A few weeks ago, I sat down with my good friend Noam Dworman, owner and proprietor of the Comedy Cellar in New York City and podcast host, to talk about Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative. I was looking forward to this conversation, because Noam is not only willing to delve into difficult, uncomfortable subject matter, he seems to relish it. Noam doesn’t hesitate to ask me some tough questions, but he does it without any performative pearl-clutching or finger-wagging.
And he’s a sharp reader! In this conversation, you’ll hear him identify paradoxes and tensions in my story that, to be honest, I hadn’t noticed myself. There are times in my life when I could have been—and was—credibly accused of hypocrisy. Noam strikes a very delicate balance between expressing a sincere disgust for hypocrisy and an acknowledgment that, at some point, we’ll all succumb to its temptation, if only for a moment. Hypocrisy may not be admirable, but permanently banishing everyone accused of it with no possibility of redemption would be an even greater offense.
When I wrote Late Admissions, I decided to do so with as much candor as I could muster. I didn’t want to hide anything. I knew that maintaining rigorous, unflinching honesty about my own life would make for a good book. But I also hoped that, in exposing my failures alongside my successes and in exploring the relationship between the two, I would allow readers to glimpse themselves in me. I’m grateful to Noam for going to those places—the particular and the universal—along with me.
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