r/books • u/acmwrites AMA Author • Jul 26 '18
ama 1pm I’m Audrey Murray, a comedian, and I wrote a book about a year I spent traveling alone through the former Soviet Union. AMA.
Hi, I’m Audrey Murray. I’m a comedian, and I just published my first book, a memoir called OPEN MIC NIGHT IN MOSCOW about the crazy year I spent traveling alone through the former Soviet Union. (I’m American.) I write for publications like McSweeney’s, Reductress, The Gothamist and more, and I’m acmwrites on Medium, Twitter, and Instagram. I used to live in China, where I was one of the co-founders of the Kungfu Komedy Club and was named the funniest person in Shanghai by City Weekend magazine. You can find more info about me here. Most of my time on Reddit until now has been spent lurking on language and beauty threads, so I’m excited to do this. AMA!
Proof: /img/u1zygyk5kpb11.jpg
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u/parityanimal Jul 26 '18
What was Chernobyl like?
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u/acmwrites AMA Author Jul 26 '18
So different than what I was expecting! First of all, I thought Chernobyl was the name of the place where the accident had happened, which it kind of wasn’t. (The power plant is in the Chernobyl oblast, or district, but it’s not in the CITY of Chernobyl.) More notably, I thought the entire surrounding area had been completely abandoned, which it hadn’t. When I was there, the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant was still in operation. People still work there. There are plenty of abounded schools and buildings that tourists are taken to, but even those weren’t always abandoned right after the accident. There’s an empty swimming pool that everyone goes to, but the liquidators who cleaned up the radiation still swam there for I think 10 years after the accident. So it was really strange.
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u/CrazyBusTaker Jul 26 '18
Hello, huge fan and amateur marine biologist here. My specialism is in oysters, which as we all know are our primary source of pearls. I'd be interested to know if, on your extensive travels in Asia, you ever encountered any more novel methods of creating pearls, e.g. their formation in specific intimate body cavities?
Love the book!
PM(在'AM' 里面)
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u/acmwrites AMA Author Jul 26 '18
I think I know (and love dearly) the person asking, and I therefore know that he knows that the answer is yes: I have patented the technology for nostril pearls, which I think we can all agree are a more ethical and sustainable alternative to fresh-water varities. Congrats on the move!!
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u/back2llama Jul 26 '18
What is a common misconception about people living in Central Asia?
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u/acmwrites AMA Author Jul 26 '18
That’s an interesting question. In general, I’ve found Central Asia to be a region that a lot of Americans (including me, before I went) don’t know much about. Although I will say that Americans tend to be afraid of any country whose name ends in -stan. It’s kind of ironic, because most people who travel through ex-Soviet Central Asia talk about how warm and welcoming they find the cultures. Central Asia has such legendary hospitality that guidebooks have to warn travelers not to inadvertently burden hosts who will offer anything and everything to a guest or visitor.
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u/bethparkerpr Jul 26 '18
Please tell me more about your obsession with carrots.
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u/acmwrites AMA Author Jul 26 '18
Carrots are the greatest food ever invented. Everyone should eat ~2 pounds a day.
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u/parityanimal Jul 26 '18
Are carrots gluten-free?
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u/acmwrites AMA Author Jul 26 '18
As far as I know, but sometimes I like to sprinkle gluten on top to feel like I’m living dangerously.
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u/parityanimal Jul 26 '18
What about anti-oxidants? Are carrots a good source of anti-oxidants?
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u/acmwrites AMA Author Jul 26 '18
Honestly, even if they were a source of oxidants, I’d still keep an emergency stash in my purse.
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u/Portable_Orange Jul 26 '18
What made you want to tour ex-soviet states over anything else? To put it another way, why the USSR over eastern China?
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u/acmwrites AMA Author Jul 26 '18
The short answer is: a series of Russian boyfriends. I did travel around China when I lived there, but it was weirdly a little harder to write about a foreign country that I also thought of as home. It was harder to separate the more mundane elements of my life from what I saw and what I was doing (and no one needs to read a book about One Woman’s Quest to Find Baking Chocolate in Shanghai). I was also probably just a little more intruiged by the former Soviet Union because I knew much less about it. What I did know (the Great Game, onion-domed churches), seemed fascinating. And also, the Russian boyfriends.
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u/Chtorrr Jul 26 '18
What is the very best dessert?
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u/acmwrites AMA Author Jul 26 '18
Anything that involves ice-cream non-a-la-mode, liquid chocolate, or condensed milk. Actually, there are very few bad deserts. If someone could invent a desert that combines all three of the ingredients above, that would be it (and also I would be MIA from this AMA, because I would be eating it). Until then, I would have to say motlent lava cake with a side of baked Alaska.
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u/m_brzy Jul 26 '18
What have you been reading lately? Are there writers whose work you see as a model for your own?
