Creator and host of This American Life, Ira Glass and one of Israel’s most famous authors, Etgar Keret, boarded a bus headed out of Tel Aviv and the podcast Half-Baked Stories about my Dead Mother was born. Now the two storytellers combine their skills for an evening of powerful and funny stories.
“Etgar told me a story that went off like a dense little bomb of feeling – really one of the most remarkable things I’d ever heard – and I thought ‘I have no idea how this can be a show but we have to make it into a show,'” Glass explains.
It was a story about his mom. Etgar had spent his life writing books on every conceivable subject, but somehow was never able to write about his mom. Then he started writing these tiny stories, each just four or five paragraphs long, that capture different sides of her. His mom, Orna Keret, was complicated. She was vengeful and loving. Maria in West Side Story and Thanos in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Capable of extreme action.
Glass has spent his life telling stories about extraordinary ordinaries. “I’ve been putting together collections of stories every single week for decades on my radio show,” says Glass. “This is one of the most extraordinary and enjoyable sets of stories I’ve ever been lucky enough to work with. They’re beautiful, and it’s fun presenting them with Etgar." Keret has an affinity for the absurd and a penchant for shaping dreams into logic. “When I began publishing my stories, they were immediately classed as “fantastic” and “unrealistic” but I was just trying to tell things as they were. It was only when I started sharing my mom’s life story with Ira and saw him listening the way you listen to a fairytale that I realized that the stories I write are fantastical because I was raised by a fantastical mother who made me take the surreal for granted.”
The podcast reflects simultaneously the intimacy of normal life that is neither the zeitgeist of This American Life, nor the quasi-reality of Keret’s imagination. In a live performance of their podcast about Etgar’s mother, Glass and Keret bring Orna and their own storytelling prowess to life.