I haven't checked the weather yet, but I know it is the perfect day to chat about adult Jewish literature. I'm Sheryl Stahl, thanks for joining me here at Nice Jewish books today. I am thrilled to welcome Sarah Yahm to discuss her beautiful new novel, Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation. Welcome Sarah.
Thank you. I'm glad to be here.
So can you tell me about your book?
Yes, so unfinished acts of wild creation is about three generations of women, and within this family, there's an inherited genetic disease, and so it's about the way the members of this family face the inevitability of death, and how they make meaning in the face of that. But I want to be clear, this isn't a twee Carpe Diem "seize the day" type of book. These are not sentimental people. These are complicated, messy, honest people, and so it's about the unfinished acts of wild creation that they engage in as they attempt to live a meaningful, but shortened life.
It was really beautiful, intense and funny that the characters are really smart and kind of snarky, and so there are a lot of funny points, and we'll get to some of those. But one of them was more an ironic thing that we meet Freya, the grandmother, the matriarch of this family, at her Shiva. She had just died, and Louise, her daughter, was kind of upset at the Jewish ritual around her death. She said her mother ran from Judaism all her life, but then she ended up dying from this rare Jewish disease. So can you reflect on that.
I mean, yeah, I mean, it's the push pull of Judaism and history, right? And so this is a deeply Jewish Book, and yet the characters never participate in any type of formal Judaism, right? And so I think it's this question of what it means to be Jewish. I've been thinking a lot about this and and I talk about this in a number of interviews, this idea of Yiddishkeit. I feel like this book has a lot of Yiddishkeit, and people have sort of asked me what that means. And I think it means different things to different people, but I see it as this, like deep, superstitious fear and like craving for ritualistic answers. And so they're constantly sort of seeking out ritualistic, magical answers to this sort of deep fear that they feel. I guess I see there's the literal inheritance of this Ashkenazi disease, right? And then there's sort of epigenetic inheritance of trauma, right? And then there's the family patterns that get transmitted. And so all of these are both filled with possibility and limiting. And so there's this idea of the salt in the pockets, right? Because that was sort of a Eastern European superstition that you could protect yourself from the evil eye with salt in the pocket. And so even though Freya is this deeply rational psychoanalyst, she sticks salt in her daughter's pockets. And then Lydia, when her own mother is dying, spreads salt around her mother's body. And I call it maternal ambivalence, salt at different points in the book.
You know, that's one thing I've mentioned a lot of my podcast about how I pick books when rule is, is that if the characters weren't Jewish, with the story be the same, and I don't think it could have been if they, if they weren't Jewish, this would be a completely different story. So even though, you know it doesn't have the all the overt, you know shows of Judaism, it's deeply it's so deeply embedded in all their characters that, yeah, there was no question to me that this is a Jewish Book.
No, it's deeply embodied, right? I mean, the way the characters speak. And I actually dictated this book. I've written about this a bit, but I wrote this book after I gave birth to my daughter, and I have an inherited genetic illness, not a terminal one, but called Ehlers Danlos Syndrome, which is hypermobility. Lot of Jews have it, and it meant I couldn't type in the aftermath of giving birth. And so I dictated the book to a friend, actually. And so I spoke the characters, and I inhabited their dialect and their arguments. And so there's a real ... also like oral quality of Yiddish- inflected English that I think comes off the page, and I think it's because of the way that I wrote it
that's interesting. I haven't encountered anyone else who dictated it, but it makes perfect sense. I mean, both for your physical condition and to you know, get into their actual physical voices, as you did it,
I also, and then I would have it, it would be read back to me, and then I would change it, and then it be read back to me. And so I would feel physically when something was off in an argument, because I would hear it and I would feel it right, and I would start, you know, arguing, and I would get that New York Jewish inflection as I had their arguments or their dinner table conversations, right? Which is interesting because I live in Vermont now, in a not very Jewish place, actually, but the conversations between these characters had the dialect and tone of my childhood, and so I physically inhabited that
Thinking of kids ... Leon, who's Louise's husband, said what I've always felt that he didn't know what true fear was until his baby was born. So the baby is Lydia, who we'll see grow up.
