Jen­nifer Lang’s sec­ond mem­oir, Land­ed: A Yogi’s Mem­oir in Pieces & Pos­es, picks up where her first left off. After sev­er­al moves to dif­fer­ent con­ti­nents, Lang, her hus­band, and their three kids have final­ly set­tled in Israel. Deter­mined to feel root­ed in this life­time, Lang, a seri­ous yoga stu­dent and teacher, uses the wis­dom she’s gained from her yoga prac­tice to help her gain per­spec­tive. Over time, she dis­cov­ers that she must first feel at home with who she is; where she lives is secondary.

Lang wrote Land­ed well before Octo­ber 7th, 2023. Our con­ver­sa­tion took place this past August, almost one year after. While Land­ed is a per­son­al sto­ry, it also gives read­ers a glimpse into life in Israel. Lang writes, ​“It shines a light on what it is to be a human being liv­ing in a place that beholds both beau­ty and chaos.”

Diane Got­tlieb: Con­grat­u­la­tions on your gor­geous mem­oir! It is in many ways the nat­ur­al next step after your first book, Places We Left Behind. In Places, we fol­low you, a sec­u­lar Jew­ish Amer­i­can, and Philippe, your obser­vant French-born hus­band, on a twen­ty-year jour­ney to find the place you both want to put down roots. The jour­ney in Land­ed is one of per­son­al growth. Can you share a lit­tle bit about the two books, how they work togeth­er, and how Land­ed reflects your hard-earned sense of self?

Jen­nifer Lang: Ini­tial­ly, I had one long man­u­script that moved from my child­hood to the late 2010s, but it was­n’t work­ing. It lacked a nar­ra­tive arc; I had no idea what I was try­ing to say. Mem­oirists are often ask­ing a ques­tion, but I had no idea what mine was. I put it away for months, which turned into years, dur­ing which time I did many dif­fer­ent things: I took online flash-writ­ing and prose poet­ry class­es and became an assis­tant edi­tor at Brevi­ty jour­nal. My writ­ing start­ed to change as it got short­er and short­er. My prose began to pop, help­ing me see the heart of the story.

I dis­cov­ered I was real­ly answer­ing two dif­fer­ent sets of ques­tions, each based on where I was in the world and how I felt with­in myself and my rela­tion­ships. In Places We Left Behind, I focused most­ly on nav­i­gat­ing mar­riage and bal­anc­ing com­pro­mis­es and com­mit­ment. Deter­min­ing ​“the place” where my hus­band and I could agree to put down our roots, along with the lev­el of reli­gious obser­vance that made the most sense for our new and grow­ing fam­i­ly, were the areas of great­est con­flict. These were the dif­fer­ences we had to work through in order to feel tru­ly at home with each oth­er. So, I’d say Places is a love sto­ry about leav­ing ele­ments of our pasts to cre­ate a lov­ing and sta­ble present, while Land­ed reads like a late-in-life com­ing of age. The main con­flict in Land­ed that I had to resolve, but was unaware of at the time, was my rela­tion­ship with myself. The answer to that ques­tion could only be found with­in me.

Each book stands alone. You don’t have to read both, or even one before the oth­er. But they also feel like two parts of one larg­er story.

DG: While Land­ed is a tra­di­tion­al mem­oir in the sense that it fol­lows a chrono­log­i­cal arc, it exper­i­ments with struc­ture in fas­ci­nat­ing ways. The num­ber sev­en feels like an orga­niz­ing prin­ci­ple: the mem­oir cov­ers a sev­en-year time peri­od, and you place your expe­ri­ence with­in the frame­work of the sev­en chakras. How did this struc­ture come to you?

JL: For bet­ter and worse, I’m a struc­ture freak. I often start writ­ing with an idea of the con­tain­er before hav­ing the con­tent. Most writ­ers pour their ideas onto the page and then fig­ure out how to con­tain or struc­ture them lat­er. My obses­sion with struc­ture might have to do with my Vir­go-per­fec­tion­ist, prob­lem-solv­ing side, or with my need for con­trol, like in my yoga practice.

Yoga became an impor­tant part of my life when I felt out of con­trol as a young mom with three lit­tle kids, a for­eign hus­band, and geo­graph­ic insta­bil­i­ty. We couldn’t agree on where to live. All that chaos made me yearn for bound­aries and lim­its: a clean house, kids in bed on time, a yoga class, or, now, all these years lat­er, struc­ture in my writ­ing life. Look­ing back at my vis­cer­al need to step onto a yoga mat and lose myself in the prac­tice, I real­ize that that space gave me a phys­i­cal bound­ary in which to con­tain this chaos called life.

