I loved Tamara Shopsin’s Mumbai New York Scranton when I read it a few years ago, so I was super-excited when I learned she had a new book out this year, and Arbitrary Stupid Goal did not disappoint. It’s an illustrated memoir that’s more a series of vignettes, but with some unifying elements; a lot of it, but not all of it, is about the NYC of Shopsin’s youth, and the cast of characters who hung out at the store her parents owned (which later became a restaurant). We get glimpses of family members and customers and neighbors, and neighbors who are practically family members (especially a man named Willy, whose presence in the book is a big part of it). We also get pieces of trips elsewhere: the time the Shopsins didn’t quite go to Dollywood, or the time that Shopsin and her husband went to a complex of old Nazi bunkers in Poland, or the time they went to Missouri and argued about locking/not locking the car doors. We get a story of a customer who taught Shopsin how to fold a napkin into the shape of a penis, and a story about the time before she was born when her parents’ store got held up and her brother asked the thief if he was a “hand robber” when he meant to say “armed robber” (which totally made me laugh out loud on the subway). I really liked the structure and style of this book, and all the life and humanity and history and community it’s got in it, the humor and tenderness and excellent stories.
(Also: this New Yorker piece about Shopsin and her book by Alexandra Schwartz is pretty great.)
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