Yeah.
So has that been true for you as well?
Oh, my God, 100% but also it's the most clarifying thing I've ever experienced. And I actually was writing about this recently, that the act of generating human enabled me to generate work, and that before I gave birth, I felt like I was all potential, neurotic potential energy. I couldn't figure out what to do with myself and my career and my life, and like, what substantive meaning to make. And somehow the act of caring for my daughter was clarifying enough that I was able to produce work in a way that I hadn't before. Yeah, which I think is interesting, because being a mom and a writer also means having all of these claims and pulls on yourself and your body, but I like, while I was nursing, I was writing while I was playing with her, I was writing like it was like, it was like, just very like, rich and productive for me, that relationship, that like secure attachment, enabled me to produce work in a way that I hadn't before.
So Louise also talks about another thing that I could relate that the such intense love she felt for her daughter, and that at times, the intense, I don't want to say hate, but just just get away from me, leave me alone feeling. So that was another thing I could definitely relate to. It's like I still love you with every cell in my body. Just go away,
like I love you more than anything in the entire world, and all I need is a minute of you not touching me. Yeah, and I call that maternal math, and I wanted to actually name the book, maternal math, and my agent and then my publisher were both like, you know, what doesn't sell? math! You cannot name your book maternal math anyway. But yeah, I think about that a lot. The Maternal math of this book, and, you know, and this is the spoiler that's on the back of the book, Louise, in fact, makes the decision to leave her child, which is really at the crux of the book, this question of what makes a good mother, and she makes this decision to leave her daughter, and is it selfish? Is it narcissistic? Is it noble? Is it neither? Is it both?
Yeah, that was the big question that I was going to kind of try and lead up to after we dealt with some other things, but since I mentioned it, so Louise nursed her mother through a long, painful death, and they had thought that she had, think, you said, a cluster of cancers. And Louise later finds out that she had this rare genetic disease, but which you didn't name is there a particular disease you had
no and in fact, I didn't let myself do too much googling about it. I sort of made up the disease. There are bits and pieces from diseases that actually exist. And I also feel like Ashkenazi Jews have a lot of weird diseases, and I'm just kind of letting it be an invention.
Okay, so she nursed her mother through this, and it was just so incredibly painful for both of them, both the mother feeling the pain of dying, but also seeing her daughter caring for her and the pain that her daughter was going through as she declined. And so Louise, when she realized that she had this disease, also did not want to put her family through this. So once she got to the point where she couldn't really function in the best way that she wanted to be a mother and a wife, she she fled. So she went to Israel, to this distant cousin who had nursed their own family member through this disease and basically cut off communication with her husband and daughter because she didn't want them to go through what she had gone through. So it's just such a big question of, who is she protecting herself? Is she protecting her family? They didn't get a vote in this about, you know what? We really appreciate that. Yeah, go and die alone so we don't have to watch.
It's a really unresolved question in the book. Here's what I have to say about it. When my mother was dying, my sister and I, she was in hospice. My sister and I were driving home for the night to our respective houses. We were carpooling, and it was torture of this death. She kept falling into comas and then waking up and falling into these comatose states and waking up. It was miserable. And I turned to my sister on the ride home, and I said, Louise was right to leave. She was right to liberate her parents from this. And my sister was like, Absolutely not. And we thought about it for the ride home, and it was a wonderful distraction from the reality of our mother dying. And I actually don't even really believe that, because also all I desperately wanted, the only thing I wanted was to be with my mother as she was dying, and, like, let her know that she was loved. But I also desperately wanted to not watch her die, right?
