Seizing Yesterday

Jonathan Goldstein’s New Book Gets a Grip on the Past

Fringe ArtsKatie McGroarty — Published October 9, 2012

By the time you hit 40, there are certain things that are expected. Things like cars and houses and children. Not only that, but cars that don’t need weekly jumpstarts, and houses that have your name on the deed. Rent cheques are supposed to be obsolete by the time life’s halfway point hits, and your credit card probably should not have an outstanding balance.
Jonathan Goldstein scoffs at these expectations.
Goldstein, Wiretap host, This American Life producer and supremely unprepared 45-year-old looks back on the weeks leading up to his birthday in his latest book, I’ll Seize the Day Tomorrow, while answering tough questions about nostalgia, naps and his ex-telemarketing career.

ON SADNESS & REALITY TV

JG: I guess [ I’ll Seize the Day Tomorrow ] is kind of like watching reality TV. In some ways, you may feel better about yourself in comparison with the people you’re watching, like, ‘I’m not as fucked up as they are.’ […] If people can read the book and feel superior to me and think, ‘Well, at least I’m not that sad sap,’ I can bring a little bit of happiness to someone’s life, I guess that’s good.

ON NOT BEING TWENTYISH ANYMORE

There’s always a struggle, but I mean, life is a struggle. You have a different kind of confidence, you have a track record, and you know that you can work through all kinds of setbacks and things like that.
Adolescence is hard. It’s exciting and everything, but it’s difficult, you are just kind of figuring your place in the world. You don’t know who you are, and it’s exciting to figure it out, but you are more sensitive, or at least I was.
You’re more defensive and you’re, I guess, more vulnerable. But in ways that are wonderful as well, you’re quick to fall in love and quick to get angry.
At one point at the end of the book, I’m talking to my dad about getting old, and he’s talking about the experience of someone offering him a seat on the subway. It was a kind of milestone for him, to be offered a seat and be perceived as on old man as the first time. He liked it, he felt like he had hit a point of his life where he didn’t have to fight for those seats anymore, and he felt like he had earned it and was respected. It’s also cool to see that you can be in your 70s and still hit all kinds of milestones and that doesn’t stop.

Somewhere, I have a box of rejection letters. And I’m not talking about the New Yorker—I’m talking ‘bout like, zines.

ON THE MUNDANE & THE MINUTIA

I guess so much of this book is really about doing nothing.
They say that writers have to be sort of economical with their experiences; they spend so much time writing and working that when they get out of the house and go run errands for an hour, they have to turn that into grist for the mill somehow. They have to turn that into something to write about, and that’s difficult.
For me, the way that my mind works—it’s perfectly suited to writing about minutia, and kind of nothing stuff, like having a kind of microscopic perspective; it’s observational comedy, in a way.

ON THIS AMERICAN LIFE OF A TELEMARKETER

In my early thirties I was just starting to get into radio; I was just hired at This American Life, and that was basically my first real job.
Before that, I was telemarketing and getting by on some freelance work. Ironically, I was telemarketing selling The Gazette over the phone on and off for 10 years. It’s funny, right? It’s gone full circle. How do you like that, huh? I sure showed them.
I was able to kind of call myself a writer, as opposed to a telemarketer, although I was probably spending more of my time telemarketing than actually writing. I really liked a lot of people that I worked with there. They were a lot of marginal people in some way, but I guess I was too.

ON NAPS & NOSTALGIA

In regards to the path not taken, I remember fondly back to a time when I didn’t have deadlines, I had time to fuck around and write in my journal. Some stuff would be bad, and I remember wishing that I had deadlines.
Now that I do I’m sort of nostalgic for that time, not taking into account that time was also filled with tremendous anxiety, because I didn’t know if I was any good, and I didn’t know if anyone would ever want to read anything that I had ever written.
But there was a lot of freedom: I could lie in bed, stare at the ceiling and get depressed and take a lot of naps. But that’s nostalgia in a nutshell, I guess.

ON CARPE DIEM & WIRETAP

See, what happened with me and radio—I spent my 20s learning how to write and how to get published, but I never could. Or, I had very limited success. Somewhere, I have a box of rejection letters. And I’m not talking about the _New Yorker_—I’m talking ‘bout, like, zines.
Man, I’ve never used this expression, but I do a certain type of experimental writing and see where that goes, and have the time and freedom to explore that. It’s written very much in the universe of the radio show. We’re always writing from a particular kind of persona, and I think that that voice is definitely firmly rooted in the universe of Wiretap.
But, I have found some new terrain and I was proud of that. It was a nice feeling to end something, and to feel at the last minute that you were finding something new. And I think that this book contains that kind of moments.

I’ll Seize the Day Tomorrow Launch / Oct. 9 / La Sala Rossa (4848 St. Laurent Blvd.) / 7:00 p.m.