Word: selma
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...With its Evelyn Waugh drawl, Social Disease is Rudnick's revenge on the less- than-zilch nightlife novels of the mid-'80s. So I'll Take It (1989) must be his anti-Portnoy. A Jewish boy who loves and enjoys his mother -- call the cops! Paul's mom Selma and her sisters Lillian and Hilda are the models for Hedy Reckler and her bargain-hunter siblings. The novel is "only" about a New England shopping tour, on which Hedy's son Joe hitches a ride. But if war novels can teach us about manhood, why can't a shopping novel...
...Paul's father Norman was a physicist at Gulton Industries, which, Paul says, "developed a lot of things that to this day I do not understand: capacitors, transistor devices that would go into everything from Osterizers to rocket ships." Later he edited one of the first textbooks on AIDS. Selma has worked for Partisan Review, for the Pennsylvania Ballet and now for a Philadelphia concert producer. Paul's older brother Evan, a jack-of-all-trades, lives near Ithaca, N.Y. "He has long hair and a beard and is very good at all the things that...
...Selma, a big Paul Rudnick fan who has seen Jeffrey three times -- "Is that more than David Mamet's mother saw Oleanna, do you suppose?" -- recalls that her son was a clever child. "But he was not the Paul we see today," she says, "because parents don't really see that. A parent is always trying to get a child to do what he doesn't want to do. And Paul's response to this was, 'No, I won't clean up my room.' At the time, I didn't find that particularly witty...
That is a notion at the heart of Jeffrey, a play that is all-funny and all- true. "In many ways it's a liberating play for Paul," Selma Rudnick says, "and I'm so happy he was rewarded for it. The world doesn't always reward you for taking such great leaps." In it Rudnick faces up to the challenge his earlier writing implicitly set: how to be sensibly cheerful about a disease that ravages homosexuals...
...helped Paul that at the end his father read the Jeffrey playscript and loved it. "It was such a sad time in our lives," Selma says. "There was no time to speak anything but truthfully. We were a very talky family at the end there." She brightens as she recalls, "Paul would come in and tell us what was going on -- sort of the Scheherazade of the hospital...