And so what I really want this can be true at the same time
exactly. And so I think this book really embodies that contradiction. And so what I want is for sisters driving home from their mother in hospice to say, was Louise right? Was Louise wrong? I want the book to be catalyst to facilitate radically honest conversations about death and mothers and daughters and this notion of what makes a good death. Also Louise, she doesn't want her daughter to witness this, right? For some altruistic reasons, because it's genetic, maybe Lydia will go through the same thing, right? She doesn't, she doesn't want to force Lydia to feel that anxiety. She also, selfishly doesn't want to watch Lydia's suffering. Also, having to appease her husband's anxiety is driving her crazy. Also, she has a fantasy about a good, clean death, which isn't possible and isn't real, right? And she always flees. Throughout the book, she tries to flee when things get difficult. She's a runner, right? An escape artist. And so there are all of these multiple facets and and I don't have any answers, except that if the book can facilitate substantive conversations between sisters when their mother is dying, and be a shorthand for the things that they're struggling with, then it's a success.
Yeah, the thing with Leon is that he wanted to be comforting, you know, it'll be okay. No, you don't look that bad, you know, I'll just cut your meat for you. It's really not a big deal. And not recognizing that those were a big deal, that those were all you know, that was a sign that she was deteriorating, that she couldn't cut her own food, that and Louise having spasms.
And, yeah, Louise has been defined by a refusal to be dishonest, right? That's her most defining characteristics. That's sort of the social contract between her and Leon, and so he's violating that social contract, right? And so that is kind of unbearable to her, to live in a dishonest way with these people who she's profoundly intimate with, but also that's unfair, because Leon also needs to keep their family functioning, right. So actually, can I go back to a previous question you asked about the illness? What I did because I was having all of these weird neurological symptoms throughout my pregnancy and in the aftermath, I actually took some of my sort of weird symptoms and made them into this disease. So in some ways, it was a way to work through my own health problems, I think also because nobody knew what they were, and I felt very dismissed by the medical profession. So I think, weirdly, making it a terminal, real illness made me feel better. I don't know if that makes sense, it was like a little bit of a backflip in my head that wasn't even completely conscious. But in terms of the the qualities and the characteristics of the disease. Some of those were things that I experienced, although, although, luckily, I do not have a terminal illness, and most of my symptoms have abated.
Excellent. It is indeed,
yes, indeed, mazel tov to me.
So one thing that there are a lot of little things that struck me in the book. And one of them, for a while, Louise was kind of obsessed with ceilings, and she was thinking that she was spending so much time in bed looking at the ceiling and looking at the cracks and the water stains and in her house and other various different therapies that she went to and wanted to make it into an art project, and trying to make meaning of the ceilings. And there should be something on the ceiling. You shouldn't have to make meaning out of the cracks in the plaster. There should be something there.
And yes, and yet, when there's something mediocre on the ceiling, that feels even more insulting, right? I've definitely been in doctor's offices where you're lying and you're looking at the ceiling and it's like a bad, you know, Monet print, you know? And you're like, Oh, seriously, this is boring, like, I would rather look at the ceiling and understand the cracks, you know what I mean. But yes, it's this. It's this the tedium of being a patient and the desperation to make some meaning out of it, and to make it productive and substantive. And Louise flails in her attempt to do that right. She tries to do this photo project. When she's on the kibbutz. She invents the sound bath spaceship. There's, there are some avant garde musical experiments, a la John Cage. I mean, she does a lot of wacky stuff in an attempt to make this all feel like substantive.
Yeah, yeah. She felt she did that in the bath too. She would kind of make a tone while she was in the bath and feel the vibration through the water and kind of catch her own harmony with the with the world. And that's one way she felt her illness, is that harmony felt off, or that tone off.
She's a little synesthetic. And so this is the way, what I like about that is Louise is, in some ways, the least flaky person ever, right? She's filled with irony and cynicism, and yet she's engaged in this weird kind of mystical sound bath stuff, right? And I like that messy contradiction within her, this like desperate need to believe in something combined with this grumpy cynicism.