DG: I love the way you use the chakras and pos­es through­out. You describe pos­tures and scenes that take place in yoga stu­dios. But the chakras and pos­es also play an impor­tant metaphor­i­cal role in your sto­ry. Can you talk about how the lit­er­al and fig­u­ra­tive are work­ing in your book?

JL: My first book starts in 1989 and ends in 2011, when we’re tak­ing a taxi to Newark Air­port to board a plane to Israel. Land­ed starts in 2011, when we arrive in Ra’anana, Israel. I chose (or should I say land­ed on) the title because the word ​“land” refers to the Land of Israel, land­ing at the air­port in Israel, and land­ing in a yoga pose — espe­cial­ly a bal­ance pose.

Years ago, a writer friend who had read an ear­li­er man­u­script gave me the most hon­est, help­ful feed­back. She said, ​“I think you’re ask­ing the wrong ques­tion. I think this isn’t the jour­ney of your mar­riage as much as your jour­ney.” After our con­ver­sa­tion, I real­ized my jour­ney start­ed as soon as we arrived here in 2011 and end­ed sev­en years later.

Sev­en is sym­bol­ic in both Judaism and yoga. In Judaism, there are sev­en days in the week­ly cycle, sev­en species in the Land of Israel, sev­en weeks of count­ing the Omer, sev­en bless­ings in the She­va Bra­chot, and sev­en days in the shi­va mourn­ing peri­od, to name a few.

In yoga, sev­en is the num­ber of chakras or spir­i­tu­al ener­gy chan­nels run­ning from the base of the spine to the crown of the head.

For us, sev­en had its own mean­ing. In our twen­ty-some­thing years of mov­ing, we had nev­er stayed longer than six years in one place. When we stayed in Israel that sev­enth year, it was the first time I under­stood what it means to root: when you know your way around, feel a sense of com­mu­ni­ty and a sense of belong­ing, and become known in your field. But it was also the year I grasped that home was more about who I was than where I lived.

When­ev­er I learned about chakras in yoga class, par­tic­u­lar­ly the root chakra, I thought about the strange turns in life, how I grew up real­ly root­ed and end­ed up so unroot­ed, and how that unroot­ed­ness con­tributed to my feel­ing out of con­trol. It also made me real­ize my chakras were off, out of bal­ance, begin­ning from the base, the root, the most impor­tant place.

To incor­po­rate the chakras, I com­pressed all the teach­ings I’d learned over the years into one nar­ra­tive for the sake of craft and sprin­kled them through­out the book.

DG: Also untra­di­tion­al is the way you play with space on the page. Can you tell us about the thought bub­bles, the dif­fer­ent fonts, and the short, com­pact chap­ters in your book? Do you call them chapters?

JL: I call them ​“chap­terettes,” thanks to Blair Glaser, with whom I was in con­ver­sa­tion last win­ter at Zibby’s Book­shop in San­ta Mon­i­ca. I asked per­mis­sion to lift that word and cred­it her every time.

After read­ing the late Amy Krouse Rosenthal’s Ency­clo­pe­dia of an Ordi­nary Life and Nora Krug’s Belong­ing in 2018, I longed to cre­ate some­thing sim­i­lar — some­thing orig­i­nal and play­ful. I think that sub­con­scious­ly I sensed the sto­ry was too seri­ous, wrought with air raid sirens and mil­i­tary oper­a­tions, car ram­mings and coun­try-wide stab­bings, and need­ed light­en­ing. Those devices helped me achieve that, for which I am grateful.

DG: Even though you start­ed to feel root­ed after liv­ing in Israel for sev­en years, you write that you’re always going to be an immi­grant. Your accent and man­ners, for exam­ple, give you away. How has being an immi­grant shaped the way you see yourself?

JL: In year sev­en, I start­ed to under­stand that the immi­grant expe­ri­ence isn’t all-or-noth­ing, either-or. It’s not that I’m Amer­i­can or Israeli. It’s that I’m this and I’m that: Amer­i­can by birth and French by mar­riage and Israeli by choice. My immi­grant sta­tus is a rich, won­der-filled part of my iden­ti­ty if I look at it through that lens. And I final­ly real­ized that I was in con­trol of that lens.

The same writer friend who’d read the orig­i­nal man­u­script and sug­gest­ed I write my jour­ney also said, ​“I feel like the nar­ra­tor has a prob­lem. She does­n’t appre­ci­ate what she’s got.” Two decades ear­li­er, on my thir­ti­eth birth­day, a child­hood friend had said some­thing similar.

