Everything is Going to Be Great is Shukert's second memoir.
Image by Michelle Spear
Innocent Abroad: Chatting with Rachel Shukert
The author tells us about her hilarious new memoir, Everything Is Going to Be Great
By Gabrielle Moss
Published: September 2nd, 2010 | 2:55pm
A laugh-out-loud tale of life as a young American expat in Amsterdam, Rachel Shukert’s memoir, Everything Is Going to Be Great: An Underfunded and Overexposed European Grand Tour
VENUS ZINE: You lived in Europe from 2003 to 2005. What parts of your experience fit in with the classic “young American in the Old World!” narrative, and what could only have happened in the early 2000s?
RACHEL SHUKERT: The story takes place during the very last gasp of that "classic young American abroad," just before it became completely impossible to run away somewhere and mostly lose touch with the place and the people you were running from. I arrived before universal WiFi, before everyone had a BlackBerry, before Facebook, before Twitter. If I needed to speak to someone, I had to call them from a special international calling center. It really was possible to have this feeling of strangeness and separation, whereas now, it's so different. Even the way we process experience has changed—in the past, you would have the experience, contextualize it, ponder it, and then document. Now, people document and experience simultaneously, and in the way the documentation becomes the experience. I think this phenomenon is going to cause a radical shift in autobiographical writing, so in a funny way, this book does feel to me like a little bit of a period piece. You won't ever really be able to lose anyone, or yourself, ever again.
VZ: You really own up to your youthful mistakes in this book—something which is, sadly, still considered pretty taboo for women. Why was it important for you to include the parts of the story that are unflattering?
RS: Because it's still taboo. When women write about difficult periods in their lives—the periods that are, frankly, the most interesting—they tend to deal with them in a few different ways. There is what Elizabeth Gilbert does in Eat, Pray, Love. She glosses over her own wrongdoing for the sake of likability, and then feels compelled to treat every character in the book in a similarly flattering light. There is the kind of memoir that seeks redemption, where the author is redeemed by confession. And on the other end of the spectrum, you get these books that very consciously try to be unapologetic and defiant, but can leave the reader feeling that the writer is a really callous person who treats other people like shit and seems to think that's ultimately okay.
I felt like it was important to forge a different path, and write in a way that faced my own mistakes head-on, but held myself accountable for them, too. For me, the essential principle of feminism has always been about women being acknowledged to be as fully human as men, as fully entitled and capable of the entire range of human experience and expression, good or bad. And for me, that means not letting yourself off the hook about certain things, but not being ashamed of them either.
VZ: Any advice for people pondering a move to the Continent?
RS: Go for it. You've got nothing to lose, especially now that everything in the world is ruined. Also, forget everything you learned at freshman orientation about not talking to strangers and make friends with some real weirdos. You won't be disappointed.
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ABOUT THE BOOK
Everything Is Going to Be Great: An Underfunded and Overexposed European Grand Tour
by Rachel Shukert
Harper Perennial
336 pages
Issue #33
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