Taking life one risk at a time

Amanda Stern tossed us the key to her front door, wrapped in a sock, from the third floor window of her Brooklyn brownstone. One of our producers made the catch and wondered aloud if the key-throw was the first of a series of tests we had to complete before Amanda would grant us entry. Fortunately, the key worked and we didn’t have to scale the building to get in.

The week before our interview, we’d visited Amanda backstage at the Happy Ending Music and Reading Series at Joe’s Pub in New York. Amanda hosts and curates the monthly event. One of the elements that makes the reading so fun, besides the musical guests, is that Amanda requires each reader to take one public risk. That evening’s risks included Victor Lodato inhaling from a helium balloon and struggling not to pass out while he read from his novel in a chipmunk voice: Laurie Grodstein sharing a postcard she received in the 80′s from a fling she met in Amsterdam; and Paul Rudnick telling a story about his mother, who had passed away three weeks earlier.

Amanda said that writers who appear at Happy Ending often confuse the word “risk” with “embarrassment.” She explained that the risk was never meant to be an exercise in mortification. “I care a lot about people’s quirks and personalities–the unexpected parts of people,” she said. “Reading someone’ s book is a very private and personal experience, and I wanted to humanize that. I wanted to be able to give the audience the truth about an author.”

With her reading series, Amanda claimed she’d found the perfect way to balance two sides of her personality, the comedian who lives to make people laugh and the writer-hermit who locks herself in a room. As a self-confessed “recovering comedian,” she’s obviously comfortable on stage, delivering her monologue without the slightest hint of self-consciousness. She saves her risks, she said, for when she’s alone, writing.