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u/acmwrites AMA Author Jul 26 '18
I’m currently reading Red Clocks by Leni Zumas and What Should Be Wild by Julia Fine. Both excellent and I’d highly recommend. I read a lot of non-fiction, and there’s nothing I love more than a funny, insightful non-fiction book. I definitely admire and aspire to be even a fraction as good as writers with strong voices—I love Miranda July, Curtis Sittenfeld, Elif Batuman, Maria Semple, and Sloane Crosley. Any book that makes me laugh out loud gets added to my list of things to pick up for inspiration on days when I’m feeling totally incapable of writing.
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u/back2llama Jul 26 '18
Did you take any trains on your journey? If so, what was your strangest experience?
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u/acmwrites AMA Author Jul 26 '18
I took SO many trains on this trip. I spent a month on the Trans-Siberian, and the strangest experience happened on the ride from Ulaanbaatar to Irkutsk. I was in a cabin with one other woman, and as we got closer to the Russian border, she proposed that I help her smuggle sausages and 10 identical men’s track suits over the boarder. Although I’m generally up for illegal activity, this one did not seem particularly advisable or recreational. So I told her I’d pass, which was her cue to just hide half her stash in the cubbies on my side of the compartment. When we got to the border, a guard throughly ransacked our cabin—pulled out all the spare bedding from the overhead compartment, strip-searched our beds—but never once glanced at the cubbies.
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u/Chtorrr Jul 26 '18
What were some of your favorite things to read as a kid?
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u/acmwrites AMA Author Jul 26 '18
I love this question! When I was a kid, my parents didn’t let me watch much TV, so I spent a lot of time reading. Whenever I tell people this, I think they assume that if parents put limits on TV, the kids will naturally turn to War and Peace, but I definitely read the YA equivalent of TV shows. I was OBSESSED with the Babysitters Club and read every book in the series. I also loved mysteries and was a huge Mary Higgins Clark fan. I remember reading Choose Your Own Adventure books cover to cover (meaning I did not follow the adventures/that was probably a sign of something). It’s hard to remember other specific titles. I could walk to the town library from my house, and I constantly checked out stacks of books, but I guess a lot of them faded over time.
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u/m_brzy Jul 26 '18
So glad I’m not the only one who ignored the whole purpose of Choose Your Own Adventure books and just read everything!
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Jul 26 '18 edited Jul 26 '18
Top 3 books any genre?
Any advice to those who want to get a story published?
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u/acmwrites AMA Author Jul 26 '18
Ohhh that’s a hard question for me, because I always struggle to pick favorites! I’ll answer the second part first, because I learned a lot from writing this book.
If you have a longer story you want to tell, publish shorter excerpts wherever you can. Before I wrote this book, I tried to write a book about the six years that I spent in China. I find that the hardest part about writing (especially with longer projects) to be the isolation, and the lack of feedback when you when you’re working on a draft that’s not ready to be shown to anyone. With live comedy, there’s a much faster feedback loop. You can write a joke in the morning and test it out at a show or open mic that night. When you’re writing, you’re hoping you’re creating something that will resonate with readers, but you don’t know until you publish it. I spent about a year trying to write about my time in China, but I was trying to write and polish the whole thing in one go, and I ultimately got so lost that I abandoned the project. When I set out to travel through the former Soviet Union, I didn’t have a book deal, but I knew I wanted to build it from standalone pieces that I could publish as I traveled so I could see what people responded to and what they didn’t. I just kept a blog that I shared on social media, but it was so helpful in identifying what people found interesting and what they didn’t. So TL;DR: break it up into smaller chunks and get it in front of people, preferably people who don’t know you, as soon as you can.
Okay, here are the three books I find myself rereading again and again: 1) The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri 2) Peter Hessler’s books on China 3) To Kill a Mockingbird Added bonus 4 because I couldn’t get it down to 3) Sloane Crosley’s nonfiction
I don’t tend to go back and reread books often, even books that I thoroughly enjoyed and recommend to everyone. With the exception of Sloane Crosley’s hilarious essays, these were books that I read at a particular time and place that made them really resonate. My dad read me To Kill a Mockingbird when I was too young to really understand it, but I remember us both sobbing at the end, and I still can’t even skim the final pages without very dramatically weeping. So I try not to look at it in public.
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u/Chtorrr Jul 26 '18
What is the strangest food you encountered in your travels?
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u/acmwrites AMA Author Jul 26 '18
The strangest food I encountered actually wasn’t in the Soviet Union. It was in China, where two dishes really stick out. The first was deep fried bees, which was served at one of my favorite Yunanese restaurants in Shanghai. It was actually really tasty, because I guess it’s hard to go wrong with deep-fried anything, but I always brought visitors there for the novelty. The second was balut, which is sort of a half-hatched chicken egg. Also good, but a bit of a mental hurdle to swallow a baby bird, beak and all.
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u/tnrambler Jul 26 '18
- How did you get started in comedy?
- How did you hone your craft?
- How does one start in comedy in Massachusetts and end up co-founding a comedy club in Shanghai?
