the house and in the café under the arches of Savignyplatz, where she drank not one, but two cappuccinos in a row, always identical in their stout white ceramic cup and saucer and delivered by a waiter in a tux. We must have made a funny trio: my mother and I, our hair dark as ink; my brother, a redhead like our father, with his little calculator, waving my mother’s smoke away. Hot chocolate mit Sahne in a glass mug for me, with its dollop of whipped cream floating luxuriously at the top. Philip ordered strictly Coca-Colas, refusing orange Fanta, which I knew he liked. He boycotted everything German, with his Canadian flag sewn onto his backpack.

This was West Berlin. 1996. My mother not yet 35, the age I am now. We never went to the east in those days. Only my father went on assignment. Berlin had been reunified, but you couldn’t have guessed it from the way we lived. The few expats we’d been put in touch with all lived in the West. The John F. Kennedy Schule, where we would be attending fifth and sixth grade in September, was in the West, in leafy Zehlendorf.

My father had explained to us before we moved: He had been posted by his newspaper to track Berlin’s reconstruction, the country’s reunification. But I didn’t think the city needed rebuilding. It was beautiful, broken as it was. We had gone to see the Wall during our first week. Our father had briefed us before the visit, given us a loose chronology of the Cold War, shown us pictures from the fall: Berliners from the west and east dancing on the Wall’s thick lip. Fall seemed a passive word when it came to all those people wanting the same thing at the exact same time.

Back at home, when we were alone together, my father spoke to me almost continuously. He spoke and I listened. On the way to dance class and soccer practice, on the way to the supermarket, and to sleepovers at Eva’s. He never seemed to mind that I was a child. He spoke to me the same way he spoke to his few adult friends, to the people he interviewed over the phone. I don’t think he knew how else to speak to me. He was the kind of parent who seemed perplexed by the lives of the young, as though he had never had a childhood. He retained facts with exquisite precision.

It was odd, then, that he should love my mother, who appeared in her very nature like the opposite of a fact one might retain. Or maybe it was this—her counterfactuality—that had drawn him to her in the first place. When my father was with her, he spoke quietly, in a choppy and informational way. They did not argue, or if they did, did not allow us to overhear. But it was impossible not to notice the way her mood might shift irretrievably in his presence, the skin around her jaw tightening, the divot between her eyes deepening, her body becoming more rigid and upright—all of the physical cues she gave my father to keep his distance, his hushed compliance. I wished, in those moments, for my father to be a different kind of husband, one who might tease her, might take her out of herself, but I think he had a great respect for a person’s inborn right to her inborn seriousness. And there was complicity between them; I saw that too. The distance she demanded and his careful maintenance of it created a world unto itself, just large enough to house the two of them.

We were waiting for our furniture and the rest of our clothes. We had packed light, hoping the shipping container would arrive in a few weeks. But it had been six now; the first apartment we’d planned to move into had fallen through. Fallen through what?

And so we visited dozens of apartments. At first, the three of us: my mother, my brother, and I. When my brother said he’d had enough of snooping around other people’s stuff—It’s weird, he told us accusingly, as though we were enjoying it too much—my mother and I went alone. There were those apartments so emptied of life, so generic, that it was impossible to imagine reviving them with our presence. But there were also apartments so palatial, so bohemian, with their open-planned kitchens and proliferations of glass jars—delicate strands of black tea, swirls of pasta—so nakedly not ours.

We spent a few days in Charlottenburg, seeing apartments there, but I knew that they were beyond the budget the newspaper had set. My mother, under the spell of the stately apartments, the ornate moldings, the high ceilings, acted as though money was of little concern, agreeing on the spot to move into a quiet apartment with a marble-counter-topped kitchen. But that evening, a rare fight erupted between my parents over the telephone, and the next day we had to bow out of the lease. Mein mann, my mother gave, in her rudimentary German, as an excuse. Mann meant “man” and “husband” at the same time. I found this strange, that one should imply the other. I had no intention, even then, of ever being anyone’s frau.

Later, my mother picking clothes out for us at the C&A department store with her version of exuberance, moving easily through the aisles, plucking items off the rack. I loved my mother best in these moments, when I coasted on the wake of her decisiveness, her confident tastes. Cute, my mother said, when I came out of the changing room wearing a tight ribbed polo with white jean shorts. She arranged my collar, tucked a strand of hair behind my ear, very cute. Philip told me I looked weird, but when I asked him why, he said, You just do. Like a weirdo. He had always been sweet before, shielding me as best he could from the bullying I had endured in our middle school in Toronto. But he brooded all the time now.

I could tell from the Turkish families and sturdy German grandmothers wearing floral housecoats that the store was not fancy. My mother loved to shop, but she only bought refined pieces for herself, keeping the habit of luxury her own. In our first week without my father, she had bought a pair of sunglasses for 175 Deutschmarks, followed by a silk blouse for 250. The boutique’s attendant, a young giraffe of a woman with a liar’s gap, had said, Sehr, sehr schön, commenting on my mother’s silhouette. My mother had looked in the full-length mirror in the way she did in those days, with a coy self-satisfaction that seemed like a secret she kept stored up only for herself.  

From time to time, after the purchase of the blouse, I would go to her room, find the stiff bag hanging behind the door, visit the crinkly paper, touch the shirt’s almost impossible weightlessness. I didn’t care about clothes; I cared about her, how she would look in them, how she would feel in them. She had told me, on the way back to the apartment, where my brother sat plastered to the couch watching a recorded episode of Melrose Place, not to tell him or my father about what she’d bought.   

Rainy days spent on the low couch watching the TV shows Eva had recorded for me onto VHS as a parting gift. Philip watching alongside, not even complaining that they were mostly soap operas. Mom reading and smoking on the balcony, not minding what we did. In the early afternoons, she went out and came back with groceries: supermarket potato salad and cold cuts for lunch and frozen pizzas and a salad for dinner, as if she had forgotten how to cook. At home, she had cooked every meal for us, garlic-stewed lamb sprinkled with immaculately chopped parsley, effortless salads bright with lemon and olive oil, nut cakes soaked in orange-blossom syrup, miraculously light, all recipes she’d learned from her Sephardic mother, my grandmother, whom my brother and I had met only twice—both visits so short, it had been impossible to glean more than the fact that she was opposite to my mother: loud, and thickset, and so aggressively affectionate that Philip had burst into tears when she’d squeezed him goodbye.

When the apartment in Charlottenburg fell through, we stopped looking for a place to live. We’ll let your dad do the digging when he gets back, my mother said, with a wry lilt. I knew that our sublet was ending in just a couple of weeks, but I said nothing, following her lead, as I always did. My father had been gone for three weeks, nearly four, and we no longer counted down the days. At night, I heard my brother crying, and instead of asking him what was wrong, I let him. We were each, it seemed, in our new confinement, in our new closeness, entirely on our own.

After the rain, a period of surprising heat. We peeled ourselves from the couch, took the U-Bahn to the Olympic swimming pool in Spandau. The place was packed with families. Bodies young and old on display. Philip grew red, chin down, eyes at his feet. We found a rare spot of unoccupied grass, where we lay our brittle bath towels. My mother on her belly, back to the sun. I bent down and undid the straps; I didn’t need to be asked. I found her handbag and took out the suntan lotion and squeezed the cream into my hands. Gross, Philip said, in his perpetual embarrassment, looking down at his Game Boy. The cream was cold against my hot hands; I massaged until the sunscreen disappeared into her back, hoping it might last longer, giving me something to do while I was here, letting me stay with my mother’s familiar body, rather than the dozens of others calling my attention nearby.

Old men with their enormous, globular bellies. Girls in their teens smoking nearby, no adult intervening. I never wanted to leave. When our father had told us that we would be moving to Berlin, he had said four years, and that had seemed like an eternity. I had cradled the telephone for hours in my room, crying to Eva, planning ways I might stay with her family in Toronto. But four years now seemed too few. I would be 15 then, just as old as those girls over there. We had been inseparable, Eva and I, but I no longer missed her. It seemed that I had been carrying on with her because I hadn’t yet known about the world, all the other people in it.

Then, Sabine. Not the first day at the pool but the second. At first, just a stranger on a towel a few meters away from mine, topless, me trying not to stare. Oblong nipples, dark and distended like stretched-out full moons. My mother, with one eye open, only half-listening to what Sabine was saying—she had started talking without a greeting, a stranger on a towel next to mine, our sudden intimacy, no introduction necessary. Philip, playing Tetris, pretending, successfully, not to care. Sabine was tan with an unevenly cut bob, no doubt something she’d fashioned on her own. She had hairy armpits; I tried not to look at those either. I’d never seen hair there on a woman before, but it had the same illicit urgency as the dark triangles in the pornos passed around at school. Sabine wanted to know where we were from; she had heard us speaking English. She had spent, she told me, a year in Wisconsin as a teenager on exchange and it was the most beautiful place in the world. Have you been? she asked, as if I were not an 11-year-old child. I told her I hadn’t, but that it seemed like one of those places that had more livestock than people in it, the kind of comment I’d heard my father make in the past. Laughter, hers, deep and from the belly, You’re funny. It’s good to have a sense of humor in your age, which made me blush. I wanted, from then on, above all else, to make Sabine smile, to make her laugh. Sabine spoke English well, save for her prepositions, which made the whole world, in her mouth, a little askew.

My mother and Sabine spoke for a while and I could sense that my mother was glad to finally be speaking English again, to be having a conversation with someone other than me. Back home, my mother had always been entirely self-reliant, the kind of mother who didn’t easily make friends with the other mothers or the neighbors or her colleagues at work. But she and Sabine got along immediately. Or Sabine spoke and my mother listened.

We spent the afternoon together. Sabine, we learned quickly, was a student at the university, and still, at age 29, working on her undergraduate degree in sociology. Looking back on it now, my mother must have envied Sabine this freedom, to study at the university for so many years without financial pressure. My mother had completed only the first two years of a degree in business administration before leaving Montreal for a summer job in the offices of an insurance company in Toronto. She’d met my father and stayed on, closed the door on her life before him.

Sabine had an ease about her, so that when we got up from our towels to walk back to the U-Bahn, so did she, and instead of taking it in the direction of her apartment, she jumped onto our line, and spoke to us until we’d arrived at our stop, and then, as if it were the most natural thing, walked us all the way to the door of our apartment building. I could tell Philip found this infuriating, as he always did when other people tried to burst our sacred family bubble. My mother and I watched her with rapt attention, and for the first time since we had arrived in the strange city, we both felt taken care of. We made plans to see one another again the next day, or Sabine suggested it and my mother agreed. And just like that, Sabine was in our lives. Sabine, of the loose-fitting skirts and tops, breasts—untethered, outlined by a silk camisole—that I couldn’t help but track, shifting beneath her shirt as she moved, as she talked. Her smell like baby powder, and something botanical, the smell of all drugstores here, a scent that I would later come to think of simply as Germany.

Trips to the Checkpoint Charlie Museum and the Fernsehturm and the Pergamon Museum were swiftly deemed boring by Sabine. Instead, a walking tour of all of the apartments she’d either lived in or thought of living in, and the ones her boyfriends and close friends had lived in too. This is where I lost my virginity, she informed us, pointing to a white-and-pink facade on a sunny street in Moabit. He was sleeping inside a bed, you know, that is close with the ceiling, so it was not a very good idea, she explained. A mezzanine, my mother providing the English word whenever Sabine couldn’t find it. How old were you? My mother asked. Thirteen, Sabine said tonelessly. My mother must have found this very young, but she said nothing. Instead, she smiled, Sabine looping her arm in hers and continuing the tour. And that is where we broke up, she said, pointing to the intersection of two broad boulevards nearby. Sabine had a way of making it seem like a life, for being one’s own, was worthy of commemoration.

