David Rakoff

If you could swap careers with anyone, who would it be?

Without his politics? Jerome Robbins. I'd be a dancer. Or Gene Kelly.

Are you able to read other writers ...

Without feeling bad about myself?

Exactly!

No. [Laughs]

Do you ever say to yourself, "Gosh, I wish I'd written that"?

Sure. Well, more like "Who the hell do you think you are?" directed at myself. Most writing I find chastening. I'm consistently given a reality check by the amount of sheer smarts and talent there is out there.

There are certain writers -- Nick Hornby, for one -- whose work inspires more than intimidates me. Then there are others, like Michael Chabon, who leave me convinced I'm on the wrong path entirely -- that I should turn in my keypad and dig ditches.

That's the thing -- it's the difference between seeing Gene Kelly dance, who makes you think you could do it, and seeing Rudolf Nureyev, who makes you realize you couldn't. It's very, very different.

I'm conscious of it when I read the newspaper. There's a journalist at the New York Times named Charlie LeDuff. He's astonishing. He's like an old-time newspaperman, the kind of people we now read and think, I hope people knew what they had in their presence. I think history will be kind to him.

Before we met, I pictured you as an appealingly acerbic, hard-shelled enigma. I eventually found this to be untrue, of course, and I think that many readers will be pleased at just how much of your gooey center is exposed in the book. Are you ever surprised at how much of yourself you've revealed in your work?

I guess I am; it's that unwitting thing where you really think you're fooling people. But people aren't dumb, certainly not as dumb as one is about oneself. I haven't yet received a lot of reactions, because the book hasn't been out there very long. I haven't yet really heard from folks.

Do you relish hearing from people you don't know?

Sure, if it's in a kind of unmenacing, uncreepy way. If it doesn't involve, you know, hanks of hair and tiny, tiny writing.

Most of the pieces in "Fraud" originated elsewhere but have been revised for the book. Was it a positive experience to revisit work that has had a life of its own for some months or even years?

In the final analysis, sure, it was a positive experience. But when I was doing it? Here's how I like to describe writing: It's like pulling teeth ... out of your dick. The pieces had to become a book, and not just a disparate collection -- they had to somehow mesh. There has to be some sort of arc, and I hope that I successfully managed to create one.

I wonder if the relative boom in humorous essays we're currently experiencing -- in your work and the work of David Sedaris, Sarah Vowell, Sandra Tsing Loh and others -- relates in any way to the recent rise in popularity of the memoir. You each write primarily in the first person; you base your work primarily on events in your lives. Do we, as a society, feel somehow isolated and therefore see these forms as a way of reconnecting with one another?

I view it more negatively than that; I think it's probably the culture of narcissism.

I understand why the narcissist is moved to record the minutiae of his existence, but why do so many opt to read these accounts?

I don't know. I ask myself that every day -- and live in fear of the answer.

So you see the rise of the personal essay and the memoir as a negative development?

I think anything I'm involved in, frankly, should be viewed as a negative development.

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