David Rakoff
David Benjamin Rakoff was a Canadian-born American writer of prose and poetry based in New York City, who wrote humorous and sometimes autobiographical non-fiction essays. Rakoff was an essayist, journalist, and actor, and a regular contributor to WBEZ's This American Life. Rakoff described himself as a "New York writer" who also happened to be a "Canadian writer", a "mega Jewish writer", a "gay writer", and an "East Asian Studies major who has forgotten most of his Japanese" writer.
Early life and education
David Rakoff was born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, the youngest of three children. His brother, the comedian Simon Rakoff, is four years older than David. Their sister, Ruth Rakoff, author of the cancer memoir When My World Was Very Small, is the middle child. Rakoff and his siblings were close as children. Rakoff's mother, Gina Shochat-Rakoff, is a doctor who has practised psychotherapy and his father, Vivian Rakoff, is a psychiatrist. Rakoff wrote that almost every generation of his family fled from one place to another. Rakoff's grandparents, who were Jewish, fled Latvia and Lithuania at the turn of the 20th century and settled in South Africa. The Rakoff family left South Africa in 1961, for political reasons, and moved to Montreal for seven years. In 1967, when he was three, Rakoff's family relocated to Toronto. As an adult, he identified as Jewish.Rakoff attended high school at the Forest Hill Collegiate Institute, and graduated in 1982. That year, he moved to New York City to attend Columbia University, where he majored in East Asian Studies and studied dance. Rakoff spent his third year of college at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and graduated in 1986. He worked in Japan as a translator with a fine arts publisher. His work was interrupted after four months when, at age 22, he contracted Hodgkin's disease, a form of lymphatic cancer he referred to as "a touch of cancer". He returned to Toronto for 18 months of treatment, including chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery. Rakoff later served on the board of directors of North Carolina's John C. Campbell Folk School.
Writing
Early career
Before becoming a full-time writer, Rakoff worked for 13 years in the publishing industry, including as a publishing assistant and a publicist. He worked at a literary agency for 3 years and then as an editor and communications manager for 9 years at HarperCollins,. For a period starting when he was 25, Rakoff wrote freelance while working in the publishing industry. Eventually he was able to earn a living from his writing, becoming a full-time writer in 1998. While Rakoff was working in publishing, he wrote Q and A interviews entitled "The Way We Live Now", which appeared in The New York Times Magazine from 1999 to 2002.Role of David Sedaris and Ira Glass in Rakoff's career
Rakoff said that he owed David Sedaris and Sedaris' producer, Ira Glass, his entire career. Rakoffwrote to Sedaris in 1992, after hearing him read on the radio his essay, "Santaland Diaries", about being a Christmas elf, which was to make him famous. That day, Rakoff wrote to Sedaris immediately to ask if he could publish Sedaris' works. They became friends, with Rakoff doing work in the theatre with Sedaris, first directing a play written by Sedaris and his sister Amy Sedaris, and later acting in their plays. Through Sedaris, Rakoff met Ira Glass, who was then a junior reporter on the NPR radio program Morning Edition. When Glass began This American Life, Rakoff became involved with the new show at its inception. Sedaris encouraged Rakoff to go on public radio, where Sedaris himself had achieved fame: at his urging Rakoff took work to This American Life, starting with "Christmas Freud", an account of Rakoff's job impersonating Sigmund Freud in the window of Barneys department store during the holidays.