My mother never spoke about her own life this way, even though I knew hers had been an interesting one, full of rupture and self-definition. The fact of her, her past, always just beyond our reach, a living mystery. Why, I’d asked my father earlier that year, did we only rarely visit our grandparents in Montreal, or did our mother ignore calls from her sisters, who seemed, from the photographs at least, lively and sweet? My father had simply said, Your mother is a very complicated woman, as if we were two men sharing in our private language, in our incomprehension.  

We must have met Frank soon after that. Frank was, Sabine explained, her partner, a word I had only ever heard used in the context of business or crime. Frank—with his tight jeans and stringy, greasy dirty-blond hair, eyes blue and nearly cruel, a tiny gold hoop in his left ear—looked more like a criminal than a businessman. He smoked constantly, a brown stain where the filter hit the front tooth. He smelled too, of stale cigarettes and body odor, and something else, pine maybe, which was meant to mask it. On warm days, it only intensified the smell of his sweat.

Frank, we pieced together from his digressive, elliptical storytelling, was from a town in the former East, a cow farm, where he’d grown up a strict Catholic. I grew up in the Scheisse, he liked to say, laughing, always looking at me when he made the joke, even though it was my mother’s response that he tracked afterward. And I wasn’t one of these guys who wanted to come to the West: America, Bruce Springsteen, that kind of thing. I miss it every day. And then Sabine would say something in German, just to him, something that sounded to me unspeakably technical, that I could not associate with love or romance. Yet Frank would respond, in English now, But of course, I would not know Sabine, and they would kiss—open and lingering and a little bit wet. Philip looking at his feet, my mother unfazed, as though the woman who’d spent our childhoods placing her hands over our eyes whenever an intimate scene came onto our small television screen had been suddenly replaced.

Philip disliked Frank right away. I don’t know why we’re spending time with that trash, he said one morning, when my mother had made plans for us to spend the whole day with Sabine and Frank. I didn’t know you to be such a snob, my mother said, slapping him lightly across the face. She seemed as taken aback as we were by the gesture; she and Philip had been inseparable back home. In Toronto, it was in my brother’s presence that my mother had been happiest, most at ease. But there was no question of canceling our plans. The day trip to Treptower Park had been Frank’s idea; he was appalled, although not especially surprised, he let us know, by how conservative we’d been in our explorations of the city’s former East.

That afternoon, Frank, as though aware of Philip’s objections to his personality, seemed set on taunting him with it. On the walk to the S-Bahn station from our apartment, he teased Philip about his near-empty backpack. Each time we passed a phone booth or a vending machine, he made a show of sticking two fingers into the coin dispenser to check for stray change. Frank finally found a deutsche mark coin in a cigarette machine and, unbeknownst to Philip, stuck it in the front pocket of his backpack, winking at me as he did. Frank must have been feeling lucky, because when my mother took our tickets out from her wallet so that Philip could validate them—one of Philip’s few remaining pleasures—Frank grabbed her gently by the arm, intercepting the exchange. We were tourists, Americans, he explained. Canadians, Philip mumbled. Certainly, Frank continued, we could get away with saying we didn’t understand German if a ticket inspector came onto the train. And if you get the fine, I pay it, Frank said. And if you don’t get inspected, you give me the tickets. Sabine rolled her eyes; Philip glared at Frank. Of course, there was nothing fair about the offer, but my mother looked at Frank and smiled, satisfied with the terms. It’s a deal, she said, a girlish glint in her eye. It was a long journey—11 stops—my stomach tight the entire time, picturing the moment we’d get caught, what would come afterward. We would have to tell my father, explain to him what we’d done: We had not paid the fare, on a dare. Why would you do such a thing? he would ask us, with the tone of moral incredulity he used whenever questions of civic responsibility, of personal integrity—however minor—were at stake.

Inspections were frequent, but we got lucky that day. At the Treptower Park Station, my mother deposited the unused tickets into Frank’s expectant palm; he slipped them into the back pocket of his jeans and said, Schönen Dank! My mother did not look dejected. She appeared light, celebratory, even, as though she had gotten away with something too. From then on, Philip called Frank and Sabine “The Scheissters,” and to show my solidarity, I called them that too, even though I didn’t think it was fair that Sabine should be absorbed into the insult.

Frank called me Frank, even though my name was Frances, Frankie to my family and to Eva. But Frank thought it was too much of a coincidence that our names should be so similar, and so he shortened my name and made it into his own. I didn’t mind having a new name in this new place and so I didn’t complain. I neither liked nor disliked Frank. I merely saw him for what he was: a man, not my father, who was suddenly always there.

I had never seen a man’s body so close up, not even my father’s. Frank invited us to look at his in a way I understood women usually did, his T-shirts tight and worn so that we could make out his chest, lean and muscular, the veins pulsing down his arms as he moved, his limbs long and articulated. He had a strangely narcotic effect on my mother, so that when he spoke, she watched, impassive, until a languid smile emerged, which seemed to connect her to some internal circuit board.

Frank was a journalist too, he explained, but not the kind your father is, he told me, putting his arm around my shoulders and squeezing. I write about politics and ideas in newspapers you or your father probably haven’t heard of. I wanted to tell him that my father had ideas too. He was the smartest man I knew. In these moments, I forced myself to remember my father—the sprinkling of freckles on his fair arms, his hair a funny russet mop that puffed up when it got too long—as though doing so would help my mother remember him fondly too.

They liked me, Sabine and Frank, immediately, and treated me, it strikes me now, like my mother’s Mann. Do you two eat wurst? The two of them asked us one afternoon, as if my mother and I had the same taste in everything, excluding Philip from their questions, their attention, as they had learned to do. We both nodded, yes, which surprised me; I had never seen my mother eat pork before. Although she had disavowed nearly every part of her upbringing, she had always drawn the line at eating pork.

And so, one afternoon at the Imbiss in the hot August light, my mother eating an entire bratwurst, drinking not one but two cans of beer. Frank offering his own freshly opened Schultheiss to Philip, whom he insisted on speaking to in German, Musst du es probieren—You have to try it. My brother looking up at my mother: a nod, or even just a lack of one. A sip, lips pursed, and then another slug, and then another. You like it? Frank asked. My brother shrugged but took another gulp and burped loudly. Everyone, including my mother, laughed. Frank was the one to say, Ja, enough, before grabbing the half-finished beer with his thick fingers and drinking the rest of it himself. Did I see it then? Philip’s particular pleasure? Some special unlocking of genetic proclivity? Or maybe Frank, like any good con artist, simply knew exactly what each of us wanted before we ourselves had figured it out.

Sabine was our self-appointed teacher, our cultural liaison. Children in Berlin, we learned, took the U-Bahn alone to get to school, often before they could even read, and so they would count the stops on their fingers. It’s normal, she’d say of anything that seemed strange to us. What Sabine found abnormal was that we had never visited Wisconsin. How could we have missed the most beautiful place in the world? One afternoon at Wannsee, while my mother and brother were off swimming, Sabine asked me if I’d ever smoked a cigarette, and when I told her no, she looked at me as though that was not normal either and then said: You should try everything once; then you can take your decision. Otherwise, you’ll always be like everyone else, letting them decide for you. I hated, above all else, disappointing Sabine, and so I vowed, privately, to take her advice seriously.

That evening, at the apartment, my brother and I sunburned and tired, my mother unpacking our beach bag immediately, as she always did. Philip sent to the kitchen to turn the oven on for our frozen pizza, our mother looking around frantically in her beach bag. I don’t believe it. I had them all afternoon, she said, looking at me, as though I would know exactly what she meant. I was certain I packed them up. Do you remember, Frankie? she asked me. My sunglasses, she clarified, impatiently. I tried to piece the day together in my mind. But I couldn’t picture the sunglasses or their leather case, just the faded spray roses of Sabine’s old bedsheet; Sabine cross-legged, quizzing us from my mother’s German-word book, the tanned, chubby look of her toes, painted a surprising pink; Sabine’s sunscreen, her open pack of paprika chips; Philip nearby, on his own towel, reading a comic book; Sabine stuffing the sheet into her Kaiser’s supermarket tote bag, smiling at me. Maybe Sabine put them in her bag when she was packing up? I offered. Maybe, my mother said, but I could tell this was not a version of the story that she liked, the answer she wanted. She furrowed her brow, moved away from me. Maybe someone took them on the U-Bahn, she said, not looking at me. We won’t tell your brother they’re missing, okay? But she didn’t have to worry about that.         

The next afternoon, at the Hackescher Hof with Sabine, white tablecloths and gold-stenciled columns, spaetzle for lunch, little worms wriggling around in a butter sauce. I waited for my mother to bring up the missing sunglasses. Instead, when the sun became too bright, she shielded her eyes with her hand. Want to switch seats? Sabine asked. Oh no, I’m fine, my mother answered. I forgot my sunglasses, she offered up, a lie uttered so effortlessly, I wondered how many others she’d told in her life. I never wear sunglasses, Sabine offered up. It’s too much of a, how do you call it, a curtain, with me and the world.

When the check came, my mother was still in the bathroom, and I watched as Sabine moved it toward my mother’s side of the table, not even trying to hide the gesture from me. I nearly asked about the sunglasses, but then I remembered: I was only a child. When my mother returned, Sabine rose and went to the restroom as my mother placed the cash down for the meal, as she nearly always did with Frank and Sabine. I knew that they believed us to be rich, and my mother had done nothing to disabuse them of that impression; no doubt, she enjoyed the fantasy too. I had the thought, not for the first time since we’d moved, that if adults knew just what children really saw and understood, they would not act as though they were alone when children were around.

Back at the apartment that afternoon, my mother took me aside and told me, I think I know what happened to the sunglasses. I remember feeling a little tug at my shoulder on the U-Bahn. But I remembered it differently: On our journey back to the apartment, she had been standing with Sabine, gripping the pole, and had placed the beach bag with its large opening on Philip’s lap. He’d attended to it with his usual vigilance; there was no way anything could have been stolen under his watchful eye. But when I tried to say as much, my mother changed the subject.

Our sublet expired, and we moved into the Holiday Inn near the Gedächtniskirche. My father had been gone for five weeks by then, and his voice had started to sound, over the telephone, like a recording of itself. Soon, Frankie. They need me here. I love you. Take care of your mom. Philip had stopped speaking to him altogether. You’re going to hurt your father, my mother told him, but Philip just shrugged, not looking up from his Game Boy. Under regular circumstances, my mother would have complained about the hotel—the cheap floral bed covering, the bathroom with its bleach smell—but she took the unexpected move in her stride. On our first day there, she let us mope around in our pajamas all day watching NBC, the only English-speaking channel on the hotel TV, eating Haribo Smurfs and drinking Fanta straight from the bottle. She came in and out, running errands, smelling of cigarettes and her new perfume. We didn’t have many traveler’s checks left. My mother hid her trips to the exchange bureau from Philip and often asked me to stay behind with him while she went out to get more cash. When she returned, she put me in charge of placing the money pouch back into the bedside drawer when Philip wasn’t looking. I wondered what would happen when my father returned and found out that his cost-of-living allowance was being spent on dinners and drinks with Sabine and Frank, as well as other luxuries my mother had permitted herself in his absence. There was the bottle of perfume purchased at the Parfümerie Douglas while Philip and I waited outside; the pair of trousers to match the blouse at the small boutique; linen placemats and a delicate ceramic bowl she’d bought at a craft fair, first for herself, and then, when Sabine had suggested that she too liked the pairing, for her as well. My mother, I knew, had always kept a separate bank account, her own, where she saved half of her monthly paycheck from the insurance company, but this was not the money she was spending in Berlin. She had told me once, in a rare moment of maternal advice: Remember, Frankie, a woman always needs her own money. You never know what might happen between two people. It was true, I didn’t know, and yet I suspected it; with my mother, talk of relationships had always thrummed with a certain threat.