Some­times behav­ior stems from nature, some­times nur­ture. My eighty-six-year-old moth­er has led a very charmed life on many lev­els, yet all she does is kvetch. I’ve spent the past fif­teen to twen­ty years, if not longer, observ­ing her, think­ing — know­ing — that I don’t want to grow old like that, to act like her. I do not want to be that per­son who takes every­thing for granted.

The change in me hap­pened dur­ing our sev­enth year here, when I under­stood that I could be both this and that. That it was up to me to stop blam­ing my hus­band for being here, to stop com­plain­ing about cer­tain aspects of the coun­try or our rela­tion­ship as a cou­ple, to stop look­ing at life through a half-emp­ty glass. It’s not who I am, how I feel inside, what I want to teach or show my young adult chil­dren. I want to be more aligned with my upbeat and ener­getic self. It takes tremen­dous aware­ness and effort, a kind of a mind­ful­ness practice.

DG: As mem­oirists — I imag­ine the same is true for fic­tion writ­ers — we might sit down to a blank page think­ing we’re going to write about some­thing dif­fer­ent this time, but the same sto­ries appear. Do you think you’ll con­tin­ue to write about this part of your life?

JL: No, I think I’m done. I’ve made peace with where I live. It is home. I can’t keep writ­ing about it because the strug­gle is over (which seems iron­ic, giv­en the strug­gle that we and many oth­er parts of the world are in at this point in time).

DG: So, no more mem­oir. What’s next for you?

JL: I hope to write his­tor­i­cal fic­tion. I would love to fic­tion­al­ize my grand­par­ents and their sep­a­rate arrivals a decade apart in San Fran­cis­co in the 1920s and 1930s, when the Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty of San Fran­cis­co was just devel­op­ing. I dream of bas­ing char­ac­ters on the peo­ple in my zayde’s Yid­dish The­ater Troupe, as well as his first wife and their daugh­ter. His ex-wife ran off with his best friend in search of fame; she and my zayde quick­ly divorced in Reno; and he strug­gled to raise their daugh­ter, alone, while ped­dling clothes to farm­ers out­side of San Francisco.

Then, my grand­moth­er, Boba, arrived from Roma­nia, also poor, illit­er­ate, and une­d­u­cat­ed. The eldest of six, she fell fast in love with a dis­tant cousin — my grand­fa­ther — who need­ed a wife and moth­er for his daugh­ter. And so, from the get-go, Boba was sad­dled with a step­daugh­ter, who spent her child­hood going back and forth between these house­holds (after her moth­er and step­fa­ther returned), nei­ther of which real­ly want­ed her. And while one mar­riage was dis­in­te­grat­ing and anoth­er blos­som­ing, San Fran­cis­co and world his­to­ry were in the mak­ing: there was the con­struc­tion of the Gold­en Gate Bridge, the stock mar­ket crash, the Great Depres­sion, World War II, and the found­ing of the State of Israel. In 1947, two of Boba’s younger sib­lings immi­grat­ed to pre-state Israel and, before I was alive and through­out my child­hood, she and Zayde played piv­otal roles in the build­ing of the coun­try from afar, receiv­ing every Israeli dig­ni­tary who passed through San Francisco.

DG: I don’t think we can talk about this book — or your jour­ney — with­out men­tion­ing your foot­notes, which address Octo­ber 7th and its after­math. Can you say a lit­tle about it?

JL: Every­thing that ever pet­ri­fied me, every­thing that tried my nerves, every­thing that made me scream and shake and sob has hap­pened — on steroids. No one ever imag­ined that so much hor­rif­ic bru­tal­i­ty could have tran­spired at once, in one day. And so, when I look back at my sto­ry — my reac­tion to the fifty-day war with Hamas in the sum­mer of 2014, the coun­try-wide stab­bings of 2015, and oth­er ran­dom acts of ter­ror — I cringe. I now see that ear­li­er self as inno­cent and stu­pid and child­ish and whiny. In fact, I had such a dif­fi­cult time read­ing my book a few months ago that I almost pulled it.

After con­fess­ing my doubt to the pub­lish­er, con­fid­ing in my hus­band, con­sult­ing a writer friend, and shar­ing the man­u­script with a child­hood friend – turned-ther­a­pist, I decid­ed to move for­ward. On the one hand, I wor­ry that putting this book into the world is a set­up for fail­ure. But on the oth­er hand, if I look through that half-full glass, I hope read­ers will see the rel­e­van­cy, the human­i­ty, what it’s like liv­ing here, and maybe nod, maybe sigh, maybe reassess their views, ques­tion their stance, learn some­thing new. Because we all need a dash of hope at this moment in time.