Half-Baked Stories About My Dead Mom

This American Life host Ira Glass and renowned Israeli author Etgar Keret combine their skills for this evening of powerful and funny stories in a live performance of their podcast about Etgar’s mother, “Half-Baked Stories About My Dead Mom.”

“This show really began on a bus heading out of Tel Aviv,” Glass explains. “Etgar told me a story – really one of the most remarkable things I’d ever heard – and I thought ‘I have no idea how this can be a show but we have to make it into a show.’”

It was a story about his mom. Etgar had spent his life writing books on every conceivable subject, but somehow was never able to write about his mom. Then he started writing these tiny stories, each just four or five paragraphs long, that capture different sides of her. His mom, Orna Keret, was complicated. She was vengeful and loving. Maria in West Side Story and Thanos in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Capable of extreme action. “It was only when I started sharing my mom’s life story with Ira,” says Keret. “And saw him listening the way you listen to a fairytale that I realized that the stories I write are fantastical because I was raised by a fantastical mother who made me take the surreal for granted.”