As a treat for Philip’s birthday, we bought a large jar of Skippy peanut butter, Kraft Dinner, and individual-size boxes of Corn Pops and Frosted Flakes, all priced as luxury goods in the KaDeWe food department. I was put in charge, before we went on this shopping spree, while Philip brushed his teeth and my mother smoked a cigarette outside, of removing the calculator from Philip’s bag. I found them then: my mother’s sunglasses, wedged in the inside pocket of Philip’s weightless backpack, not missing at all. I moved swiftly, still focused on my original mission. I placed the calculator in the bedside table, next to the laminated room-service menu and the money belt, and zipped closed the knapsack, laying it on its side, as it had been before I’d picked it up. I left the sunglasses exactly where I’d found them; I could be decisive, hide the truth as well as any adult.

Later, watching Philip in the imported-foods aisle, I was glad I had not told my mother. Philip seemed so at ease among the garish packaging, the familiar brands—his birthday homecoming—ignoring the prices, not even reaching for the calculator in his backpack. Although he was officially a year older, 13 now, his age seemed incidental. He was so much younger than me, in need of my protection, my secrecy. A few days later, feeling around for the sunglasses while Philip was still asleep—my mother gone to the bakery—I was surprised to find that the pocket where the sunglasses had been was now empty. I looked around in his suitcase, under his bed, in the pocket of his fleece, his windbreaker, but I couldn’t find them anywhere.

One evening, Frank and Sabine visiting our hotel room, their singularity at odds with the drab interior. Sabine sitting cross-legged, at home wherever there was a floor. Frank messing with the remote control. My mother wearing a pretty dress, mixing drinks on the varnished hotel-issued desk, as though she were hosting a cocktail party. A strange scene: this North-American family, father missing, with a 20-something German couple in the Holiday Inn Berlin Kudamm, 99 Deutschmarks a night, with a discount for a week, which my mother had negotiated by speaking to not two but three different employees. I had been relieved to watch her do it, to find that perhaps she had not, in fact, entirely forgotten about our father, about us. I wondered where our father would have settled if he’d been there that evening, but I couldn’t picture his body in the scene. The only person in the room tethering us back to him was Philip; I could tell Philip thought we were fickle, that our loyalties were cheap.

Ice, my mother indicated to Philip and me, passing me the plastic bucket. Philip took a while to snap to attention, but then my mother raised an eyebrow and we slinked out of bed into the hallway. We raced to the elevator in our flip-flops, tripping a little as we did. We fought to press the button. I won, as I always did, and then we fought, too, to press down on the lever of the ice machine. But I let Philip do the honors, knowing he needed the win more than I did, the sense of temporary power: the ice clattering, the loud whoosh, the release.

On the way back to the room, we didn’t race but walked slowly instead. Philip looked so sad, I wanted to shove him, or to slap him, as my mother had just a few weeks before, so he could come back to us, be my older brother again. I knew that he hated Frank and Sabine, hated their presence in our room, hated the way they acted upon our mother, and upon me. He missed our father and the normalcy his presence would have necessarily restored. He missed our beat-up minivan. He missed baseball practice. He missed our neighbor’s dog, a dachshund who always slunk right up to him, licking his open palm. I knew all of this without him saying a word. Why didn’t I miss these things too? I put my hand on his shoulder, just as Frank was in the habit of doing with me. Philip let me keep it there longer than expected before pushing it away. Don’t be a weirdo, he said. I could see, from the side, that his cheeks were gleaming pink; he was crying.

We had forgotten the key and so when we got back to the locked door, we knocked and waited, wondering, after some time, if we’d gotten the room number wrong. My mother finally arrived, slightly flushed, her hair down. She smiled at us; Willkommen, she said, as though we were late arrivals to her party. She was a little bit drunk, her eyes darker than usual. She looked young, like the photographs I’d seen of her from the period when she and my father had first met; she’d been only 19 then. Frank lying on his back, using a paper clip to clean his fingernails. Sabine, armed with my mother’s comb, returning to the activity we’d interrupted: braiding my mother’s dark mass of wavy hair. My mother was very proud and protective of her hair, and I had never once seen another person, not even my father, touch it. In Toronto, she had cut her own bangs and trimmed her own split ends. Sabine wet her comb in the glass and glided it through my mother’s long hair. My mother sighed with pleasure, and I had the urge to turn the volume up on the television. When Sabine was halfway done, she brought my mother to the mirror, and I heard Sabine say, You have such nice eyebrows. My mother demurred, said something about missing the woman who waxed them back home. That’s normal? Sabine asked.

For my 11th birthday, earlier that year, my mother had taken me to that very aesthetician; she had waxed my legs and the three lone hairs under my armpits, the small shadow above my lip, the hair between my eyebrows. My mother had made the appointment for me; driven me to the small salon, in a strip mall in a part of town I’d never been to; sat on a chair beside me as I squirmed in my underwear beneath the stranger’s tender efficiency. When I had started to cry, my mother had grabbed for my hand, but I’d refused it, finding her touch unbearable. I had the thought for the first time: I am separate; I belong to myself. And aside from thinking that my mother was the most beautiful, the most interesting woman in the world, I hated her a little bit too. I had immediately swallowed these thoughts down. I was a good-natured, loyal child, and it had frightened me, what these thoughts might do, what they might set in motion between us. My mother had said, in the car on the way home, as a kind of apology perhaps, You’ll thank me later, because you’ll never have to shave. She had always been, before this moment, so careful with me. Whatever her mother had been to her—overbearing, intense—she had handled me with an opposite energy. It was as though she were worried that any explicit assertion of her power—to love or to punish—might affirm some similarity between them.

Philip seemed not to take in the scene in the hotel room. He crawled into the nearest bed, tucked himself in with his jeans still on, returned to Super Mario Brothers. Frank propped himself up on his elbows and snapped his fingers at Philip, and said, Hey, man, I think there’s a beer in there, pointing to the mini-fridge. Philip perked up at the mention of the beer, even putting his Game Boy down. Yeah? he said, with his practiced shrug. Ja, Frank said, and set about getting him one. He crawled around my mother and Sabine; I waited for my mother to say something, anything. Surely, she should be the one to say no. But it was Sabine who grabbed Frank by the belt loop as he made his way past her, and I watched as some electric current moved between them, and then a few words spoken in German very quickly—too quickly for me to even hear the words individually—Frank crawling backwards, as if on rewind, head down, looking up at Philip and saying, Sorry, man. When Sabine speaks, you listen; that is the rule. Philip did not say anything or even look at Frank, just back at the tiny screen of his gray console, but I could see the redness that had erupted across his throat. The invitation to have something he might want, and then its retraction, was the exact kind of inconsistency that drove Philip crazy.

I spent the rest of the evening lying in bed with Philip, pretending to watch the German-culture program that was playing on TV. The men were debating something important about the future of the country, but I couldn’t understand what positions each was taking. Just two old men frowning, gesticulating; Frank snorting, swearing on the second bed. My mother sat silently on the floor, back to me and to Sabine, who continued to twist her hair into a braid that looped around the front of her head like a crown. My queen, I had heard my father call my mother on a few occasions, and the idea had embarrassed me, his deference to her, this power she had accrued how, exactly? She sat that evening nearly silently, an emanation, head rocking gently back and forth with the current of Sabine’s hand weaving. It seemed more and more dangerous—her power, her sovereignty—a glass teetering on a table’s edge.

Done with her coiffure, Sabine rose and tapped my hip to indicate that I should move over and settled onto the bed between Philip and me. Philip groaned, but Sabine laid her arms around both of our shoulders and declared: It’s like camp, isn’t it? And we’re like s’mores. I’m the marshmallow. She laughed. I had them once in Wisconsin. So disgusting, right? But, you know, good too, she said to Philip. But he ignored her, so she looked at me, and I said, Yeah, not knowing what else to say. My mother was in the bathroom, and for a moment, I had the thought that if she left us, as I knew some parents did, maybe Sabine could step in and be my mother instead. Yet if my mother left, wouldn’t it be to be with Frank? In which case, Sabine probably wouldn’t want to stick around us, to be reminded of her heartbreak. Or maybe my mom would want to live with both of them like on Melrose Place, where young and attractive people lived near one another, a revolving door of attachments and betrayals—only in this case it would be in Berlin, and there wouldn’t be a pool but an interior courtyard with decrepit bikes and an elaborate system of trash and recycling. The image of my mother, living another life without us in it, was not a new one. How long had I held it? Not a fear exactly, but a queasy interior tug, a thought to avoid just in case thinking it might make it come true. I had always been comforted by a certain attendant superstitious belief: My mother loved Philip far too much to leave our family. He was too precious to her, too dear. But that had been before; now I wasn’t so sure.

When my mother finally came out from the bathroom, she looked taken aback by the arrangement of our bodies. She gestured to the spot on the bed next to Frank, and said to Sabine in a gentle but firm tone, You’ll be more comfortable there, no? Sabine squeezed my shoulder, rose and jumped into the bed next to ours, curling up to Frank like an overgrown cat. He lay his hand instinctively on her soft waist; she made a sound like purring. I missed Sabine, her warmth, her heavy breathing, her thick presence next to mine, so foreign and pleasurable. Instead, Philip’s clammy feet, my mother’s rigid body, kept at a distance from mine. I wanted to grab my mother’s hand, to tell her not to leave us; we were a family. Philip needed her; he wasn’t doing well at all. But I couldn’t get my hand to move over to hers. My arms stayed stuck to my sides, unwilling to cooperate.

Frank asked if they could order room service, and my mother said, Of course, leaning over and opening the side-table drawer, just long enough, I noticed, for Sabine to see, above the laminated menu, the thick money belt—beige and somehow as illicit as a pair of underwear or some exposed part of the body. My mother and I had gone together to cash 1,000 deutsche marks only that afternoon. My mother lay back down, turned over to face us; she put her arm around my waist and tried to reach for Philip too, but he shimmied his body away from ours in revolt. My mother settled on hugging just me. A relief. I could breathe again. Get some sleep, Frankie, she spoke sweetly into my hair, kissed my cheek. You look nice, I said, touching the thick silken plait poised above her forehead.

I must have fallen asleep, because when I opened my eyes, it was morning, and my mother was already dressed, Philip snoring next to me, still wearing his jeans, his face ruddy, his upper lip slick with night sweat; the bed next to ours already made. I bought us some breakfast, my mother said, passing me a brötchen mit Käse right in bed. She looked fresh and concerned, Sabine’s braid still crowning her head but loosened and uneven, a little sad-looking in the light of day. I didn’t have to wait, as I usually did, to piece together what was wrong with her. She whispered to me, It’s gone, pointing to the bedside drawer. They took it, she said. I can’t believe it.

I watched my mother pace the room; I ate my brötchen quietly, letting the seeds fall between the sheets, not even catching them in my cupped hand, as I usually did. Then she sat on the ground at my feet, and I knew what she wanted me to do. I started unplaiting. I worked gently but efficiently, trying not to hurt her tender scalp. As I undid the braid, my mother’s thick hair fell into my hands and I felt it in her, the switch, the split: before and after. I might have said something then, about Philip, the sunglasses, the backpack. But I didn’t. It was her skill, but I could have it too; I already did. To decide: That’s it. To close the door on those people, that phase. To turn the page. I let her do it; I did not intervene. She got up and kissed me on the forehead. You’re a good girl, she said, but I didn’t exactly feel like one.

