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AUSTIN – Sit down with author Shalom Auslander, in person or with his latest book, and soon you'll be nervously looking upward, fearful of the lightning strike to come.

It's not just because he drops four-letter invectives against the Almighty with casual aplomb. Or that he envisions a furiously vengeful God who has a whole heavenly department at work cooking up ironic deaths for those who displease him.

It's because you're quite likely to find yourself amused by Mr. Auslander's own wrath and end up laughing with him to the point that you'll wonder if the next lightning bolt will be for you.

Such is the response many readers have probably had to his memoir, Foreskin's Lament (Riverhead, $24.95). In it, he tells of growing up in an ultra-Orthodox community in New York. At school, he was drilled on dietary restrictions, rote prayer and divine fury. At home, he faced a violent father and found escape in an escalating series of rebellions – cheeseburgers, pornography, drugs and a prostitute (with a cheeseburger on the side).

He writes as a 34-year-old father-to-be, hating the God he was raised with, dreading the implications for his wife and child if he fails to obey.

"I believe in God," he writes. "It's been a real problem for me."

Critics regularly describe the book as both very angry and very funny, with an emphasis on the angry. They've also compared him favorably to writers such as Philip Roth and David Sedaris – who, like Mr. Auslander, has appeared regularly on public radio's This American Life. The New York Times recently named Foreskin's Lament one of its 100 Notable Books of 2007.

Between nervous phone calls home to check on the well-being of his wife and son, Mr. Auslander talked about his work in Austin last month.

What kind of response have you gotten to the book? I imagine that half the people who come up to you say they can relate, and the other half want to convert you.

The really surprising thing is that most of the people who come over are Catholic, Christian, wonderfully fallen, beautifully fallen. And I kind of suspected that. The first-ever reading I did from Foreskin's Lament was at the State University of New York. And afterward these two old men with heavy Irish accents approach me, and one of them shakes my hand and says: "I'm 75 years old. I waited my whole life for someone to write about what it's like to be Catholic. And it turned out to be a Jew."

And then his friend laughs and slaps me on the shoulder and says, "Yeah, but better you than me." They were joking that they were going to be meeting him soon, and couldn't risk offending him like I can.

So your ultra-Orthodox experience in New York might have relevance to, say, a Lutheran in Omaha, or a Baptist from Waco?

It's the same [expletive] God. If he's half the [expletive] that the religious people tell us he is, we're all [expletive]. You really think prayer is going to help? The character they've drawn – flying off the handle, clearly has huge issues, possibly alcoholic, at least homicidally schizophrenic – you think prayer is gonna work? The guy's crazy. So I think everyone who reads it can get past the "Jew, Jew, Jew" bit.

Despite your anger at God, you say you're not nonreligious.

Because religious means something to me. Religion means a belief in a god, an awareness of it. And having this sort of connection. It could be a negative connection. I'm aware of my father. I don't love him. I don't want to be with him. But I can understand that there is such a thing. ...

A part of me wants to believe desperately that God is up there, and he's glad that I'm saying this, because he's had some terrible PR. That would be really sweet. I don't think it's true.

A lot of the coverage of your book has emphasized the religion angle. Is it equally a book about family?

What I would say the book is fundamentally about is individuation. It's a person separating from their family and trying to separate from a belief system, doing that to become an individual. To become the person that he has always been but has been kept from being.

You chose to find humor in a pretty horrific upbringing. Why?

I have much more respect for humor than tragedy. You can either picture a writer sitting in a room at a typewriter making himself cry, or you picture a writer in his room making himself laugh. Both are completely [expletive] pathetic. But the first one is more pathetic.

I think I've always found humor, whether it's Aristophanes or Vonnegut, or Beckett or Bill Hicks, or Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor – these are the guys I admire most. They seem to have all the rage, all the righteous anger and the perspective to be able to sit a little bit higher up and laugh at it. That's what the Greeks saw as comedy – the gods'-eye view of the world. Tragedy is the way humans saw it.

Some critics have said perhaps you didn't push hard enough in your examination of yourself.

It's pretty clear from the book I've still got some [expletive] problems. I'm not pretending to have figured anything out. What I wanted to do was say, "This is who I am."

What's next?

I want to finish this tour and go home and sit down and dig a little deeper. Find something else that's in the shadows of my head. The great thing about writing is that you're walking through all the hallways and closets of your mind with a flashlight and saying, "It's not so bad." Like I do with my son: "Look, I'll turn the lights on. There are no monsters here." And I really want to go home and look for another monster to shine some light on.

So, how are your wife and son? Struck down yet?

You know, a lot of tumors can't be detected for a little while. I'm quite sure he's gotten to work on both of them already. Or some fuse downstairs has burst and is setting fire to the box. That's just the way he works.

What about an ironic punishment for your readers?

Well, they're out 24 bucks. That's a start.

Truth is, it was more nerve-racking writing it because I was alone, because God could take me out and no one would know. Now that it's published, there are all these witnesses. In a way, everyone who has bought the book is part of an enormous class-action suit and can be called as witnesses if anything happens to me.

Shalom Auslander

(Riverhead, $24.95) {WebDesk} Read on: There's more

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