So that that was the quote I was trying to find when we first meet Leon. See if I can find it again, which is one of the funniest things. So Leah, when she met Leon, he had been studying to be a therapist, and she'd been raised by a therapist and overly therapized by her mother, so everything she said was analyzed and and that So on one hand, she was kind of anti therapist, but on the other hand, Leon was able to laugh at his field. So, so he says, Freudians are so meshuga Leanne said, his face pink with wine. Let's face it, sometimes a cigar is really just your father's penis smoking a cigar. So, and then Louise kind of runs with it, and she says, mostly to entertain herself, a cigar is just your father's penis smoking a cigar and wearing a Groucho Marx mustache. So they continue this back and forth, and it's just such a funny, smart, snarky conversation. It's yeah, yeah, yeah, that
It's yeah, yeah, yeah, thatopening line of the book, my mother was raised an Orthodox Jew and then became an orthodox Freudian, so she pathologized me with a religious fervor. I stole that line from my mother. My mother is not Louise in any way. Louise is much more me, actually, than my mother, but my mother was my grandmother. Rose was an orthodox Freudian, and then an Orthodox Jew and then an Orthodox roidie, and she did pathologize my mother in all of those ways. You couldn't get an aspirin unless you said what was really wrong. My mother did have to go to a therapist because she was shy and wasn't released from therapy until she admitted that it was castration anxiety. You know that it? That it was penis envy? I think, yeah, yeah, just some, like, real meshuggana Freudian nonsense. So yeah, I was writing in that, that milieu. But I love, I love how silly those two can be, and they're sort of like silly intimacy, even though they also fight a lot. But isn't that what intimacy is, conflict and silliness?
Yeah, so you mentioned your first words, so I want to ask you about last words. Phrase, last words to her for something about remember the tomato test, which Louise had no idea what she's talking about, and it's sort of a running joke throughout the book, and indeed, on the cover of the book is a beautiful painting of a tomato. So where did the tomato test come from?
So my mother had a head injury, and was in a weird, you know, medically induced coma. She fell off her bike on Cape Cod in Truro, and an anesthesiologist found her, and she was medevaced to Boston, and we got there, and she woke up from her coma. First of all, she woke up from her coma. She looked at me, and she said, Sarah, what's going on with you in therapy? That was the first word my mother said when she woke up from a coma. Can hear a thunderstorm in the background. I realized that it's not a contained studio, but what's nicer than a summer thunderstorm?
So yeah, fbut we don't have those in LA
You don't have those in LA, yeah, Sarah, what's going on with you in therapy? And it was this like moment where I was like, oh my god, I was we were so worried when she was in a coma. We were like, is she still going to be herself? Is she still going to be herself? And then, lo and behold, she emerges, and her truest, most authentic self is pathologizing me and I, like was so relieved and wanted to murder her all at the same time. But anyway, the one of the, I think the second thing she said to me was, Sarah, life is just a tomato test. And I was like, what does that mean? And then I, like, we my whole family, like we interrogated each other. And then when she recovered, I kept asking her about it. We had all sorts of theories about what the tomato test was, but everyone else forgot about it, and I became fixated on it as this like profound metaphor that, in the end, was probably just her brain misfiring. But there was something about that misfire that I felt was like a key to something deeply profound. Sorry, I'll never get over that. Sarah, what's going on with you in therapy?
She's wanting you to be your best.
She was also a therapist. Bost my parents were. So, yeah, anyway,
so that in her mother's last words inspired Louise to plan her last words and write them out. So regardless of whether her actual last words are, she has them. She wrote what she wanted them to be to her family. So I was wondering if you thought about that and if you have your last words planned out.
I do not have my last words planned out, but I did plan out the last words I said to my own mother, but I I'm not in a phase in life where I I'm in the phase of life where I have a young child. So the idea of thinking about my own death just makes me feel the need to say kanahara and spin over both shoulders.
Yeah, yeah. I get that,
yeah. And knock wood. They're superstitious things.
It did inspire me a bit, so I spent some time thinking about ...
What are your last words going to be?
I would want to say to my children, who are both young adults now, I have loved you with every cell of my body, from the moment you were conceived and every minute of your life, you have been good enough. And many moments, you have been amazing.
That's wonderful.
That's what I would say.
And you know what? They know it. They already know it.
I hope so. I hope so anyway.
But this is what I want this book to do, type of thought and conversation, you know?