When the phone rang while she was out—Sabine, no doubt—I didn’t pick up, just as my mother had instructed me. And when Philip asked me what was wrong—had Mom broken up with the Scheissters?—I told him I knew what he’d done. The sunglasses. The money. He didn’t deny it. Give it to me, I said. No, he replied, and so I went into his backpack myself. I was not angry; I was satisfied. What I thought I knew was true. I counted it out loud: 780 Deutschmarks. I didn’t even ask him why. I understood. I thought for a moment, considered the different outcomes. We’ll give it back to her 20 Deutschemarks at a time, I said, as though I really was a Frank after all. I wished Sabine could see me this way, one last time: suave and certain. Making my own decisions. Taking things into my own hands.

How easy it was, just a single phone call. Our father back within two days. I pictured what my mother must have said: We need you. Come home. The kids. He had a concerned, harried look when we first saw him, an uncanny guest in the lobby of our Holiday Inn. He smelled oddly unlike himself, like the airplane and the soap from foreign hotels. The conversation between my parents, when it finally took place, happened in the bathroom of the hotel room. Philip turned the volume up on Jay Leno, but I pressed my ear to the door. She had been robbed, I heard her explain. Robbed? Where? Why hadn’t she told him over the phone? His voice like a branch snapped off in a gust of wind. You’re being very confusing; tell me exactly what happened, Sophie, he said, and I pictured him in there with one of his black-and-white reporter’s notebooks with the coil at the top, just a few words per page in his indecipherable scrawl. And then she told him everything, from the beginning. From the time at the swimming pool, to the Imbiss, to the many walks around Sabine’s neighborhood, to the trip to Treptower Park and the Hackescher Hof. She spoke the facts, the kind my father would be interested in. The exact number of times we had met up with them, the name of the village where Frank had said he was from, the name of the publication he wrote for, the exact amount of money stolen, 780 Deutschmarks. It won’t take me long to find them, he said. It might even make a good story. My mother let out a little inchoate cry. No, Joel. I didn’t hear the rest. The taps were turned on. But I imagine the particular quieting down, the thing that I had never understood—would never understand—between them, a pitch unreachable to anyone else, their quiet acquiescence; in other words, their love, or maybe simply their marriage.

We moved the next day to a cheaper hotel in the Western suburbs and found an apartment more affordable than any of the others we’d looked at. It had a brutalist charmlessness, but a room for each of us, and was walking distance from our school. School was not as different from Toronto as we expected. Every effort was made to shorten the distance between this place and North America, the school’s ethos like sliced bread: comforting but not especially nutritious. Philip made friends quickly there, and I found two boys—the son of a Nigerian diplomat and the son of a Bostonian violinist at the Berlin Philharmonic—who didn’t mind spending time with me. My mother stayed mostly in the apartment, doing penance, although for what, exactly, I wasn’t sure. Philip and I returned the money one 20-deutsche-mark bill at a time, and there was a certain pleasure in watching my mother’s little flash of joy at finding more than she’d thought was hers. When we did venture into Berlin for the odd concert or for an exhibit or to visit some expat my father had been put in touch with, she always wore her prettiest clothes, the silk blouse and trousers from the boutique in Charlottenburg. In them, she had that expectant sense about her, as though at any point she might be recognized.

Our stay in Berlin lasted only one year. My father was called back to Toronto before his posting was over. Budget cuts, the newspaper gave as an explanation. He would make editor within the year. I was not wrong about my mother. She was, I must have sensed it even then, with my child’s prescience, destined for rupture, scorched-earth cycles. Within two years of our return, my parents would be divorced, my mother gone to live in Vancouver with her second husband, an insurance salesman with a face as smooth and supple as a child’s. My brother and I saw her, after that, only during holidays, which merely solidified what she’d always felt like to me: a scarce resource, on loan from another life. I hated her for six months, maybe a year, as any teenager would, but it was a feeling that was impossible, constitutionally speaking, for me to sustain for very long. My father reacted to his heartbreak with a similar composure: He was sad and forlorn until he couldn’t stand to be that way anymore. It was Philip who took the divorce most to heart. He pointed the finger at my father: He had been the one to upend our lives, had been the real absence all along. He pointed the finger at me: I had no character, followed others around like a dog. Philip punished us by disappearing for days at a time, showing up drunk at our high school, getting into fistfights at the smallest slight. It would take him nearly a decade to recover from the bomb my mother’s departure detonated in his fragile life. But that was all much later. That year in Berlin, at least as I remember it now, had the pleasant, suspended quality in our family’s history of an entre-guerre, a détente.

In the long and checkered history of possibly terrible impulse decisions, here’s one for the ages: A few years ago, the comedian Alex Edelman decided on a whim to show up uninvited to a casual meeting of white nationalists at an apartment in New York City, and pose as one of them. Why? He was curious. He wanted to see what it would be like to be on the inside of a gathering that would never have knowingly included him, given that he is Jewish. The events of that night became fodder for his one-man show Just for Us, which has toured across the United States and overseas in recent years, and opens on Broadway tonight.

I first saw Just for Us in December, and have often thought of it since then, not only because it is hilarious, which it is, but also because I have rarely encountered a piece of comedy so sophisticated—or, as the comedian Mike Birbiglia put it to me, one with such an “elegantly light touch.” Birbiglia produced the show’s most recent run, off-Broadway. He never had any intention of producing, but felt he had to help make it possible for more people to see Edelman. “You can’t have a story that good and not have everyone hear that story,” Birbiglia told me. “It’s the only show where I’ve recommended it to probably 300 people and not a single person has said they don’t like it.”

One of the things Birbiglia admires about Edelman is “his tenacity for considering revision or rethinking things that already work,” he told me. “Most people, when their show is really well received, they’re like, ‘I’m done.’ I always admire people who never view work as done.” I recently sat down with Edelman to talk about the mechanics of writing, what makes something funny, and the best advice he’s gotten from his comedic heroes. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Adrienne LaFrance: I want to ask you about your writing process, but first let’s talk about Broadway.

Alex Edelman: Oh my God.

LaFrance: It must feel surreal.

Edelman: People are like, “Is this a lifelong dream?” And I’m like, “Yes.” But also, I never dreamed of this.

LaFrance: It never would have even occurred to you.

Edelman: It would be like if you were jogging and someone’s like, “Do you want to jog … on the moon?” You’d be like, “What.”

LaFrance: So you’re hilarious, which is of course a prerequisite. But what struck me about Just for Us is the quality of the writing—how layered it is, and the sophistication of how you return to various jokes over the course of the show. I’m curious how you approach the writing process.

Edelman: So laughs are No. 1. Laughs have to go into everything. Everything else can go. So then you’re like, Okay, I’m getting laughs. I’m still doing the show. What else do I want? Mike Birbiglia saw the show in its old form, and he was like, “B+.” And I was like, “B+?!” And he was like, “You need to think more deeply about XYZ.”

LaFrance: What was the XYZ for him?

Edelman: The story of the meeting is the star. But Mike said, “Find what it says about you.” So imagine you’re writing a poem and you’re trying to service the subtext. Or imagine—sometimes TV writers will say, “Okay, here’s the plot of the episode, but what is the episode about?” Like, what is Seinfeld about? People are all like, “Seinfeld’s about nothing.” But Seinfeld is not about nothing. Seinfeld is about the relationships between complicated people. Seinfeld is about what it’s like to live in a city, what it’s like to be an uncompromising personality in a world where that’s not suitable. There are so many different things that a thing can be about, right? So you start thinking about what it’s about, and then you sort of gently buttress the thing with clauses. And if the clauses can be funny, then, oh my God. So I started massaging things, and—I’m sure you’re like this too—I love a well-written line. A line that just nails you. A line that just gets you right here (Gestures between the ribs.). For everyone that line is different, but I love to try to hit everyone in the John Updike bone.

LaFrance: Do you think it all comes down to surprising people?

Edelman: I think so. Or just being really apt. But yes, I think surprise is a big part of it. I won’t do a joke if I don’t think it’s surprising. Low-hanging fruit is anathema to me. It makes my teeth itch.

LaFrance: I ask about surprise because it’s something Mel Brooks told Judd Apatow in an interview Judd just did for The Atlantic. They’d been talking about Blazing Saddles and Judd asked Mel, in effect, whether he set out to be shocking. And Mel says it was never about shocking people, it was just about always getting the biggest laugh—and getting the biggest laugh means surprising people.

[Read: The immortal Mel Brooks]

Edelman: It’s true. Comedy at its finest is a high-wire act. If you take Blazing Saddles, for example, I can’t believe how off-the-wall it is, but I also can’t believe how clear it is in its intention, right? Like when the railroad bosses are singing “Camptown ladies,” it shows you right away who the joke is on.

LaFrance: That level of moral clarity is signature Mel Brooks.

Edelman: It is. But watching Blazing Saddles as a comedian, you can go, I can’t believe how clear it is. I can’t believe how funny it is. I can’t believe how many different perspectives there are. I can’t believe how off-the-wall it is. I think every show that you watch, you should walk out marveling at it.

LaFrance: That’s a high bar.

Edelman: I went to the New York Theater Archives last week, and I was watching the late playwright and performer Spalding Gray. And he did this really compact movement—and there was something so efficient about the compactness of his movement.

LaFrance: You have to think about that too—how you move across the stage.

Edelman: There are two aspects of stand-up comedy: what you say and how you’re saying it. The content and the aesthetic. In the best shows, they inform each other: The content and the aesthetic overlap.

LaFrance: Who are your comedic heroes?

Edelman: Oh my God. Steve Martin.

LaFrance: I love him so much.

Edelman: When he came to the show, I exploded. I also love Judd Apatow. I love Mel Brooks. I love the writer and director Chris Morris. He made a movie called Four Lions, which is like a Muslim Blazing Saddles. Jesse Armstrong, who wrote Succession. Lucy Prebble. Nathan Englander. And of course Jerry Seinfeld and Billy Crystal. Elaine May. Tom Lehrer—he’s an old comedy brain. And Mike Birbiglia and John Mulaney.

[Read: No, really, I’m awful]

LaFrance: What kind of advice are you getting from these legends who have all come to your show?

Edelman: Do you know I ask everyone who comes for a note? Billy Crystal’s note was huge. He said stop using one of these (Gestures as if holding a handheld mic.); start using one of these (Gestures to his ear as if wearing an earpiece mic.). We did it.

LaFrance: Is it in fact better?

Edelman: So much better. Because you can do free range. You can embody the characters. You can play the characters in a smaller way. It’s really, really not something I liked doing, but he was right. Steve Martin offered a tag. Jerry Seinfeld offered me a thing that bummed him out that came out of the show—he said just don’t address the audience’s reaction to a joke. It was a really good note. Stephen Colbert told me a place in the show to find some more stillness, which was wise.

LaFrance: That’s very Colbert-y.

Edelman: Birbiglia has given about 50 notes on the show, and each one of them is the best note you’ve ever heard. It’s like one of the heads of my Mount Rushmore produced my show and then all of the other heads started coming to see it. So yeah, I ask for notes. And I want notes from people who are not comedy legends who come to see the show. I’m a big, big fan of notes because I don’t take most of them.

LaFrance: Even then, it’s still interesting to hear how people are receiving what you’re doing.

Edelman: You know what’s interesting also is that sometimes a note means that you’re being ambiguous about something that you don’t mean to be ambiguous about. So it can either be changed with one word or where you put something. If I get the same note again and again, it means I’m being ambiguous.

LaFrance: How many times have you performed it now?

Edelman: I’m going to say probably around 300 times. When you perform it every night, it’s very intentional. You are performing it every night with a capacity to change it. You, in your brain, have a chance to—

LaFrance: You can do whatever you want.

Edelman: You can do whatever you want! It’s crazy.

LaFrance: That’s fun.

Edelman: Um.

LaFrance: That’s scary?

Edelman: Scary. Yeah. Fun and scary.

LaFrance: Do you get nervous before going on?

