Your wife, the daughter of Korean immigrants, decides to repay her mother’s sacrifice by buying her a convenience store. Tell us about your first reaction to her idea.
Well, I looked forward to getting free snack food and earning dividends on the hefty profits Gab thought we could make. I even looked forward to working a shift now and then – I thought that would be kind of funny. The humor dissolved pretty quickly once we started looking at stores and putting together the numbers, at which point we realized this would change our lives. And that was before we opened.
At what stage of owning the deli did you begin to conceive of it as a memoir?
I didn’t start off thinking that way at all, and didn’t take many notes, until one day when I was feeling miserable and went to see a friend who owned a coffee shop in Manhattan, and he said, “Don’t let this period be forgotten, write it down, because as miserable as it is, you’re going to remember and cherish it the rest of your life.” And he wasn’t a writer, just someone who’d gone through the travails of starting a family business. So I started keeping notes, but even then it wasn’t for another year that I seriously thought about writing about it. For one thing, I hadn’t written much in the first-person before – I kind of frowned on it, to be honest; I was raised to use the pronoun “I” as little as possible, especially in writing – and had never taken much interest in New York as a subject. At some point, though, I realized I’d had sort of a classic New York experience, like the Griffin Dunne character in “After Hours” who’s sitting in a café one night and ends up getting chased by a Mister Softee truck and turned into a sculpture. That idea, that a dull, everyday person can be transported at any moment to some utterly improbable place – is one of the essential myths of New York, isn’t it? Anything can happen.
