TIME: The last few years have been a heavy time. What role do you think humorous writing has to play when so much of politics and even culture is focused on doom and gloom?Well, I get all my news from late-night TV clips. That’s how I’m processing things. They seem to be telling the truth more.If you can get people to just get over themselves, you really are doing a public service. The other day I was with a friend and she said, “Look at that man over in the corner.
TIME: In your books, you both find humor in mortality and death. Do you find it cathartic to write about the particular absurdities of loss?It’s naturally funny. My oldest friend’s parents both died in the past 10 years. [After the deaths] they were sitting Shiva and couldn’t move for days. They were going crazy sitting there, non-practicing Jews except for this funeral, and all they did was crack jokes.I never find writing cathartic. Nothing’s real to me until I write about it.
TIME: Are there things you feel you can write after losing a loved one that you couldn’t write while they were alive?I remember I wrote about my grandmother when she was alive. I put someone like her in a story. She wore her hair in a 1960s bouffant still into the ’90s. I said it was like a hot air balloon, and she was very hurt by that. There were worse things in the story, but that’s what worried her. I thought: I’ll never do that again.