Edelman: I get a certain feeling that’s somewhere between nervousness, excitement, disbelief, gratitude, anger—

LaFrance: Anger?

Edelman: Sadness.

LaFrance: So all the feelings.

Edelman: My feelings are—I don’t think I’ve talked about this—but there’s a moment right before you go onstage where it’s dark. It’s, like, really dark. And you are standing in complete darkness and you’re waiting to go into the brightest light you can stand in. In front of a lot of people. There’s a really profound ritual to that.

LaFrance: Do you feel loneliness in that moment?

Edelman: I always ask to have someone there with me. My stage manager or the assistant stage manager always stands next to me. Sometimes I go, “Can I put my hand on your shoulder?” And I put my hand on their shoulder. So I am reminded that there’s someone else. It’s not nervousness, but it’s also not not nervousness. It’s like, What if everything goes wrong? Or maybe everything is going wrong. But also I get to go onstage and do this.

LaFrance: What about nights when you’re not in the mood to do it? Does that ever happen, where you just have to power through?

Edelman: You owe people a good time and you owe people the best you can. And audiences surprise you and give you energy. And also it’s a conversation. It’s not just me. Sometimes you don’t feel like having a conversation but then the other person sort of bucks you up a little. I’ve gone onstage not wanting to do it, and then a second into it I’m like, This is fucking great. I worked my ass off to get here. I’m going to do a good job. I’m not mailing this shit in. I can’t believe that it’s going on Broadway. I am trying to be grateful. And also I’m very sad. I developed the show with this guy Adam Brace—if not my closest friend, certainly the person who understood me the best. And he died about five weeks ago.

LaFrance: Right, I remember. I’m so sorry.

Edelman: I’m hoping this will make me feel closer to him. Also, there’s no mailing the show in now! Not that I would anyway. But this show is his show, too. He’d be really fucking—pardon my language—he’d be really annoyed if I was just, I’m tired.

LaFrance: I know you keep telling me you’re not famous, but it seems you’ve reached a certain escape velocity.

Edelman: What does that mean?

LaFrance: You’re the kind of person who people see perform and then they say, Oh, he’s going to be very famous. I think you’re going to be very famous. Sorry to be the one to tell you this.

Edelman: I think you’re out of your mind.

LaFrance: I am not out of my mind.

Edelman: I’m serious; I don’t see it happening.

LaFrance: But you must feel the difference lately. You have Steve Martin giving you tags—

Edelman: Proximity to fame and fame are not the same thing.

LaFrance: Of course they’re not. But clearly you understand that there is momentum to the work you’re doing.

Edelman: Being successful and being appreciated are amazing. And I want those things very badly. Fame, you can keep.

LaFrance: Well, this is why I ask. Does it feel weird now?

Edelman: I want my work to be appreciated. I want all the awards. I want all of the people to come to see it. It’s a good show and it’s entertaining and people like it and I’m proud of it. And I have these amazing conversations with people after the show. By the way, if you’re reading this and you’re a thoughtful person, please come to the show and talk about it with me, because I want conversations with as many people as I possibly can. But it’s a little disarming to be here (Gestures around the restaurant we’re in.) and have people walk up to me. Also because of Adam, my director who died, there have been moments these past few weeks where I have been out in public but am not looking to talk. And people are like, “Hey!” I went and saw Parade and it broke me wide open. I didn’t know it was about Leo Frank. I was raised on Leo Frank’s story—this lynching of a Jewish man. And at the intermission, I’ve got my head against the wall, and I’m crying so, so, so, so, so, so hard. Like, cannot breathe and—

LaFrance: Someone pops out like, “Hey!”

Edelman: Genuinely. Someone was like, “Hey, Alex! I saw your show downtown!”

LaFrance: Were you like, “Excuse me, I am sobbing right now”?

Edelman: They saw me crying and they were like, “Oh yeah, it’s super sad.” And I was like, Can you leave me alone? But also I’m not famous. And also, I have lots of complex, thoughtful conversations about really difficult subjects. People who are famous don’t live lives that are heavy on nuance. I’d love to retain the distance. You know, a lot of the stuff that you and I are talking about loving has to do with transgression. I’m not out here to offend anyone, ever. I think if someone offends somebody else, it’s usually a craft failing. I’ve told jokes in the past where I’ve hurt people’s feelings. I have jokes that I won’t do now that aren’t taboo yet, but they will be in five years.

LaFrance: Tell me one.

Edelman: I had a joke—there was a line about someone’s weight. And then I read this book called The Elephant in the Room by this guy Tommy Tomlinson.

LaFrance: Oh, of course, we ran an excerpt of it. He’s a brilliant writer.

[Read: The weight I carry]

Edelman: He’s a gorgeous writer. And halfway through that first page, there’s a line that’s like, Those are the numbers and this is how it feels. And I thought, I will never make a joke about someone’s weight ever again. Or until I can tackle it with empathy or complexity. Because there is funniness in the inherent contradictions between someone being like, “Fat is beautiful!” and “Good for you; you lost all that weight!”

LaFrance: The cultural piece of it.

Edelman: Right, and in that gray area, that’s where there’s comedy. There’s comedy in human frailty. There’s comedy in failure. There’s comedy in success and in the things that success doesn’t buy you.

Peter Garritano for The Atlantic

LaFrance: How did you get into comedy in the first place? You’re from Boston.

Edelman: I started comedy shortly before graduating high school. I would go to open mics. I was a comedy-club boy.

LaFrance: What made you want to go onstage and tell jokes?

Edelman: It looked like fun. The comedians all had fun with each other. They all knew each other. They were co-workers. It was a space where you could be a weirdo. The first show I ever saw was called “Comics Come Home.” It was in a huge arena. Denis Leary hosted it. And everyone looked like they were having such a good time. I was, like, 13. I went because I was a big sports fan and I had worked in sports before I was a comedian. I worked for the Red Sox, the Dodgers, and one sad summer for the Brewers.

LaFrance: So you’re a baseball guy—but are you a big Boston sports fan?

Edelman: I’m a huge Boston sports person. The biggest. But you know, I’m largely agnostic. Sometimes I’ll say that onstage and people will boo in New York. And I’m like, Guys, are we really taking this seriously? Come on. We’re all grown-ups. I think we’re all in a place where we can just be chill.

LaFrance: I’m a Phillies fan.

Edelman: Boooooo!

LaFrance: Can we at least both hate the Mets?

Edelman: I kind of like the Mets because they don’t like the Yankees. But also I like the Yankees because I don’t care anymore. I really don’t care that much anymore, but I’m a huge fan. I love sports.

LaFrance: I used to live right by Fenway on Bay State Road.

Edelman: I know exactly where that is.

LaFrance: It was great because I could sit on my little fire escape and hear the game and it was just the most magical thing.

Edelman: So that’s what I love. I’m a connection junkie. And baseball makes great connection. That hum of the crowd. Oh my God. There’s nothing like a hum of the crowd. I love that.

LaFrance: Okay, so even before you leave high school, you knew you wanted to be a comedian.

Edelman: I didn’t really. It was a hobby. It’s still a hobby. I love it, but I’m not super jaded yet. I’m not jaded at all, actually. It’s my one—the one thing I have going for me is curiosity, I guess. Also, Ira Glass likes to talk about how when you’re young, you have a taste. You have a thing that you like. You’re 18 or 20 and then hopefully grow into it. So I’m still trying to grow into my taste.

LaFrance: Right, that’s the classic bit of Ira Glass wisdom about how you know what quality art is before you have fully developed the skills to make it. Do you have a theory of why so many great comedians are Jewish?

Edelman: I think literacy has a lot to do with it. I think it has to do with comedy being slightly déclassé. Jews have always done well in arenas that are slightly déclassé, or unfashionable. If you read that book An Empire of Their Own, by Neal Gabler, it’s all about the Jews who were pioneers in early Hollywood because they desperately wanted to get on Broadway and they couldn’t.

LaFrance: Well ,well, well, now they can!

Edelman: Yes, this is the first Jewish show on Broadway; I’m not sure if people are aware. There has never been another Jewish show on Broadway. There certainly aren’t four at the moment, right now. But I don’t know that a bunch of the comedians that you’re talking about are exactly lighting candles on Friday nights or something. Not to say that comedians who are culturally Jewish don’t feel their Judaism deeply or aren’t deeply invested and engaged with it.

LaFrance: One of the major themes of your show is white nationalism. The show is so funny but the subject matter is intense, obviously. Do you ever feel exhausted by it?

Edelman: I don’t offend easily. I read this really great book called Conflict Is Not Abuse, by Sarah Schulman. But you know what is tough, a little bit? Everyone wants to tell me their anti-Semitism story.

LaFrance: Is that like the people who want to tell you the dream they had last night?

Edelman: The funny thing is, I’ve heard every single one. Once every week, I hear a new one. And, you know, there is still a guy from Boston who calls me “Yarmulke Boy.”

LaFrance: Ugh, really?

Edelman: Yeah.

LaFrance: Who?

Edelman: I won’t say who he is. But he calls me “Yarmulke Boy” and he’s not Jewish and it’s not appropriate. He’ll text me, like, “Hey, YB.” A lot of the comics I grew up admiring in Boston were not good people. I thought I had to be a certain way as a comedian. Turns out I don’t have to be that way. What a relief to find out I didn’t have to be a low-grade bully onstage. My influences were not always sterling. But there are some great ones, too.

LaFrance: That’s very much the Boston comedy scene, especially in that era.

Edelman: I think one of the things about the show that people appreciate is that it eschews easy things, and one of the things it eschews is victimhood. I don’t feel like a victim all of the time. When the Kanye West thing happened, people were like, “I’m so sorry.” And I’m like, “About what? He’s an idiot. He’s such a lackluster anti-Semite.”

LaFrance: Okay, but anti-Semitism has gotten really bad—it’s gotten worse—so I get the impulse for someone to want to say sorry.

Edelman: Oh it’s awful. And I want people to take anti-Semitism seriously. But you know what? Judaism is a tapestry of grief. And it is too complex to be reduced to this prepackaged notion of a turn on the victim wheel for a couple of days. Does that make sense?

LaFrance: It does. Kanye is one tiny piece of this much bigger problem.

Edelman: This much bigger problem we should all be talking about. Which isn’t to say I’m dying to work with Kanye West. In fact, I don’t really want to hang out with him. But also I am curious to sit down with someone like that to ask, “What is going on with you? And also, if you have these notions, I’m happy to talk to you about how you feel.”

LaFrance: That’s very generous.

Edelman: Well, it’s not, though. I don’t think acknowledging someone’s existence is the same thing as cosigning them completely.

LaFrance: Of course not. But a desire to talk to someone is different than just saying, “This person’s an idiot and I’m not going to engage with this at all.”

Edelman: I didn’t engage with the Kanye thing. I didn’t tweet about the Kanye thing. Someone said to me, “You haven’t said anything about Kanye.” I was like, “Do you not know where I would stand on that?” You don’t need to be a mind reader to figure out how Alex Edelman is going to feel about Kanye West.

LaFrance: I’ve talked to so many comics about comedy in this cultural moment—this question of what you can say, whether you can really tell jokes anymore.

Edelman: You can, you absolutely can. I do think that there are a bunch of people who can be too sensitive about jokes. I wrote something for a TV program, and they said, “We can’t put this on. Our audience will be offended.”

LaFrance: What was the joke?

Edelman: It was about how there’s one holiday that’s so dominant in the winter that all the other religions’ holidays struggle to be seen and that holiday, of course … is Hanukkah. And right now it’s really hard because you go to the supermarket and Hanukkah’s everywhere. And there’s also another holiday called Christmas and Christmas is this holiday that celebrates the birth of Santa Claus. It was all very heavy on irony. And they were like, “Our audience will think you’re bashing Christmas.” And I was like, “No.” So I do think there is some of that—irony that is taken at face value. But I also think that tension and comedy are natural partners. And also, by the way, things that are acceptable now won’t be acceptable in a couple years.

