Half-Baked Stories About My Dead Mom: Ira Glass and Etgar Keret Don’t Mince Words

“This show really began on a bus heading out of Tel Aviv last summer,” Glass explains. “Etgar told me a story that went off like a dense little bomb of feeling — really one of the most remarkable things I’d ever heard — and I thought ‘I have no idea how this can be a show but we have to make it into a show.’” It was a story about his mom. Etgar had spent his life writing books on every conceivable subject, but somehow was never able to write about his mom. Then he started writing these tiny stories, each just four or five paragraphs long, that capture different sides of her. His mom, Orna Keret, was complicated. She was vengeful and loving. Maria in West Side Story and Thanos in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Capable of extreme action. “When I began publishing my stories, they were immediately classed as ‘fantastic’ and ‘unrealistic’ but I was just trying to tell things as they were. It was only when I started sharing my mom’s life story with Ira and saw him listening the way you listen to a fairytale that I realized that the stories I write are fantastical because I was raised by a fantastical mother who made me take the surreal for granted.” “I’ve been putting together collections of stories every single week for decades on my radio show,” says Glass. “This is one of the most extraordinary and enjoyable sets of stories I’ve ever been lucky enough to work with. They’re beautiful, and it's fun presenting them with Etgar” This event is presented in partnership with the Athenaeum Center for Thought & Culture and with special support from WBEZ Chicago. Ira Glass is the host and creator of This American Life, heard each week by over 5 million listeners on public radio stations and podcasts. Glass began his career as an intern at National Public Radio’s network headquarters in Washington, DC in 1978, when he was 19 years old. He put This American Life on the air in 1995. He also served as an editor for the podcasts Serial, S-Town, and Nice White Parents. Under Glass’s editorial direction, This American Life has won seven Peabody awards and the first Pulitzer Prize ever awarded for audio journalism. In 2021, the episode ‘The Giant Pool of Money’ became the first podcast ever to be inducted into the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry. Etgar Keret is a leading voice — especially among the younger generation — in Israeli literature and cinema. He is celebrated for his surreal, often darkly humorous short stories collected in books such as The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God & Other Stories, The Nimrod Flipout, and Fly Already. His film and television credits include co-directing Jellyfish (2007) and co-writing the series Deep Skin. Many of his short stories have been adapted for the screen. His writing has been published in The New York Times, Le Monde, The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Paris Review, and Zoetrope.