Author photo by Sigrid Estrada

If Ian Frazier were in a buddy movie, he would play both the straight guy and the comedic nit wit. His non-fiction books Travels In Siberia and Great Plains are both tour de forces in travel writing. It is his comic persona, however, that he has mined to uproarious effect with his latest offering, The Cursing Mommy’s Book Of Days (published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux), his debut novel. It’s based on his popular Shouts And Murmurs character in the New Yorker magazine, where he has been a staff writer for twenty years. The Cursing Mommy character follows the daily boozy tribulations of a stay-at-home mom of two boys who possesses the vocabulary of a sailor and the liver of Keith Richards.

In a Q&A session at the New School, the 61-year-old former Brooklynite, who now calls Montclair, New Jersey, home, sat down to talk about The Cursing Mommy’s Book Of Days.

JV: How did you come up with this crazy character?

Frazier: My wife was driving with these little girls in the back seat who were Mormons and very well brought up and something happened in the road and my wife said, “Shit, gaddam!” The little girl said to my daughter, “Lauren, your mommy cursed.” Just from that we started talking about the “Cursing Mommy” and I did a short piece in a newsletter and I just started writing more of them. My editor at the New Yorker saw it and thought it was funny so I wrote one and they bought it. My first one broke by a long margin the record for the greatest amount of curse words on a page.

How did writing a novel differ from non-fiction?

It was more like a performance. I regarded it as improvisational theater. With a non-fiction book you have notes and something you’re going to talk about. To promote Siberia I went on the Steven Colbert show and I’d never done that before. I was very up for doing his show in terms of adrenaline and fear. It was really fun. I thought I’d like to do something like that in writing rather than having notes and a place I want to go, so it was more like improvisation

Did you fear your Mommy wouldn’t grow and change?

I’ve heard novelists say that there is one thing they concentrate on. For me there is one phrase, “A client of Larry’s.” There’s something about that phrase, the guy’s client. This book is based on the mother of a friend of mine who would say things like, “Oh we out with a client of Don’s and we all got drunk.” I kept hoping that the voice would suggest things.

Did you have any real life inspiration?

All this stuff really happened. I live in New Jersey, I have two kids, I have two sisters. I never heard my grandmothers come close to swearing. My mother would say damn and hell. My sisters and I and many women I know talk like the cursing mom. They wouldn’t restrain themselves from saying the F-word. My sister was making a pie for me and she came over and said “I was making a pie and the recipe was on the the f-ing bottle and once I filled it I couldn’t do the rest of the recipe.” You should write down things that kids say and keep a list because a lot of being a parent is an incredible drag.

Did you have an audience in mind?

My wife is in a book group and I think that book group is one of the greatest things in town. I really like it but I don’t participate, it’s just for women. They would say, “God, you should do a cursing mommy book.” I also got a letter from someone who read a Cursing Mommy piece in the New Yorker and said that they said it was the first time they’ve laughed in two years, since they were widowed. It was a heartfelt letter.

Did you rewrite much?

I did not rewrite it much, but I had a plot line and my wife read it. She reads a lot of mysteries and she said, “this plot line is terrible.” Originally I had gypsies coming in. I stepped back from it. What I don’t want this to be is something that could be senseless and gypsies could be senseless. So I went back and changed it.

This is your first fiction book but you’ve written a lot of non-fiction. Have you previously tried to write fiction?

I really wanted to write fiction to begin with and I tried. The thing that I found tough about fiction is that I’m embarrassed by plot, thinking about what happens to the character. It’s a modernist thing. That’s why I tend to rely on voice. If you look at great modernist works like Ulysees, there’s no real plot, the guy’s walking around Dublin. What’s the plot? What’s the plot of Remembrance Of Things Past? Plot is not a big feature of modernism. With non-fiction you have the plot already. Whatever is happening out there in the world, that’s the plot. If you take a trip to Siberia, there’s the plot. You start here and end up there. Late in my life as a writer, I realize that plot is a tough thing. I had no idea it would freak me out as much as it does.

Ian Frazier will be appearing at the NYU Bookstore, 726 Broadway (btw. Waverly & Washington Place) on Wednesday, Nov. 28 at 6:30 p.m., as part of a “Secrets of Book Publishing” panel with authors Patty Marx, Susan Shapiro and New Yorker Shouts & Murmurs editor Susan Morrison.