LaFrance: But comedy is not supposed to age well. It’s supposed to be ephemeral.

Edelman: A big part of working on this show and keeping it alive is pruning things out of it that seemed okay in 2021 but now seem a little staid, or that seem relevant now—like a clause that acknowledges the present moment that we’re living in. I think of the show, truly, as a story that I’m telling to a group of people. I mean this, Adrienne, it’s a story. It’d be the same thing as if 20 people were sitting around this table with us and Mike Birbiglia said, “Alex, tell us your story.” If I had a reference to something from 2018 in there, everybody would be looking around like, What the fuck is going on?

LaFrance: They’d be like, Is he okay?

Edelman: Right, like Jared Kushner is invoked in the show and now I say, “Trump’s Jewish son-in-law,” because now it’s not a given that everyone knows who Jared Kushner is. There were so many jokes cut from the show or added into the show. It’s a living thing. It is a story I am trying to tell. Not to be pretentious about it.

LaFrance: Do you think that comedy is the highest form of truth?

Edelman: No. Obviously not. Obviously not.

LaFrance: Fine, fine, but—

Edelman: It can make a point in an oblique way that addresses a fact that you can’t make in a straightforward way.

LaFrance: You’re a real theorist. What I mean is—as with novels or great works of visual art, isn’t there truth you can access from great comedy that is otherwise inaccessible?

Edelman: Yeah, but the fact that you asked that question with a bit of an eye roll does speak to the fact that comedy is a really effective Trojan horse for truth, or a great way to hold two contradictory truths at the same time.

LaFrance: A way of acknowledging complexity in the world.

Edelman: But there’s no such thing as a form of truth telling. It’s like saying “Is an oven the most effective way of communicating heat?”

LaFrance: Come on, an oven’s pretty good at communicating heat.

Edelman: Wait until you meet open flame. Open flame kicks oven’s ass.

LaFrance: Are you an extreme extrovert?

Edelman: Noooo. Are you kidding?

LaFrance: No, I’m not kidding! Because you said you wanted to be out talking to people.

Edelman: I’m an extrovert who needs to recharge an introvert battery a lot. And I like safe spaces. And by safe spaces I mean conversations with people who I can say anything to. Where I can say “I’m worried” or “What do you think about this?” I think there’s a real thing where if I have questions about a world I don’t know about, or a perspective I don’t understand, I have lots of friends where I can go, “Hey, can I get your perspective on this thing I don’t understand?”

LaFrance: That’s a very journalistic posture, you know.

Edelman: I really love intense conversation.

LaFrance: Why do you think you’re funny—what made you funny?

Edelman: I think there’s something about wanting to make points in interesting ways.

LaFrance: So wanting to be effective at getting your point across?

Edelman: I don’t know that I crave funniness, really. I crave originality. I crave surprise.

LaFrance: Getting a reaction out of people.

Edelman: The right reaction. Also, I crave connection, and there’s nothing that connects people like funny.

LaFrance: Do you have funny family members?

Edelman: Yes, my grandfather was funny. My grandfather on my father’s side was the funniest. Also my grandmother. My parents are both funny in different ways. My mother will be like, “This is the funniest thing,” and you’ll be like, “It’s a coincidence is what you mean.”

LaFrance: Why do you think so many comedians are emotionally tortured?

Edelman: Everyone’s tortured.

LaFrance: Everyone?

Edelman: Show me a nontortured person, we’re not going to get along. But I’m not tortured! I have shpilkes.

LaFrance: I don’t know what that is.

Edelman: I have anxiety but not, like, clinical anxiety. I just want things to go well. This is a real cliche, but if you’re paying attention, and your job is to be attuned to things, it’s kind of hard not to wrestle with the complexities of that.

LaFrance: Tell me about the art you consume—books, movies, TV.

Edelman: I love Simon Rich. I love Succession and anything else that Jesse Armstrong has done.

LaFrance: Didn’t Adam McKay also produce Succession?

Edelman: He did. I love Adam McKay–style comedy.

LaFrance: I was just telling a friend of mine about a sketch he wrote for SNL—this must have been 20 years ago—called Neil Armstrong: The Ohio Years. The whole premise of it was Neil Armstrong, later in life, and how he never got over how awesome it was to have gone to the moon. And he’s going about his daily life but you hear his internal monologue constantly going, Moon!

Edelman: Do you know my Neil Armstrong joke?

LaFrance: Tell me.

Edelman: I did it on Conan a couple years ago. It’s about meeting Neil Armstrong—and this is true—at the USS Intrepid. I asked him to sign an autograph and he wouldn’t sign an autograph for me. So I start yelling at him. And I said, “Neil Armstrong took a step away from me, and it was a small step for Neil Armstrong.” The joke is also about how no one knows who Michael Collins is. Neil Armstrong: one of the most famous men in American history. Michael Collins, third guy on the mission: not even the most famous Michael Collins! There’s a movie called Michael Collins. It’s about a different guy. I love doing that joke. And I love Adam McKay. I love funny. I love funny but good. I’m not into stuff that isn’t propulsive. I said to Jason Robert Brown, the composer who wrote the music and lyrics for Parade, that Parade is like Schindler’s List if Schindler’s List slapped.

LaFrance: This is true about your own writing—it’s very tightly wound.

Edelman: It should be riveting. Fun has become a dirty word. My shows are fun. It doesn’t mean they’re light. It doesn’t mean they’re not thoughtful or thought-provoking. They need to be fun. Every drama should be fun. Every comedy should be fun. I’m not sitting through anything ever again unless it pulls me in. Ever! I’m done.

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Are we moving too fast for America’s national pastime? Hanna Rosin asks staff writer Mark Leibovich whether the changes MLB is making to the game could help him fall in love with baseball all over again.

Interested in the changes baseball’s making? Read Mark’s article on how Moneyball broke baseball — and how the same people who broke it are back, trying to save it.

This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Hanna Rosin: Okay, first question: Can you just list for me some rituals that baseball players do?

Mark Leibovich: Um, you know, spitting into their hands and rubbing their hands together, staring into space, slapping their chest, Velcro-ing and un-Velcro-ing their batting gloves, tipping their hat, balancing their hat, looking to the right field grandstand, looking to the left field grandstand, crossing themselves.

They invent new ones all the time. It’s completely dynamic. A pitcher might tug at his cap and wiggle his leg when going into a motion.

Rosin: Do people lick their bats?

Leibovich: Apparently Yasiel Puig does.

Rosin: Eww.

Leibovich: Yeah. But no, I think that’s a pretty rare thing. And sounds unsanitary too.

Rosin: And what do these rituals have to do with baseball?

Leibovich: Nothing, except that they have been there forever—and players have always had rituals. Oh, this is a big part of the problem in baseball. This is why the people in charge have moved to make it faster.

Rosin: That is my friend Mark Leibovich, a staff writer at The Atlantic who gets all the best assignments.

I’m Hanna Rosin, and this is Radio Atlantic.

Leibovich: See, if you had known me 30, 25 years ago, you would’ve totally seen me be into a baseball game. But baseball just left me.

Rosin: I’ve known Mark for enough years to see all the fan gear faded. Red Sox hat, Red Sox T-shirts with holes in them. Red Sox socks. I’ve even seen a picture of little Mark at the game with his dad.

Leibovich: Oh my God. The first spring-training game—like, my friends and I would rush home from school to listen to the game on the radio.

Rosin: His love of this game…it was deep.

Leibovich: Every year, my birthday party was all my friends coming, and we would play a game of pickup baseball at the intersection near the little cul-de-sac I grew up on.

But it’s not necessarily like little 7-year-old Mark here. Mean, if you had seen me, I guess I would’ve been in my late 30s. They had these scintillating couple of playoff series where the Red Sox finally came back. I mean, you know, those are some intense sports-watching things.

I mean, this was the culture of my youth, and that is just gone.

Rosin: And is it gone? Because life is just so fast now.

Leibovich: I think that’s part of it. I think baseball has gotten much slower. I mean, games literally took, you know, two and a half hours when I was a kid. Now, you know, as of last year they took three hours, 10 minutes or so.

Rosin: So it’s the two things moving in opposite directions. It’s like: Just as we were speeding up and getting faster, baseball just got slower.

Leibovich: You have these two things moving in opposite directions—baseball getting slower, and our brains getting faster and our attention spans shrinking.

And all of this was moving in a direction antithetical to enjoying baseball.

Rosin: It’s funny;. when you put it that starkly, it actually makes me a little sad. Like we just have no room for anything slow in our busy lives anymore.

Leibovich: Yes. I mean, it’s funny ’cause we have these conversations, and it’s like, “Oh, baseball is to blame. It’s these self-indulgent ritual-doers who are Velcro-ing and un-Velcro-ing their batting gloves all day.” Maybe this is just our problem. I mean, there are a lot of slow, reflective things we don’t do anymore.

Rosin: So, Mark: When you set out to write about baseball, you thought that the sport was dying. And then, it did something to save itself...maybe. What did baseball do?

Leibovich: They have initiated a set of rules [in Major League Baseball]. One, and most importantly, to make the game go faster. And two: certain rules to make there be more action and offense. Less waiting around in baseball; more fun to watch.

Rosin: Got it. So just like: faster everything. More exciting.

Rosin: What’s one thing they did?

Leibovich: Well, the big thing is a pitch clock.

A pitch clock is a new tool that has appeared in every major-league ballpark this year. In which there’s this big clock in the outfield and also behind home plate—

Rosin: —like a literal clock.

Leibovich: A literal clock. It counts down from 15 seconds.

A pitcher now has 15 seconds to pitch the ball, or 20 seconds if there’s someone on base. And the batter has to be in the box ready to hit by the eight-second mark. So there are only eight seconds left. The batter has to be ready.

Rosin: And what else did they do?

__

Bigger bases

Leibovich: One of the things they did was they made the bases bigger, which, you know, people can understand. It’s a bigger base now. What that does is it encourages stolen bases. It makes running bases a safer thing, ’cause you have more of a safe haven to grab onto, or slide into.

They’re reducing pickoff throws, which took forever. And things like that. So they’re encouraging more offense.

Rosin: This isn’t technical baseball language, but it does feel like a real vibe shift.

Leibovich: It very much is. And it’s hard to explain, but when you’re actually watching a game, there is urgency.

Urgency: It is not a word that anyone would ever associate with baseball in recent years.

Now, you sit and you watch—and people are not screwing around. And you sort of internalize that as a viewer or a listener, and you say, “Wait a minute; things are happening faster. I better pay closer attention. I better not check my phone as closely.”

And so the whole vibe is, yes, maybe less relaxing. But ultimately more satisfying, because more is happening, and it’s happening faster.

Rosin: And why did they make all these changes?

Leibovich: Well, part of it is just: Baseball was falling further and further behind things like football and basketball and other sports that are a lot more compelling.

They go much faster and, frankly, are more national spectacles. Like everyone gathers to watch the Super Bowl.

So I actually went to a World Series game last fall between the Phillies and the Astros. And I drove up to Philadelphia. And, you know, it was a World Series game, and it was a no-hitter. The Astros pitchers—four of them—combined to no-hit the Phillies. This was historic, or theoretically it was historic.

No one really noticed. No one remembers it. And this is a World Series game—the likes of which are routinely being outrated on TV by early-season NFL games.

I mean, as our culture speeds up, as brains speed up—you know, cell phones and computers and attention spans. Just the whole culture has sped up. Baseball has slowed down.

