Parenthood, Ambivalence, and Mourning

Abby and Patrick welcome novelist and academic Jordy Rosenberg to discuss his brand-new novel, Night Night Fawn. Alternately hilarious and devasting, Night Night Fawn is written in the voice of Barbara Rosenberg, an embittered New York Jewish woman penning a deathbed memoir that documents her many disappointments and frustrations – with life, love, friendship, money, and, above all her trans son, whom she hallucinates as a large and ominous bird. Night Night Fawn is also incredibly overdetermined with respect to genre, representing an effort on Rosenberg’s part to write from the perspective of a fictionalized version of his own mother. On yet another level, it’s a sustained interrogation of the complex and painful interactions between material conditions and ideological systems, the forces that shape our experiences of family, class, religion, and ethnicity, and the specific histories of twentieth century American Jewishness as it relates to Zionism and the horrors of our twenty-first century present. In this wide-ranging conversation, Abby, Patrick, and Jordy discuss the social reproduction of bigotry; the relationship between ethnonationalism and the heteropatriarchal family form; the ethics and aesthetics of representation; the contemporary landscape of the political novel, and much, much more.

Selected Works Cited:

Jordy Rosenberg, Night Night Fawn: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/689017/night-night-fawn-by-jordy-rosenberg/ 

Rosenberg, Confessions of the Fox: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/556691/confessions-of-the-fox-by-jordy-rosenberg/

Rosenberg, “Gender Trouble on Mother’s Day”: https://avidly.org/2014/05/09/gender-trouble-on-mothers-day/

Rosenberg, “The Daddy Dialectic”: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-daddy-dialectic/

Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia”

Karl Marx, Capital, Vol I

Leon Trotsky, “Literature and Revolution”

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