Journalism
Rakoff was a prolific freelance writer and a regular contributor to Conde Nast Traveler, GQ, Outside Magazine and The New York Times Magazine. His writing also appeared in Business 2.0, Details, Harper's Bazaar, Nerve, New York Magazine, Salon, Seed, Slate, Spin, The New York Observer, Vogue, Wired and other publications. He wrote on a wide and eclectic range of topics.Published books of essays
Rakoff published three bestselling collections of essays, which include his own illustrations. Both Fraud and Don't Get Too Comfortable were awarded a Lambda literary award, both times in the "Humor" category. Half-Empty won the 2011 Thurber Prize for American Humor.''Fraud''
Fraud includes essays that are largely autobiographical and humorous. Rakoff stated, in relation to the theme of the book, "The central drama of my life is about being a fraud, alas." He went on to say "That's a complete lie, really; the central drama of my life is about being lonely, and staying thin, but fraudulence gets a fair amount of play." He has said that he thought of other titles for Fraud, like "Smart mouth" and "The jig is up". Rakoff described the first-person essays that comprise the collection as more inwardly focused than his later work. The work contains material from public radio's This American Life and from Outside and Salon, which was significantly lengthened and re-written, as well as a few new pieces.The book received praise from many critics, garnering near-unanimous acclaim. In a review Publishers Weekly wrote that "a talented new humorist springs onto the scene: Rakoff has a rapier wit, slashing in all directions with slice-of-life insights and cutting remarks, sometimes nicking himself with self-deprecation in his dexterous duel with the American experience." Kevin Cowherd said that in the book, Rakoff "makes a strong bid for the title of Most Neurotic Man on the Planet, and the results are absolutely hilarious – when they're not achingly revealing and tinged with sadness." Max Magee called the collection a "meta-article in which he talks about the particulars and relative merits of his assignment as he embarks on that assignment" and that "the reader feels invited in for a behind the scenes look at what it is like to be a disaffected, overly-qualified, under-ambitious journalist as he takes on his fluffy assignments." David Bahr calls Fraud "witty, insightful and typically bittersweet."
Other reviews of the book and audio-book were mixed. The reviewer in The New York Times mentioned that Sophocles and Freud had pursued the same idea that forms the book's focus, that is, that we are defined by our fears. Greil Marcus said Rakoff's stories are not as funny as those he read on the radio.
''Don't Get Too Comfortable''
Don't Get Too Comfortable, which is subtitled "The Indignities of Coach Class, The Torments of Low Thread Count, The Never-Ending Quest for Artisanal Olive Oil, and Other First World Problems" was published in 2005 and also consists of comical autobiographical essays. Some of the essays were originally published in shorter form elsewhere and some original. The over-riding theme of the articles is the absurdity and excessiveness in American life: the book is about luxuries and privileges being treated as deserved rights. Rakoff said that the moral of the book is that there should be "a little more guilt out there" and "we could all, myself included, count our blessings, acknowledge our privileges." The book was generally praised by critics. The New York Times said, "Rarely have greed, vanity, selfishness, and vapidity been so mercilessly and wittily portrayed". Emily Gordon says that in his "bursts of pure enthusiasm, he's a delectable Cole Porter, Nicholson Baker and Sarah Vowell smoothie". However, Rakoff was criticised in The Washington Post for misusing the word "like", with the reviewer suggesting that Rakoff's prose could use tightening. In The New York Times, Jennifer 8. Lee said the book was "no more than a collection of vaguely related magazine pieces" rather than "a coherent seriocomic manifesto", that some essays were off-theme, and not about narcissism and excess.''Half Empty''
A third book of essays, Half Empty was published in September 2010. Rakoff said the book is "essentially about pessimism and melancholy: all the other less than pleasant to feel emotions that because they are less than pleasant to feel have been more or less stricken from the public discourse but in fact have their uses and even a certain beauty to them". The book won the 2011 Thurber Prize for American Humor.Contributions to anthologies
Rakoff contributed essays to the following anthologies of non-fiction published by other writers:- "My first New York" in My First New York: Early Adventures in the Big City
- "Utah" in State by State: a panoramic portrait of America
- "Streets of sorrow" in The Best American Travel Writing 2007
- "Love it or Leave it" in The Best American Non-required Reading 2006
- "Barbra's farewell: A city Verklempt" in Da Capo Best Music Writing 2001
- "My sister of perpetual mercy" in A Member of the Family: gay men write about their families
- "Christmas Freud" in The Dreaded Feast: writers on enduring the holidays
- The Autobiographer's Handbook: The 826 National Guide to Writing Your Memoir
- "Sagrada family" in Men on men 5: best new gay fiction
- Interview as a child prodigy in The infant mind transcript/The infinite mind.
Posthumous publication