And finally, they sort of decided to, all at once, just get very tough and say, “Okay, there is now a clock in baseball.” Lo and behold, it has already shaved 25, maybe 30 minutes off of games in the first couple of months in this season.

__

Theo Epstein

Rosin: So. Who is the main architect of speeding baseball up?

Leibovich: There are a few of them. But probably the best known is a guy named Theo Epstein, who is this legendary figure in baseball.

He was the youngest general manager in history. He was named general manager of the Boston Red Sox at age 28. He is known for bringing the first World Series championship to Boston in 86 years. He then left the Red Sox and went to the Chicago Cubs—who had an even longer World Series drought—and he delivered after 108 years.

So he sort of has this legend attached to him. And he left the Cubs a couple of years ago, and he joined Major League Baseball as a consultant.

__

Moneyball

Rosin: Isn’t Theo Epstein associated with the whole “Moneyball revolution” in baseball?

Leibovich: Yes. He did not pioneer it. Billy Beane of the Oakland A’s is given credit for that. But Theo Epstein is known as the chief disciple who applied some of these new theories in baseball and actually won World Series with it for the Boston Red Sox and the Chicago Cubs.

Rosin: Tell me if this is right. This is what I understand about Moneyball. Okay. I read the book; I saw the movie. So Moneyball was a revolution that, as I recall, was supposed to modernize baseball. Like, instead of tracking one set of statistics about players, they tracked a different set of statistics about players. Which turned out to be the actual critical factors in winning a game, and allowed teams with fewer resources to beat rich, fancy teams.

But also what I understood about Moneyball was that it was supposed to have fixed baseball.

So didn’t we fix baseball?

Leibovich: You know, very interesting terminology here, and we’re gonna try to make it not complicated. It fixed baseball for teams trying to win baseball games—i.e., the Oakland A’s, right? Who have less resources and did more with less.

The innovations we’re seeing now? It’s not about winning baseball games. Because the commissioner of baseball [Rob Manfred] and now Theo Epstein, his consultant—they work for all of baseball. They work for the fans; they work for the interests of entertainment.

So it has nothing to do with a competitive advantage between the Oakland A’s and the New York Yankees. It has everything to do with the entertainment attention span of someone watching a Disney movie or playing a video game or watching the Super Bowl or something like that.

Rosin: Moneyball fixed one set of problems, but then created another set of problems.

Leibovich: Well, they created a blueprint for teams to do better with less resources—but it was a terrible thing to watch. I mean, it created more walks, more strikeouts, slower action. So yeah: I mean, it solved one problem. It created any number of problems if you are a consumer of entertainment.

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Mental-Skills Coaching

Rosin: You know, I get why they need to move faster. One of the things that you wrote about from the slow era, which I really appreciate, was this mental-skills coaching. I was surprised and maybe happily surprised to learn that they teach baseball players how to meditate in real time while they’re on the field.

Leibovich: In a sense, yes. I mean, that’s been part of the 21st-century revolution in baseball, and in the service of giving baseball players and teams a slightly better competitive advantage. They have taught mental skills, imaging, little mini-meditations, visualizations, things that you do. Because sports, especially baseball, is a big mind game, right?

You need to put yourself in a very relaxed state, or a state that puts you in a good position to succeed.

Rosin: That seems so nice and enlightened, and that’s what we tell our children to do when they’re stressed out. That’s what we tell everyone. Like, we’re all supposed to slow down and meditate.

Leibovich: Yeah; it might be nice. But it also gets introduced into the culture, which by and large introduces more time and dawdling into the culture of baseball. So David Ortiz, Nomar Garciaparra, Robinson Canó: They have these rituals where they take their deep breaths, and they clap, and they sort of see the field.

And then the owner of the Seattle Mariners told me this: He was teaching his son’s Little League team, and all of a sudden half the Little League team is trying to imitate Robinson Canóby stepping out during the at-bat and doing his little ritual. And so: “Sorry, we gotta wait for Jimmy over here to do his little Robinson Canó–like ritual.”

And then John Stanton, the owner of the Mariners, said to me, “Look, we have just taught an entire generation of kids that it’s okay to pace around the mound for however long and waste all this time.”

And I guarantee you, it would be a lot more interesting to watch Johnny try to dunk like LeBron James or kick a soccer ball like Messi or something than it is Johnny from Seattle trying to imitate Robinson Canó between the 2-and-1 and 2-and-2 pitch.

And so, again, in a very crude way: The pitch clock sort of disrupts all of that all at once.

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Juan Soto

Rosin: You know what: We haven’t talked about how the players feel about all of this.

Leibovich: Hmm.

Rosin: You talked to Padres star player Juan Soto about the pitch clock. Let’s listen to that.

Leibovich: Do you think the clock is a good thing? Like, did the times of the baseball games used to bother you? Or did you ever get impatient, sort of waiting for pitches to come and stuff, just watching a game when you’re playing in it?

Juan Soto: I feel like if you enjoy the games, you gotta give them time to think. And to see, look around and look at everything. I mean: I know for fans sometimes it gets boring. But for baseball players, they will never get bored.

Leibovich: So you were never bored at a baseball game.

Soto: No, never. Never. It’s never too long. It’s never too short. I’m just enjoying the game.

Rosin: What was your impression of what he was saying there?

Leibovich: He was saying like, “Look; this is my life. This is my job. This is what I love to do. I don’t care if you’re bored.” I mean, I’ve had many, many people I interviewed for this story say that a million different ways. Like: “I can’t worry about whether you’re entertained or not. You know, I’m gonna get fired if I lose this many games. Or if my batting average dips below  2.0, whatever.”

No one was saying, “Oh look—the ratings from last night’s game were higher than the night before. Oh, ticket sales are up around baseball. We are being more entertaining.” No one cares about that, huh? Nor should they.

Rosin: So, the players feel one way—and we, the fans, feel another. So I guess that’s why Padres star Manny Machado, in his very first pitch-clock game, was like, “No, thank you.”

After the break: Can Mark learn to love baseball again?

__

Rosin: You’ve been to a pitch-clock game.

Leibovich: The first pitch-clock game.

Rosin: Ooh!

Leibovich: Well, the first spring-training pitch-clock game.

Rosin: You were in a box, sitting with all these guys, right?

Leibovich: It wasn’t a box. It was actually a couple of rows up from the field in a spring-training game, with, basically, the orchestrators of this from Major League Baseball. One of them was Theo Epstein. Another guy was Morgan Sword, who is basically the director of on-field operations for Major League Baseball, who has been putting this all in place.

Rosin: And what were you guys talking about?

Leibovich: Well, mostly we were watching the game. I mean, this is like the first day of school for Morgan and Theo. This is this thing they had been envisioning and trying to put in place for months, and even years. And this was the first game in which it was actually happening

Rosin: And were they nervous, like on edge? What was the vibe?

Leibovich: Morgan was extremely nervous. He was a basket case, and usually he’s pretty chill. So yeah, that was pretty glaring.

Rosin: Why was he a basket case?

Leibovich: He was a basket case because he had been thinking about everything that could possibly go wrong. First of all, he’s being scrutinized. Everyone in baseball is watching to see how this first pitch-clock game is gonna go off. But he’s also spent so much time talking to umpires, talking to players, talking to managers, talking to game officials, talking to clock operators. You know, it’s basically starting up a whole cabinet department within baseball that didn’t exist before.

And so obviously on Day One, you’re gonna be nervous.

—

Leibovich: So what’s your experience as a fan been during this interregnum for you? What about your son?

Theo Epstein: Yeah. I mean, my son—my 15-year-old—I can’t help but notice his lack of desire to sit through a three-and-a-half-hour game, really.

Rosin: So who is that?

Leibovich: That was Theo Epstein. He was telling me about what his personal experience is as a baseball fan during this time when he is not affiliated with the team.

Rosin: And he’s saying his son is bored? Like, can’t watch baseball anymore?

Leibovich: Yeah.

Epstein: And especially during the pandemic, I noticed so much of his life existed through gaming. Interacting and doing commerce and everything else, like all through the computer. And Fortnite—it’s like a 10-, 15-minute game. Obviously, it’s a bit of a cliché that the Gen Z generation grew up on their phones.

Leibovich: Yeah. The patience. it’s not a cliché; it’s brain chemistry. It’s real. It is very real.

Rosin: So it’s not just about our attention span. I guess what he is panicking about is that he’s got these sons who should be baseball fans, but they can barely pay attention for more than 10 seconds.

So it makes you feel like the future of the sport is not—

Rosin: Yeah. So this is a multitiered problem, right? So not only are older former fans’ brains adapting to a faster life and moving away from baseball; there’s also this new generation that doesn’t even see what the fuss is about to begin with, and aren’t exactly reading Moneyball and reading George Will columns and watching Field of Dreams to see what the fuss is about.

Rosin: Yes. It’s actually pretty cool that you were present at the creation of new baseball—the new era of baseball.

Leibovich: I’m glad. I’m glad you appreciate this. Because this was a momentous day. And of course it was also a very mundane day, but yeah: It felt momentous.

Rosin: Right. The first-ever game in the new era of baseball. Like, was it more fun? Did you like it? Did time move faster?

Leibovich: So the game was very crisp. It was 3 to 2; I think Seattle won. Basically, all these executives, they were rooting not for the Mariners or the Padres. They were rooting for this game to be very, very fast. ’Cause they knew everyone was looking at this as like, Oh, this is the new baseball. We want it to work.

And yeah, it was very enjoyable.

I was very glad that the game took less than two hours and 30 minutes. I know Theo Epstein was; he wanted to go take a nap. The person to my right wanted to catch a flight back to New York or wherever he was going.

Rosin: So people were living their lives. I gotta catch a flight, I gotta do this, I gotta do that. And it fit into their busy lives.

Leibovich: Much more so.

Rosin: Hmm. I can’t really tell if you, Mark Leibovich, were into the game. Like, you know when you’re into a game.

Leibovich: Yeah.

Rosin: Like, I’ve seen you be into a football game.

Leibovich: Yeah. Have you ever seen me be into a baseball game?

Rosin: No.

Leibovich: See, if you had known me 30, 25 years ago, you would’ve totally seen me be into a baseball game. But baseball just left me.

Rosin: You used the word enjoyable? Enjoyable is like a dead word. Were you into the game? Personally, I prefer just fast games; I like watching basketball, I like watching soccer. I want to maybe get on board with faster baseball.

Leibovich: Yes.

Rosin: And so I guess I’m wondering where you are. Like, are you on board with faster baseball? Like when you were there, were you like, Ah, this is gonna work?

Leibovich: Yeah. I saw a minor-league game a few years ago that had a clock, and I was like, Yeah, this is it. This is totally it. I was watching an NBA playoff game with my wife and my daughter Nell, who said, “You know, there’s something really nice about a game that you know is gonna last two hours and 20 minutes.” There’s a clock on the NBA game. And if you’re a soccer fan, it’s gonna take two hours. The commissioner of baseball himself, Rob Manfred, said to me, “Look, what in your life do you really want to do for more than two and a half hours at a shot?” Even people sitting up in the front office, or the commissioner of baseball, would be like: Wow, do we really have to watch this for more than two and a half hours?

Rosin: Yeah. Like the people who are supposed to be…

Leibovich: Management, managers, commissioners. Things like that.

Rosin: I guess I just have to accept that this is where we are now.

Like, we are just not people who have patience for a three-hour pastime. We just don’t have it.

Leibovich: Right. But here’s the thing: Games literally did not take three hours in 1969. They took much less, like two and a half hours. Or probably less than that. I don’t know; maybe people then would have had less patience. But again, these two things are moving in opposite directions.

Rosin: Let’s say we shaved enough time off baseball that it lasted the same amount of time as it did when you were a kid.

Leibovich: Right.

