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January 5th, 2021 
Awake Goy 
Corie Adjmi’s life reads like a book: She grew up in New Orleans for most of her childhood until her family moved back to Brooklyn to be closer to their Syrian Jewish community. Adjmi fell in love and married a fellow Syrian Jew, had five kids with him and worked as an elementary school teacher at a neighborhood yeshiva. While she was still nursing her fifth child, she took some time off for a continuing education writing class. Now, two decades after walking into that class, she’s the award-winning author of her first book, “Life and Other Shortcomings.”
“I took the class just to have something for myself,” Adjmi said in a phone interview with the Journal. “I had no idea it would turn out to be the career I cared about for the rest of my life.”
“Life and Other Shortcomings,” which won the short story category of the 2020 American Fiction Awards, is Adjmi’s collection of fictional short stories that focus on the experiences of different women. The stories take place in locations like New York City, New Orleans and Madrid from 1970 to the present day. Some of the women are married, others are divorced or single, and some work while others don’t. A running theme is the patriarchy in the pre- and post-Me Too worlds.
There are Jewish subjects and characters throughout the book, too. In one story, Adjmi uses the Jewish calendar to tell time, mentioning Yom Kippur, Hanukkah and Passover. In another story titled “The Devil Makes Three,” the main character, Iris, struggles with her faith and with attending the mikvah.
“I think people want a good story, and these are entertaining and humorous but also pack a punch,” Adjmi said. “Some are about identity, some are about domestic abuse, and the patriarchy exists throughout these pages. While the subject matter can be intense, the stories are written in a way that is relatable, honest and entertaining.”
“The stories are written in a way that is relatable, honest and entertaining.” — Corie Adjmi
One story, titled “Shadows and Partially Lit Faces,” highlights patriarchal thinking. A husband is entitled because he believes that he “is able to compartmentalize his life by having an affair while still being able to keep his life with his wife/family,” said Adjmi. “[This is] something that is still all too common.”
Adjmi started writing the stories for “Life and Other Shortcomings” when she first became a writer in the early 2000s. She got the standalone pieces published but said she “felt like [these characters] would know each other. They needed to be connected. That was a really fun process.”
Now a grandmother, Adjmi — who lives in Manhattan with her husband and still goes back to Brooklyn for Shabbat — has more time to write. But when she was first starting out, she said she “wrote whenever I had a free moment. A special day would be to go to a café, get a coffee and sit by myself for short periods of time.”
Over the past 20 years, Adjmi wrote two novels as well. One of them, called “The Marriage Box,” is coming out this spring. “It’s based on my real life, but it’s totally 100% made up,” she said. “It’s based on a young girl who grows up in New Orleans, and because of things she’s done, she’s gotten into trouble, and her family is moving back to Brooklyn. It’s culture shock. I’d like to think of it as ‘Unorthodox’ meets ‘Crazy Rich Asians.’”
The author has also recently written on her Instagram about how contracting COVID-19 has had long-term effects on her and how she now acts and feels weird sometimes out of nowhere. “I talk about my COVID brain and pandemic fatigue,” she said.
Until her novel comes out, Adjmi is focusing on “Life and Other Shortcomings” and how women all around the world, who have been finding their own power as of late, can relate to it.
“It turned out this was a good time [to release the book],” she said. “Women are rising. They’re joining forces. There’s a sisterhood thing happening. People are paying attention to these issues in different ways. It feels timely to me.”
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