With the publication of her acclaimed short story collection Slaves of New York, Tama Janowitz was crowned the "Lit Girl of New York." Celebrated in rarified literary and social circles, she was hailed, alongside Mark Lindquist, Bret Easton Ellis, and Jay McInerney, as one of the original “Brat Pack” writers—a wave of young minimalist authors whose wry, urbane sensibility captured the zeitgeist of the time, propelling them to the forefront of American culture. Always an original, she left the glamour and glitz of the 1980s behind to be a wife, mother, and poodle wrangler—only to find herself still searching for a sense of purpose. In Scream, her first memoir published in 2016, Janowitz recalls the quirky literary world of young downtown New York in the go-go 1980s and reflects on her life today far away from the city indelible to her work. As in Slaves of New York and A Certain Age, Janowitz turns a critical eye towards life, this time her own, recounting the vagaries of fame and fortune as a writer devoted to her art. Filled with a very real, very personal cast of characters, Scream is an intimate, scorching memoir rife with the humor, insight, and experience of a writer with a surgeon’s eye for detail, and a skill for cutting straight to the strangest parts of life. Boy Scout talked to Janowitz about great ambition, story survival, and finding a plastic cup, preferably without a hole.
