Gary Shteyngart holds nothing back in Little Failure

Gary Shteyngart’s three novels — 2002’s The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, 2006’s Absurdistan and 2010’s Super Sad True Love Story — feature protagonists who, taken together, suggest a sort of pathetic hologram of the author. Fans of the books’ lonely, miserable characters have long wondered just how much of the self-deprecating satirist behind them is really on display. With Little Failure, published in January to wide acclaim and just out in paperback, Shteyngart’s readers have their answer.

The memoir — named for his mother’s hybridized English-Russian childhood nickname for him, failurchurka — explores Shteyngart’s life, from his sickly early childhood in the
Soviet Union to his years growing up in Queens, New York, to what he perceives to be his continued inadequacy as an adult in Brooklyn. It’s brutally self-revealing, sometimes heartbreaking — and wildly entertaining.

The Pitch corresponded with Shteyngart via e-mail, ahead of his book-tour stop at Unity Temple on the Plaza Wednesday, October 15.

The Pitch: All of your novels so far have been works of fiction officially, but you’ve admitted having inserted autobiographical elements into stories and characters. What motivated you to switch to memoir for Little Failure?

Shteyngart: I was 41 when Little Failure came out. That’s 73 in Russian years. I’m barely alive! So I thought I’d get all my thoughts down while I can.

Some of the scenes in Little Failure are downright painful. You’ve said before that honesty is something you strive for, but was it difficult to do so in this book? Did you ever feel like you needed to hold something back or keep something private?

After Little Failure, my life is an open book, to use the cliché. I held back almost nothing. I figured, hey, if I’m going to finesse the truth, I should write another novel. But a memoir deserves an unflinching examination of how I became who I am, for better and often for worse.

Were you at all afraid of revealing so much of yourself to the public with Little Failure?

We live in an age where people broadcast news of themselves every day on social media. But so much of it is carefully curated. I decided to take the opposite path. Little Failure is like a fire sale: Everything about me must go!

You write extensively about your relationship with your parents, and how oppressively you felt like a failure to them growing up. But you’ve also talked about how patient they’ve been with you in helping with research for Little Failure. What is your relationship with your parents like today? Do you think they still regard you as a failure? Do you care whether they do or not?

I think they’re proud of me, actually! I think when I demonstrated that writing wasn’t just a hobby, that it was a real vocation for me, they came around as all immigrant parents do when they sense that you can stand on your own two feet for a change.

You were 7 when you emigrated from Russia to America, and you don’t gloss over the horrific deaths in your family as a result of the issues there at that time. When you remember the difficulties you had growing up as an immigrant child in a foreign country, do you ever imagine the alternative, had you stayed in Russia? What do you think that would look like?

I’d probably be a super-wealthy oligarch instead of some writer schlub. Right now I’d be fighting to keep my London apartment and Swiss chalet in the face of looming sanctions.

You’ve talked about psychoanalysis before, and I know it plays a role in your writing. Can you tell me a little about how it helped, exactly?

Psychoanalysis for me was like getting permission to broadcast the truth about myself into the air. Everything came out and just sort of sat there in the stuffy room. The next step was to try to craft something useful out of it.

Now that you’ve written something 100-percent personal and true, are you interested in moving on to other subjects?

Yes! Now that I’ve exhausted so much of the material that animated my novels, I can write about other topics! My next book is a thriller about a woman who works for a hedge fund, and is set in 12 cities around the world!