Rosin: Do you think you could ever feel about baseball the same way you felt when you were a kid? Do you actually feel like you could feel the same way?

Leibovich: I mean, look: Can you feel the same way about something as a 50-something-year-old as you did when you were 7 or 8?

I mean, you have a much less mature brain when you’re a kid, for better or for worse. You see the world much more clearly, much more innocently. With much less sense of proportion, and so forth. So, I don’t know, and maybe my fandom growing up is shaped by nostalgia. Now that I think about it and talk about it, I would think so—because right now I associate it with good times for my youth.

Rosin: So it feels like where we are this summer is that we—the fans—really want baseball to change. The players are somewhat resistant. The rules are in place. Do you think that this will save baseball?

Leibovich: I think it will help baseball. I think early results are that it has helped baseball.

If you go by the actual shrinking time of games, if you go by the ratings and the ticket sales and so forth, the first few months of the season have been very encouraging. The larger point is, you know: Is this putting a Band-Aid on a larger sort of existential problem that baseball is ultimately not going to be able to deal with?

Rosin: All right. So now that you’re done with your reporting, and there are no legends inviting you to sit in their boxes with them and talk to Juan Soto, are you gonna go to any games?

Leibovich: Yeah. I mean, again, a lot of it comes down to…

Rosin: Was that like “Yeah,” or was that like “Yes”?

Leibovich: Yes. And I’ll tell you what probably the decider will be. I mean, I’m parochial. I care about my team, the Red Sox. The Red Sox were not supposed to be good this year. They’re kind of mediocre, but they’re an entertaining team, and I have cared about them. So I have watched. If they completely implode, I’ll probably stop watching. So like Juan Soto and him wanting good numbers, I want my team to do well. And I will probably drop off. But if I do go to a game this year, I’m thrilled that it’s not gonna go past 11 o’clock.

Rosin: Right. So it’s love, but it’s conditional love.

Leibovich: Totally.

Rosin: Like, they’ve won you back, but conditionally.

Leibovich: Hundred percent.

Rosin: I think where I’m at is: I still would rather see a Washington Spirit game. But if somebody, say a child—anybody’s child—asks me to go to a game, I won’t recoil in horror. I’ll be like, “Yeah, okay, sure. I’ll try it.”

Leibovich: Here’s what I’ll say to you. And it’s very intimate. But I’m gonna invite you to a game. We both live in Washington, and so we’re gonna go. And whoever wants to join us can join us. And hopefully, the recoiling in horror will not transpire. And if it does, we can just leave.

__

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by A.C. Valdez. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid. Our engineer is Rob Smierciak. Our fact-checker is Michelle Ciarrocca. Thank you also to managing editor Andrea Valdez. Our podcast team includes Jocelyn Frank, Becca Rashid, Ethan Brooks, Kevin Townsend, Theo Balcomb, and Vann Newkirk. I’m Hanna Rosin, and we’ll be back with a new episode every Thursday.

If you like it, tell some Red Sox fans or some Yankees fans; whatever. Tell all the fans.

The best way to cap a weekend road trip, I can assure you, is not by jostling for an EV charger outside a Sheetz gas station in Scranton, Pennsylvania. It’s Memorial Day, and I’m in a runt of a rental car trying to outmaneuver a Ford F-150 Lightning. Thirty minutes of waiting for a charger to free up is bringing out my most Darwinian instincts: Like an eagle swooping down to nab a goat, my tiny black Chevy Bolt EUV swings into the spot before the pickup even knows what’s happening. The adrenaline rush of sweet victory is immediately tempered by an emotional letdown. My car needs an hour of charging before it’s ready to go again.

I didn’t ask for any of this. Three days earlier, I had booked Hertz’s cheapest option—in this case, the “Manager’s Special”—assuming I’d end up with a forgettable sedan. What I did not consider was an electric car. “Sorry, it’s all we have,” the man at the Hertz counter in downtown Brooklyn said as he handed over the keys. With no forewarning, no experience driving an EV, and virtually no guidance, what was supposed to be a restful trip upstate was anything but. Just a few hours of highway driving would sap the battery, leaving me and my friends scrounging for public chargers in desolate parking lots, the top floors of garages, and hotels with plugs marked for guests only. It was a crash course in EVs for four people who had never heard of CCS versus CHAdemo, the 80/20 rule, and Level 3 chargers.

Maybe the same thing will happen to you, if it hasn’t already. After my disastrous weekend, I talked to three rental-car experts: All of them were familiar with the phenomenon of the surprise EV, a result of how much the industry is leaning into electric cars. Only 4 percent of Americans own an EV, but Hertz plans for a quarter of its fleet to be electric by the end of next year.

These are great, potentially planet-saving machines, but the ordeal made me want to wage a slash-and-burn campaign against all of them. A surprise EV rental, it turns out, is tailor-made to amplify the downsides of electric cars, especially among impressionable newbies. “You know, it's really not smart,” Loren McDonald, an EV consultant, told me. “If they’re out of gas cars, they’re out of gas cars, but they’ve got to eliminate the surprise thing.” The promised transition away from dirty gas cars only works if people actually want to buy EVs, as all of the government tax breaks and Will Ferrell ads make abundantly clear. Yet the very first time that many people experience an electric car will be not at a dealership, but rather on a rental-car trip.

EVs may work great for the business traveler who is taking their Tesla from the airport to the hotel and to a client meeting across town, but things are way more complicated for  road-trippers. What makes an EV rental such a struggle is that it is a rental: The overwhelming majority of EV owners charge their cars at home, waking up to a full charge every morning. Unless you luck out and have a place to charge overnight at your hotel or Airbnb, you’re stuck with America’s wild west of public EV chargers.

[Read: The one thing holding back electric vehicles in America]

Plugs are not only hard to find, they’re sometimes full or broken—and very often too slow for anything but overnight charging. When my Chevy Bolt was just about running on empty in the Finger Lakes, the closest charger I could find was blocked by a blue Tesla loitering after a fill-up. The next best option was so slow that after four hours of charging, the car had added a measly 70 miles to its range—roughly what a gas pump could do for a similarly sized car in well under 30 seconds. Plenty of Tesla Superchargers popped up on Google Maps, but none of them worked with my hapless Bolt.

If I had known an EV was coming my way, I would have dutifully planned out my charging strategy ahead of time instead of sitting in a Sheetz parking lot and simmering with road rage. Gas drivers tend to find the nearest pump whenever they’re low on fuel, but with an EV, every time you park could end up as a missed opportunity to get a bit of juice. Because of the quirks of lithium-ion batteries, you might save time charging your EV in bursts, as opposed to doing it all in one go; with this in mind, drivers learn to compulsively check EV charging apps—Plugshare, Chargehub, Chargeway—for nearby stations. Compared with filling up on gas, “it’s just a completely different experience,” says Ellen Kennedy, an expert on carbon-free transportation at the think tank RMI.

Some guidance on these matters helps—but all Hertz had provided me with was a sheet of paper listing three nearby EV chargers, which were really not germane to my out-of-town trip. “It would be like a business person going to an office-rental store back in the late ’80s to get an IBM Selectric,” McDonald said, “and the person at the desk says, Oh, we’re out of those. Here’s a Macintosh computer.” Laura Smith, Hertz’s vice president of customer experience, told me that the company emails a link to an online EV guide to every customer who explicitly books an electric car. Because my car was a surprise, I didn’t get one. (Smith said that Hertz has begun to put QR codes pointing to the online guide on the keychains for all its EVs.)

[Read: EVs make parking even more annoying]

At this point, Hertz has one of the biggest EV fleets in the entire world, an army of tens of thousands of Teslas, Polestars, and GMs, with an order of magnitude more on the way. Perhaps Hertz is “over-fleeted” with electric cars, Jonthan Weinberg, the CEO of the rental-car site AutoSlash, told me. That means that if the car you wanted isn’t available, the one you get instead is more likely to be an EV. Perusing Hertz’s website suggests that EVs may indeed be overstocked across the country. The three cheapest rental-car options I could find for this weekend at New York’s JFK airport are all EVs. At LAX, the cheapest EV will run you $40 a day, compared with $88 for the Manager’s Special. And at Midway in Chicago, the only available cars are all EVs.

Other rental-car juggernauts aren’t at Hertz’s numbers yet. Both Avis and Enterprise offer EVs, but in nowhere near the same numbers—and mostly as luxury cars. “We will not introduce large numbers of EVs into our fleet until we have clarity that the customer experience meets our standards,” Lisa Martini, a spokesperson for Enterprise Holdings, which owns Enterprise, National, and Alamo, wrote in an email.

Expect that to change—and quickly. Car-rental companies buy something like one-tenth of all new cars in America, and EVs are tempting options, Sharky Laguana, the president of the American Rental Car Association, told me: They are far easier to maintain than conventional cars, containing a tiny fraction of the moving parts. EVs also seem to hold their value, a major factor considering that rental-car companies tend to sell off their cars after a year or two. “I just can’t see us waiting until the last minute and then pulling the trigger” on the EV transition, Laguana said. “I think that we would want to be way ahead of it.”

The auto industry seems to think that the turn toward EV rentals will help convince people that gas is not the future—and prevent them from buying cars that may be spewing carbon for next decade-plus. After all, what is a car rental if not a very long test drive? Hertz has suggested that its own embrace of EVs represents “a critical step toward adoption.” Similarly, the CEO of GM recently called its partnership with Hertz “a huge step forward for emissions reduction and EV adoption that will help create thousands of new EV customers for GM.” But for that to be true, renting an EV has to be a good experience, not a last-minute surprise that upends your whole trip.

It could have been that way for me: Heading out of the Hertz garage for the first time, I weaved through New York traffic and was spit out of the Holland Tunnel in New Jersey. Slowly, the initial EV shock turned into the bliss of clicking on cruise control on a traffic-free highway. The Chevy Bolt was a zippy little engine that could, a car that screamed boring Prius but had the acceleration and torque more reminiscent of a Porsche. Not even an hour later, though, somewhere on I-80, a ding erupted from the dashboard: Only 20 miles left on the charge. So much for that.

“But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction—what has that got to do with a room of one’s own? I will try to explain.”
— Virginia Woolf

That I haven’t written, will not write
can’t mean I am not writing
about having written, about standing still
in the hereafter. I have, of course,
outlined the arguments, tried on
the opening gambit like a silk blouse.
Can’t mean I didn’t gather
a bouquet from my wild—
a sliver of wit, a peck of curiosity,
a crisp riposte, the curve of a dimple—
to offer you. “To have offered,” as in:
“to have had it be offered to (someone).”
I did try to be prepositional,
to stray near you.

I rehearsed the syntax—should I
first: apologize? confess? joke?
—a fern here, a lily there,
the subject here, the object there. Run
on I creased the sentences
into flightless origami; drafted monographs on silence—its juicy neurosis, its daft meter, my poor scansion. The predictable comparisons.Alphabetized my 12 memories; abridged the rest.
Check
and check.

By the next edit:
I would have drawn
the curtains against the fret
of your neck.
I could have shaded my eyes
from your laughter,
I will have pruned the light
branching on my skin where
you might have taken root;
I should have folded up the map
to my heres. Conditional
as they all were, anyway.

Yet I keep walking
into these stanzas—where you stay
baffling the rafters,
a rasp of feathers.
I nest into the floss
of those four hours,
story myself to sleep.

So, hi. As promised, I have moved
the furniture and flooded the room
with shade. My hands are now free
to file night further, further into day.
Sorry, sorry, on my way
to write you, the words left me
at a stoop. The one where, for e.g.:
“jasmine grows,” “is growing,” “will grow.”
In being so out of time, tenses
“have mattered,” “are mattering,”
“will.”

From bumping into a stranger to making amends for a past wrong, it's important to know how to apologize in Japanese.