Yeah, so let's get back to Louise and Leon's parenting. So when Lydia was growing up, she struggled with anxiety and OCD, and as parents do, both desperately tried to help her and Leon by trying to logic her out of it, and Louise by trying to help her create protective rituals for herself. But neither of those helped. Do you want to comment on kind of their their efforts there?
Yeah, um, I feel like I'm talking a lot about the sort of personal components of the book. Is that okay?
Yeah!
so I had childhood OCD, um, and my parents tried to logic me out of it, and they were both therapists, and they would, you know, explain obsessive thinking to me and compulsive rituals, and they would spend a lot of time yelling at me, and it was unbearably lonely, and they would also say this thing to me that made no sense, which is, it's just magical thinking. Stop there. I can't give you any magic words. This is unproductive. It's magical thinking. And I remember thinking, but like, magical thinking is what I do best, right? Hmm, and and I, and magical thinking is what created a book like magical thinking is how, how I generate other worlds, right? And so it felt off to me. And all I really wanted was somebody to be to Leon ends up blowing bubbles with her at the sink. All I ever wanted was for somebody to be with me in my suffering and my loneliness. And then I in graduate school, and one of my stints in graduate school, I read a lot about the anti psychiatry movement. And this movement started by R D Laing in the UK. And then there were some soteria houses in the US, where when people were in the midst of psychosis, instead of attempting to talk them out of it, you'd be with them. And they called it the psychological term for it was being with which is hilarious, because it's on the surface so simplistic and actually, like, deeply profound. So it was the idea of like, okay, somebody's somebody sitting around and thinks the mirrors are talking to them. Well, let's sit with them and talk back. So instead of imposing a reality on them, entering into their suffering with them, so that they weren't alone. And so I brought that concept to bear with this idea of how one could treat OCD and anxiety in a way that didn't pathologize, and how you could enter into somebody's loneliness with them and see if that could be healing. So Leon's attempt to logic her out of it resembles what my parents did. Louise's attempt to create this magic ritual that sort of empowers her and cures OCD is grandiose and also sort of delightful and also grandiose and narcissistic. It isn't really about Lydia. And in the end, what Leon does is sits with her in it and tries to make something playful out of it with her. And so that's sort of the, the thought experiment, I guess, of that, of that chapter,
obviously, a lot of this came from your personal experience.
Yeah,
Did you have to do any research for the book?
I had to do research on one specific section, which is the because Louise does die in this religious community in Israel, and so they go through, like traditional orthodox burial rituals. And I knew nothing about them, and I needed to find a rabbi to explain them to me. And I was like, rabbis are busy. Nobody's going to explain it to me. And I was like, I will call the local Chabad rabbi. So I called the local Chabad rabbi, and I was like, I almost like, set a timer. I was like, he's going to explain it to me, and then he's going to give me a hard time about not going to services. And literally, like, by my clock, he finished it, and he said, so now I did this thing for you. You can do something for me, hilarious. So yes, so I needed to do research into traditional burial rituals. I needed to learn about burial shrouds. And there, was one particular question that I was very concerned with. Oh, it had to do with the neshema the soul. And I read somewhere that you weren't supposed to stand behind the dead body, because somehow the soul could enter your body. I wasn't quite clear on it, but I I was trying to structure. I was trying to choreograph the physicality of that scene of her in this room with her mother in a burial shroud, and unwrapping the burial shroud, and where they would have said the Neshama was, and sort of washing the body, and the coordinating the choreography of that was incredibly complicated. And I actually needed to ask the rabbi, like many, many questions. And of course, like all things in Judaism, the more he answered, the more questions I had, right? And so I ended up just kind of doing the best I could. And it was close enough. It was imperfect, but close enough.
Yeah, sorry, starting to think about my kids again, Sarah, you're good enough. You are good.
So do you have any works in progress that you would like to talk about?
