Have you ever had the experience of having read a memoir by a writer you’ve never met, a total stranger, and discovered a shocking number of parallels in your individual lives? My Childhood in Pieces: A Stand-Up Comedy, A Skokie Elegy (Knopf, 2025) by award-winning poet Edward Hirsch, who is also the current president of the Guggenheim Foundation, is one such book for me. For example, we both spent formative years in Skokie, Illinois, a suburb directly north and west of Chicago. Narrowing that focus, we also shared a connection to the same stretch of Hull Street, a road that only exists for a few blocks in the village. Additionally, both of our immediate families had their roots in bordering Chicago neighborhoods, Logan Square and Humboldt Park, and made similar migrations to Albany Park before settling in Skokie. There are others, too numerous to mention. Thankfully, Mr. Hirsch was as intrigued as I was and graciously agreed to an interview.

Gregg Shapiro: Edward, I first became aware of your connection to Skokie (Illinois) via your poem “The Skokie Theater” from your 1986 poetry collection Wild Gratitude. How much of a role did that poem play in your decision to write My Childhood in Pieces: A Stand-up Comedy, A Skokie Elegy (Knopf, 2025)?

Edward Hirsch: The Skokie Theater was the first poem that I wrote about Skokie. I would say, even more crucially, the first poem in which I admitted that I came from Skokie. I had spent the first 30-some odd years trying not to acknowledge that [laughs] in order to make a literary life. In my first book, For the Sleepwalkers, which I published in 1981, there was not a single reference to Skokie. Zero. I didn’t think you could write about Skokie and be literary.

GS: Did you ever think at the time you wrote the poem that you would be writing a book of prose about Skokie?

EH: Absolutely not. In fact, it seemed like a one-off. Then there were a few other poems along the way…I wrote a poem about my high school football coach in my third book (The Night Parade) called “Execution,” and I was no longer ashamed of coming from Skokie and trying to be literary. But I didn’t think that Skokie would be my subject matter. In fact, it hasn’t been. I mean, there have been a lot of things about Chicago, and it has come up, but never in such a full-blown way. There are two hints in my book about this that I meant to be tells. One, a fortune cookie with a fortune that was preposterous: “Someday you will look back fondly on the past.” There’s another one, later in the book, that says that Lincoln said that the place where he came from in Indiana was the most unpoetical spot on earth, and I said he’d never been to Skokie [laughs]. Then I said, “In honor of Lincoln, it’s best to be honest. I never planned to write about Skokie either.”

GS: Why was now the right time to write “My Childhood in Pieces?”

EH: I started about two years after my mother died. I think everyone had died, and I think that had a big role. My first father died, my second father died, and my mother died. I began not really writing about Skokie but writing about them. I think they lived a kind of hustling, assimilated, Jewish American experience. Writing about them led me to Skokie.

GS: When you said that everyone had passed, it made me wonder what you think that the family members who have passed on would think of the ways in which they’re portrayed, and how your living relatives feel about how they are portrayed?

EH: It’s hard to speak for other people. I think that both my first father, Ruby (aka Harold Rubinstein), and my mother (Irma) would have really liked the form of the book. I think my mother would have loved the jokes, and my father would have, too. They would have liked the speed, they’d like the comebacks, they’d like their quotes. I don’t think that they would have liked the book. I think that the main reason is my mother was a private person; she put on a front, and I don’t think she would have liked having everything exposed. My (first) father believed my mother had poisoned our minds, and I think he would have thought the book represented, still, how my mother had poisoned us.

GS: I’m glad you mentioned the jokes, because mirroring the book’s subtitles, “A Stand-up Comedy, A Skokie Elegy,” the segments in the book read like a cross between poetry and stand-up comedy bits. Is this the format you always envisioned?

EH: That’s the format that evolved. You’re completely right; that’s how it’s structured. I found the way that poems and jokes are alike. The way they’re alike is in the turn; the quickness, the compression, and the turn. Or what the Italians in the sonnet call the volta. The volta is the swift change. That’s like the cut in the joke. I found that this structure was tremendously liberating to me and that I could use this structure even when, I guess, the jokes weren’t meant to be funny or even meant to be jokes. That is, I could have the title, I could have the setup, and I could have the coil. The coil could be sad, it could be poignant, it could be sad and funny, it could be a lot of different things, but that’s the structure. For some reason, this opened up…the world just came flooding back to me.

GS: Are you a journal keeper, or did you rely on your memory for the details?

EH: I’m not a journal keeper. I relied on memory. But I would say this: if you’re going to write a memoir about your childhood, it helps to have a sister who went through psychoanalysis. She remembers everything.

GS: That’s amazing! Did you have a target audience in mind when writing the book?

EH: No. But I really like my own jokes. I wouldn’t say it’s a target audience, but I had in mind the people that I was writing about and capturing them. Not just my parents, but their whole crowd. I call them my fake aunts and uncles. I wanted to capture all my fake aunts and uncles. I can’t say I had them in mind, but I wanted to do justice to them.

GS: Did you return to Skokie as part of your research process while writing the book?

EH: Yes, I had some hilarious field trips. My sisters live in Chicago, and we went back to our old neighborhood. We got a tape measure, and I wanted to measure the distance between our houses where we grew up. I wanted to know exactly the distance between our houses in the development, and we also measured the driveways. I measured the distance from the stoop to the sidewalk. I told my best friend from high school this, this is in the acknowledgements, and he said you embellish every story why would you want to nail down a random fact like that [big laugh]. I wanted a kind of ethnographic accuracy about those kinds of details. Just to be sure, my sisters and I walked down the block and counted every house on the block. We kept getting confused because they all look alike [laughs].

GS: There is a shared trajectory that many Jewish families in Skokie had in common, which is that Chicago’s Albany Park neighborhood, where I was born, was a stopover in the northern migration toward the suburbs. My first four years were spent on Whipple Street, just north of Lawrence Avenue in Albany Park, and you wrote about your grandmother living near the intersection of Bernard Street and Lawrence Avenue, in the same neighborhood. Much later, in the 1990s, the late poet Maureen Seaton also lived on Bernard Street, on the block that is bisected by the Chicago River and has the foot bridge. Do you have any fond memories of Albany Park?

EH: Very much so! I’m associated with a world. Your point is a good one, and this is something I discovered in writing the book because I began reading. You just move with your family. I didn’t understand that we were following Jewish migration. I knew there were a lot of Jewish people around us and I knew there were a lot of Jewish people around my grandparents, but I didn’t know that they were they were moving in directions that other Jewish families were moving. It just never occurred to me. That was just a surprise to me, to see you’re part of a larger context. I think that’s often the case when you’re young. You don’t know. You just go along. Whatever your family is doing seems normal to you, and then later you discover that it either was or wasn’t.

GS: Skokie is currently experiencing a kind of revival, especially since a new CTA station in downtown Skokie, at Oakton Street and Skokie Boulevard, has opened. This station would be walking distance from the intersection of Terminal Avenue and Hull Steet (near Tecumseh Park), which you mentioned in your book. Imagine what it would have been to grow up there, to have the ability to escape Skokie by hopping on a rapid transit train a couple of blocks away and be whisked into the city. Do you think that would have been something you would have taken advantage of?

EH: Yes, at a certain age. Elementary school, no. High school, yes. Because by my sophomore and junior year, I wanted to go to the Art Institute (in downtown Chicago), and that would have made it easier. Maybe we would have been more sophisticated if we could have gone into the city more often. I can’t speak with total confidence about this, but it might have helped [laughs].