From City & State’s Heard Around Town, May 9, 2012:

In a New Yorker article last month, Stanford University officials expressed misgivings about the Bloomberg administration’s behavior in negotiations on a proposal to build a New York City tech campus — a proposal that was eventually scuttled before Cornell University won the bid. The negotiations reportedly left Stanford President John Hennessey “seething,” and he accused the city of changing the terms. The university’s general counsel, Debra Zumwalt, told the magazine that the city had belatedly added millions of dollars in penalties, and said that she had “never seen negotiations that were handled so poorly by a reputable party.” Asked yesterday to respond to the comments, Mayor Michael Bloomberg insisted that the city “dealt fairly with every applicant” but that the city would never give away something so valuable — the land and the millions in upgrades — without some guarantees. “I just don’t know the woman,” he said about Stanford’s counsel. “I don’t know her. I can just tell you that my experience, mostly with John Hennessy, the president of Stanford, was nothing but great. He’s a great, educated, smart guy, good leader, and it’s just a shame that it didn’t work out.”

To read more from City & State click here.

By Paulette Safdieh

It takes a lot to impress a New Yorker. Out-of-towners and tourists, newly transplanted co-workers from the West Coast (and, at times, even our Uptown counterparts) get excited about seeing the latest Broadway show or MoMA exhibit, but we shrug our shoulders like we’ve seen it all before. We have our own idea of what’s cool.

Downtown thrives on the charm of unconventional culture—which is why a haunted house museum finds its home on Bowery and not on Museum Mile. Unbeknownst to a lot of us, our exclusive hub south of 14th Street has its own fair share of museums—depending on what your definition of museum is. Some travel from location to location setting up pickle exhibits, some cater to house ghosts and some showcase comic books like the Metropolitan Museum of Art does Rembrandt works. So what if you intentionally missed the Alexander McQueen exhibit this year? There’s a different kind of viable culture thriving in our own quarters that you don’t need to wait two hours in a line to experience.

Skyscraper Museum

Across the street from the Jewish History Museum and down the block from the Museum of the American Indian, this tribute to our city’s favorite form of architecture is yet another reason to hop off the train at Bowling Green. A small, one-floor space, The Skyscraper Museum showcases an array of historical documents (including newspaper clippings and World Trade Center floor plans) and an impressive wall exhibit of the world’s tallest buildings.

Black-and-white photographs of New York City construction sites line the ramp leading from the gift shop entrance to the one-floor dedication to our city’s—and the world’s — most famous high-rise buildings. Tall glass windows and overhead mirrors give the illusion of walking through an indoor skyscraper park, allowing visitors to navigate between the pillared cases that hold model buildings, including Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest at 2,717 feet, and the Kingkey Finance Tower in Shenzhen, China.
Interactive touchscreens and wall-mounted television screens teach about skyscraper form and history—did you know there are jumbo skyscrapers (surface area up to 2 million square feet) and super jumbos (up to 4 million square feet)? The museum’s collection also includes a replica New York Times front-page story from 1947 announcing the proposal for the World Trade Center site and the letters exchanged between famed architect Minoru Yamasaki and the paper’s architecture critic.

The Skyscraper Museum, 39 Battery Pl. (at Little W. St.), 212-968-1961, www.skyscraper.org; Wed.–Sun., 12-6 p.m., $5.

NY Food Museum

Because everyone loves food (although not everyone loves museums), the NY Food Museum opened in 1998 with mass appeal, giving New Yorkers a new way to celebrate tasty grub and learn a thing or two while they’re at it. Since originating the city’s annual International Pickle Day nine years ago, the NY Food Museum has continued to give us reason to believe that New York’s tastebuds enjoy food beyond the realm of red velvet cupcakes and Halal food from a cart.

The NY Food Museum is not a sight to be seen one afternoon and never revisited, mainly because of its traveling status. Sans a permanent home, the museum hosts discussion panels, film showings, traditional exhibits (including their first How New Yorkers Ate 100 Years Ago) and the upcoming Lower East Side Pickle Day this spring. Beware of the crowds; pickle day draws tens of thousands of visitors every year.

NY Food Museum, 59 Orchard St. (betw. Grand & Hester Sts.), 212-266-9010, www.nyfoodmuseum.org; call for exhibition dates, times and prices.

Italian American Museum

Appropriately nestled on the corner of Mulberry and Grand streets among the Italian bakeries and aroma of freshly cooked pasta, the Italian American Museum pays homage to the first Italian immigrants to come to New York City.

The museum’s director, Dr. Joseph Scelsa, an extremely knowledgeable—you guessed it—Italian-American sociologist, bought the building in 2008 from the Italian-American Stabile family, with the hope of archiving community artifacts from the last century and a half. The Stabile family emigrated to New York in the 1860s and first opened the space as a bank.

The museum’s interior is built around the actual glass booths where the tellers sat, and includes an array of artifacts from the 19th century through today. The collection ranges from Italian-American currency printed in New Jersey during World War II (when the U.S. occupied Italy) to the first vendor plates from the annual San Gennaro festival. Old passports and luggage tags are showcased beside community photographs, marriage certificates and even a restored wedding dress. The very back of the museum holds an organ that dates back to 1898, a 6-foot-tall bank vault and hand-cranked calculators used in the space years ago.