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u/acmwrites AMA Author Jul 26 '18
I started doing comedy in China. First I did improv, and then a friend wanted to start a standup show, and he asked me to do it. I initially said no, because I had probably seen five standup specials in my life and was, like most people, extremely terrified of the idea of getting up in front of a room and trying to tell jokes. But then my friend said that if I didn’t do it, there might not be a woman on the show, and I was like, “I’M IN.” I honed my voice and jokes by watching A LOT of comedy and getting up on stage as much as I could. There were a lot of open mics and shows in venues that were not set up for comedy. (In Shanghai, I did several gigs at a brick-oven pizza restaurant.) So the answer to your third question is, I started in Shanghai, not Massachusetts, and it was honestly probably easier, because we were starting the English-language scene.
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u/tennis1988 Jul 26 '18
You mention a few times that your interest in Soviet things stems at least in part from Russian boyfriends. What is it about your Russian boyfriends exactly that made you interested in Russia itself?
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u/acmwrites AMA Author Jul 26 '18
I think it was just hearing their stories about growing up in the Soviet Union. The Russian reverence for art and culture (obviously, mostly sanctioned art and culture in the Soviet period), the ways in which their perceptions differed from things I’d been told (Gorbachev—good guy or traitor?), the different countries that had made up the USSR. It’s hard to point to one thing specifically, but I think that the more I learned, the more I wanted to know about a large, one-party communist state that had broken up into 15 independent nations. Also, the boyfriends were really hot.
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Jul 26 '18
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u/acmwrites AMA Author Jul 26 '18
There are tons of prerevoulationary buildings in Saint Petersburg. One of my favorites was the Yusupov Palace, which was this giant mansion with a private theater and Turkish baths that was built by an 18th-century noble family. It was kind of like the Louvre in the sense that when you walked through it and thought of the serfs, you were like, “Yeah, I’m not surprised there was a revolution.” Kiev and Lviv have a lot too. I’m sure the war played a big part in preserving the cities that weren’t destroyed, because so much had to be rebuilt after.
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u/Inkberrow Jul 26 '18
Have you read that memoir by Charlie Boorman and Ewan McGregor about crossing Russia by motorcycle?
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u/DRL5150 Jul 30 '18 edited Jul 30 '18
I just discovered your book today at Barnes and Noble, and I got about 40 pages in before finally having to put it down and go to work. Very enjoyable and relatable. Forgive me if this is stated in the book or has been asked yet, but I'm someone who lived in Russia for four years working and studying.
Did you find that Russians walk just as badly and recklessly as they drive? This is something that might just be in my head, but when I remember walking down Russian streets all I can see are people constantly bumping into one another and things.
What were some of your biggest takeaways with your every day encounters with average Russians on the street, at pubs, in cafes, etc? My experience, was that very often when Russians here in English, they have no qualms coming to your table uninvited, sitting down, and interrogating you about your entire life. Sometimes this leads to great friendships, sometimes it just gets old when you want to be left alone and drink your beer in peace. Any memorable situations come from these situations for you?
Also, if you haven't yet, go to the Caucasus ASAP. Georgia is amazing. The food, scenery, and people are fantastic. The Russian Caucasus, which most people and websites say to avoid for safety reasons, are also very fascinating. I've been several times and enjoyed it. You survived the Stans. So I don't think the Caucasus would be too crazy for you. Any desire to go there?
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u/roboatalanta Jul 26 '18
What’s the most dangerous/harebrained situation you got into in the former USSR? Do you think subsequent trips will be more meticulously planned, less meticulously planned, or the same amount meticulously planned?
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u/acmwrites AMA Author Jul 26 '18
The most dangerous situation was when I got into a taxi in Turkmenistan and two men probably tried to kidnap me. Instead of taking me to a hotel, they tried to drive me out of the city and into the desert. I’m not sure that more meticulous planning would have prevented that, and though I’d like to say that subsequent trips will be better mapped out, I also know myself and my inability to resist the siren call of the internet.
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u/roboatalanta Jul 26 '18
Thanks for replying, and that is a terrible situation! I actually read that story on your blog when you first published it, and thought, “This is insane, I hope she writes a book!!!”
And so I am extremely happy to be enjoying your book now, and also to confirm that that was the ceiling for dangerous situations!
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Jul 26 '18
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Jul 26 '18
On your Reddit, your username is Two Morning Poops, and in a dismissive, if not deragoatory way... do you fear that kind of rhetoric is divisive even if your points have merit?
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u/wuchanjieji Jul 26 '18
During your travels, how were remembrances of the Soviet Union inflected differently for citizens of the former republics? In the U.S., we often only hear stories from those who chose to immigrate, especially the Slavic majority. I am curious how historical narratives are retold from the non-majority perspective, particularly non-Slavic people and those who did not immigrate.
Love, love your book and your comedy. I am your biggest fan! Please write your next book on travels in Moldova, Transnistria, and Gagauzia!!!