When author Mack Friedman was a teenager in Milwaukee in the 1980s, attending Rufus King High School, his deep interests included spirituality and sexuality, particularly trying to understand his homosexuality.
A child of parents who were scientists and atheists but still culturally Jewish — he recalled in a recent telephone interview that his father created his own “offbeat and funny and great” haggadah — Friedman would visit synagogues and churches on days when people were not there worshipping.
“That is still my favorite time to meditate and practice my own spirituality,” he said. The churches were usually open, but “it was harder to get into [the synagogues] when they were closed.”
As for sexuality, Friedman said that when he was 13 to 15, he “spent hours” at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee library reading on the topic, trying to understand himself in a place where he felt “little cultural affirmation” of who he was.
Both of these interests are expressed in Friedman’s first novel and second book, “Setting the Lawn on Fire,” published recently by the University of Wisconsin Press.
Friedman, who now lives in Pittsburgh, was in Wisconsin this month to speak about his book at a Madison book fair and at the Harry W. Schwartz Bookshop on Milwaukee’s East Side.
The novel, Friedman told The Chronicle, is a “coming of age” story – “almost a kind of Huck Finn book, in a way, without being quite as good.” According to the jacket notes, it is about a Jewish gay man who grows up in Milwaukee and “embarks on a journey of sexual discovery that leads him from Wisconsin to Alaska, Philadelphia, and Mexico.”
A ‘Wandering Jew’
Some of this is autobiographical, Friedman said. He did at one point travel to Alaska, and that chapter in the novel “is almost entirely truthful … Those pretty much were my experiences.”
But most of the rest is made up, including the death of the protagonist’s mother, for which he sits shiva in the only clear reference to Judaism in the book, he said. “Life is not neat or tight enough to turn into a good story,” Friedman said.
Yet Judaism and Jewish experience in America are themes of the book, even in the general absence of the former, he said. “I think the character is trying very hard not to see who he really is. A lot of gays go through that. If there’s a thing he feels conflicted about, like religion, he avoids that.”
And Friedman said he has a powerful sense of “American Jewish rootlessness,” a “Wandering Jew feeling.”
“I think that’s what the book expresses about Judaism,” he said. “Jews have always been running. Sometimes they run to stick to [Judaism] and sometimes they are running away from it.”
Friedman himself has certainly wandered in his life. Born in Chicago, he came to Milwaukee as a pre-teen and stayed through high school. He attended a small liberal arts college in Pennsylvania, where he majored in English. He traveled to Alaska and West Virginia; and worked for “a couple of years” as a social worker dealing with street prostitutes in Minneapolis.
This last experience led him to research and write his first book, “Strapped for Cash: A History of American Hustler Culture.” “It was impossible to find decent research” on the history and what worked in helping men and transgender people working as prostitutes, he said. “I was at my wit’s end.”
“I thought I could offer the next person to do this kind of work some information and knowledge to work with,” he said.
Some of that research and experience apparently went into the novel as well. According to the jacket notes, the protagonist becomes “a hustler who learns to provide the blank canvas for other people’s dreams.”
But the primary sources for the second book were “collections of fantasies and desires and fears and imaginations” that he had been writing since he was “17 or 18.”
He revamped that material considerably for the novel. “When you write when you’re 19, you’re not very good at it,” he said. Nevertheless, he “tried to remain true to the voice I had back then…. It is very raw in that respect.”
Friedman now works in an HIV clinic and is working on a master’s degree in public health while doing research at the clinic. And it is likely that some of this experience will become material for his next book, he said.
“I was an HIV tester for a long time,” he said. “And here where I live, that is like being a priest. People will tell you their darkest secrets and seek forgiveness or punishment in the test results.”
So the next book will be “looking at HIV as a metaphor for sin and punishment and expiation,” but it “will be a little time in the making.”
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