Welcoming about 100,000 yearly visitors, the museum preserves a culture unique to our city’s Little Italy—“the most famous Little Italy in the world,” according to Scelsa.

Italian American Museum, 155 Mulberry St. (at Grand St.), 212-965-9000, www.italianamericanmuseum.org; weekends, 12–6 p.m., $5.

Merchant’s House Museum

Celebrating its 75th year in business, the Merchant’s House Museum welcomes between 50,000 and 100,000 curious every each year to explore the supposedly haunted, 139-year-old row house on East Fourth Street. The museum first opened in 1936, three years after the death of Gertrude Tredwell, the last person to live at 29 E. 4th St. The Tredwell family lived in the house for over 100 years, and a visit to the museum suggests they—or their ghosts—still do.

Once you walk up the wsix steps from the sidewalk and step through the white marble door, be prepared to hear strange sounds of nonexistent footsteps and catch yourself looking over your shoulder in fear. Through the display of 3,000 untouched possessions from the Tredwell family and their four Irish servants, including old clothes and a wooden piano, the museum evokes a creepy sense of abandonment. Throughout the two floors, stationed amongst the roped-off furniture, fully dressed mannequins of the Tredwells appear more authentic than any sculpture at Madame Tussaud’s.

If you can get past the spookiness, the Merchant’s House Museum also serves as an educational opportunity to learn about New York City architecture and lifestyle history. A double parlor room on the ground floor showcases mahogany chairs, hanging gasoliers and paintings, all dating back to the early 1900s. The intricate mouldings lining the ceilings and brick exterior helped earn the building landmark recognition as the only historic house museum south of 14th Street.

Merchant’s House Museum, 29 E. 4th St. (betw. Bowery & Lafayette St.), 212-777-1089, www.merchantshouse.org; Mon.–Thurs., noon–5 p.m., $10.

Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art

Some of us have a greater appreciation for the brilliance behind Charles Schulz comics than famous Renaissance paintings. The Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art lets you know you’re not alone, presenting a collection of the best graphic arts, classic comics and cartoons from around the world. Located amid the tourist frenzy of Broadway in Soho, the museum has its own discreet, quiet space on the fourth floor of an office building.

Though small, the museum offers a collection of newspaper funnies, Japanese anime, comic strips and gag cartoons to bring back feelings of childhood nostalgia and leave you asking why you ever stopped reading Archie comics. It examines how issues of the First Amendment and censorship have tangled with graphics over time and how the images on display reflect the period in which they were created. Should a visit awaken your creative flair, offered classes include the Craft of Comics Writing and Writing for Animation. A gallery-style museum, rotating exhibits are set up every few weeks, so always call ahead to confirm whether the museum is open.

Leave time after your visit to head over to Animazing Gallery on Greene Street, a 26-year-old gallery featuring artwork from greats like Tim Burton and Maurice Sendak, to keep in the spirit of the day.

Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art, 594 Broadway Ste. 401 (betw. Houston & Prince Sts.), 212-254-3511, www.moccany.org; Tues.–Sun., 12-5, $6. 

Museum of the American Gangster

Scarface fans, rejoice! This museum, hidden behind a 10-foot black gate on St. Mark’s Place, is home to some great gangster paraphernalia. Established just over a year ago in a onetime speakeasy, the museum showcases the scandalous and violent years of the Prohibition era with artifacts ranging from 100-year-old stills (the vesssels used to make moonshine) to the infamous bank robber John Dillinger’s death masks.

A visit to the museum, which more closely resembles a small schoolroom than the MoMA, starts with a showing of a 15-minute video about American history in the early 20th century. Simply furnished with a bench and four wooden chairs, the museum teaches about the history of the building itself and the gangsters who operated out of it, Walter Scheib and Frank Hoffman.

After purchasing the building in 1964, the current owner discovered a copper safe filled with $100 gold notes (equivalent to millions of dollars today), cigarettes and beer bottles left by Scheib and Hoffman. Over the years, the owner’s decision to gather these and other relics and expand the collection into a full-fledged museum came to fruition last spring.

The safe, now covered in rust, sits at the museum’s entrance filled with replica bills and the bottles found inside years ago. Wanted posters, newspaper clippings and Pat Hamou paintings line the walls of the museum, which has a special Valentine’s Day Massacre section and hand-drawn diagrams of American history. Although visited by local school groups and gangster enthusiasts, the museum has some days when nobody walks through the door. Make sure to visit the theater and bar on the ground level to cap off your visit and celebrate the legality of alcohol.

The Museum of the American Gangster, 80 St. Mark’s Pl. (betw. Ave. A & 1st Ave.), 212-228-5736, www.museumoftheamericangangster.org; 1-6 p.m., $15.

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