Yeah, I'm most of the way through a second book. I'm filled with crushing self doubt about it, but I'm good enough, and maybe sometimes I'm amazing, right? I'm gonna myself, yeah, it's, it's a different book, although it's also about family, it actually takes place on a commune in upstate New York in the 80s, and it's about the father in this family is bipolar, and the son of a Holocaust survivor with the trauma that that entails, and he becomes fixated on this idea of designing a perfect society, of changing the world through physical. design. He builds this extensive forest playground. I'm not explaining this in a super clear way, but it's really about this utopian idea. And while he's busy working on this utopian idea, there's some sexual violence that occurs in the community that he misses, and it's about sort of the cascading repercussions of that form of sexual violence, and then the daughter in that family as she becomes a mother in her own right, many decades later. So it's really about this question of, I mean, it's its own form of maternal or paternal math, right? This question of, like imposing your ideology upon your children and the forms of violence that it can entail, and then also the ways in which being traumatized perpetuates itself, but in different, unexpected ways. It sounds very intense and sad, but like most of my books, it's also funny, although it's a little heavier, I think my first book is really about connection, and they fall apart, but they reconnect. In the end, they're like the vibe that the trauma that they experience is not from each other, mostly it's from circumstances. But what makes this book painful is that they traumatize each other, and they need to learn how to connect. The daughter really needs to learn how to connect and how to be intimate in ways that are not destructive. So in that way, it's a different book.
book, great. Well, I look forward to reading that when it comes out. So is there anything about unfinished acts that you would like to talk about that I haven't thought to ask you about,
let's see. We talked about mothers, daughters, talked about marriage. No, I think we did a pretty good job. We covered a lot of ground. Is there anything that that you feel like we missed? We did a little therapy. Now, I know a little therapy good enough.
I don't know if you could see all my post-it-pads, marking everything. So not positive. I asked a question for each of them, but I think I caught the main ones. Okay, so that brings us to tikkun olam time. So I know you didn't get a lot of lead time to think about this, but if you were to you have a soapbox moment now to bring a call to action for repairing the world. What would you like to say?
Well, I read an essay yesterday, and what he said was, we have to rethink what it means to be Jewish after Gaza, not that we're in the after, we're in the in the middle. And so I would, I would really ask people, there are a number of organizations that I think are are doing wonderful work within the Jewish community. And so I would really encourage people to give to rabbis for ceasefire now and to Jews for food aid in Gaza. So that's my little soapbox moment.
Okay, I assume they have a website.
Yes, Rabbis for ceasefirel now has a website. And Jews for food aid in Gaza also has many websites.
Okay, I'll put that in the I'll add them in the show notes,
yeah, thank you. And actually, I I ... its a painful time.
Thank you for sharing that it is, indeed it is. So if someone would like to contact you, what is the best way
They can find me on Instagram or Facebook or email me, I'm happy to give you my email address. It's just my full name, SarahYahm@gmail.com and actually, I would really like to encourage people, as we talked about, my book is really good for book groups. It's really, really good for about being part of the sandwich generation, about parenting and being a child. And so I actually have a book group guide, a reading group guide, on the daink website, which is my publisher, and so maybe we could link to that as well, because I would really like to encourage people to read it and talk to each other about it, and I'm happy to zoom in to book groups and be part of a conversation.
All right. Wonderful, yeah. Well, thank you, Sarah Yahm for speaking with me about Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation.
It was lovely to talk to you.
If you are interested in any of the books we discussed today, you can find them at your favorite board and brick or online bookstore or at your local library. Thanks to dionki for use of his frylich, which definitely makes me happy. This podcast is a project of the Association of Jewish libraries, and you can find more about it at www.jewishlibraries.org/niceJewish books. I would like to thank AJL and my. Podcast mentor Heidi Rabinowitz, Keep listening for the promo for her latest episode.
Hi, this is Kyle lukof. I am the author of a world worth saving. I'll be joining you soon on the Book of Life podcast, and I'd like to dedicate my episode a little controversially to trans minors who have already had some kind of gender affirming medical care.
The Book of Life is the sister podcast of nice Jewish books. I'm your host, Heidi Rabinowitz and I podcast about Jewish kid lit join me to hear my September 2025 conversation with Kyle lukof about a world worth saving@bookoflifepodcast.com
