One-Night Stands with Wild Strangers

Joselyn Takacs interviews Amy Silverberg about her debut novel, “First Time, Long Time.”

By Joselyn TakacsJuly 23, 2025

• Fiction

ALLISON, THE PROTAGONIST of Amy Silverberg’s debut novel, First Time, Long Time, is a writer in her late twenties cobbling together a living the way many Angelenos do, with a couple part-time jobs: leading book clubs for wealthy women, adjuncting at a local community college. The book’s premise is somewhat more unexpected. One day, Allison settles down to write at a Silver Lake bar and finds herself sitting next to the most famous radio DJ in the United States. Despite the odds, the misgivings, and a 30-year age gap, Allison ends up dating this Howard Stern–esque DJ, and we watch as she is swept into this famous man’s orbit.

First Time, Long Time is interested in fame and its effects—on those who have it and those who seek it. But more to the point: how fame complicates love. The novel thrums with wit and humor. Allison’s side gigs (the book club, the community college) provide the occasion for some wonderful passages about why literature matters now—not to mention the frustrations of impressing that on a disinterested audience. “They acted as though they wouldn’t be changed by a novel no matter what it was,” she laments at one point, “no matter if I found a writer that spoke so wholly to who they were—some unarticulated version—that they’d wonder if they’d written it themselves.” Often, the book takes comedy itself as a subject. Allison’s brother is a stand-up comedian—a role Silverberg knows intimately as one herself.

Comedy was one of many topics that came up in my conversation with Silverberg about her debut. The two of us went to graduate school together at the University of Southern California. When we spoke in April, we discussed her journey to finding her footing in the novel form, the female comedic voice, and the enduring appeal of Howard Stern.

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JOSELYN TAKACS: How did this novel come about?

AMY SILVERBERG: Let the record show: it’s all fiction. The writing of this book was strange because I feel that I’m a short story writer. It probably annoys my agents that I won’t stop referring to myself as “a short story writer who wrote a novel.” I’d had a collection of short stories I wanted to publish, which I’d been working on forever. My agents were like, “What if we try to do a novel first?”

I wrote a failed novel during the pandemic. It never came together, and [my agents] were like, “Just write 30 pages. Write a short story, and we’ll see if we can sell it.” So, the novel started out as a 30-page short story. Then I wrote several bad drafts. With each draft, I would do a page-one rewrite: I would read all their notes and then I would just start from the beginning. Which is my short story brain: I go sentence by sentence by sentence. I’m not a plot thinker—I’m a voice thinker. It took a lot of drafts to have the novel sound, frankly, more like one of my short stories, which is to say, looser, funnier … I think, in the beginning, I was trying to sound like a novelist.

What did “sounding like a novelist” mean to you?

The writing was kind of uptight and didn’t have any of the style that I think makes me a good writer in my short stories, which is a little funny-sad. I knew nothing other than that I wanted this young woman to start dating an older man that her dad was obsessed with, and I wanted that man also to have a daughter. It ended up getting more personal and more intimate to me, just in terms of preoccupations I have with love, and problems with my fun—but difficult—and charismatic dad. Hopefully, he won’t read this interview.

When I finally turned in the last draft, the publishing company was like, “Pencils down. We gotta be done with this.” I could have worked on it for years and years—which they knew.

The seed story—was that published somewhere?

No. I couldn’t write 30 pages without giving it kind of a beginning, middle, and end. So, it sort of read like a short story. Only little pieces of it ended up in the final novel, but in that original short story, [the narrator] meets this older man, this famous radio DJ at a bar, and then her father comes to visit, and they all go get drinks together. And that’s sort of it. It started out in third-person present tense.

That’s a hard point of view to pull off. Especially since so much of the humor in this novel is observational comedy.

Yeah, it got a lot better when I changed it to first person. I’m most comfortable in first person—at least for this first book. In this debut, I had to go where I felt most comfortable.

The idea of what your debut novel needs to be in the world can be totally paralyzing.

Totally—even less the idea of the debut novel, more the idea of me as a novelist. Like, Now I’m writing a serious novel. In the end, the novel turned out pretty similar to the way all my short stories sound. The more you try to escape your own style and your own voice, the more you realize that that’s kind of where your bread and butter is, I think.

Could you talk more about your writing habits?

When I think about this book, I think about having written it in what feels like a yearslong manic episode. I’ve never been one of those writers who has to write every day; I always have to drag myself to the page. The writing comes easier when I have a deadline. Obviously, you and I have only written a debut, but each book is its own kind of puzzle, and you can’t believe you got to the end. I know when I’ve landed a short story ending. This felt way more like—“is it a mess?”

A short story is like a song, right? You can tell by the end if there have been enough verses or refrains. It feels complete.

That’s a nice way to say it. Lorrie Moore said that novels are like a marriage and a short story is like a one-night stand with a wild stranger.

Is Lorrie Moore one of your writers?

I love Lorrie Moore, Grace Paley, Mary Robison, Amy Hempel. I did my dissertation on the female comedic voice in contemporary short fiction, so I’m always writing toward those women who I felt were gaining power by being funny in domestic spaces. And sort of subverting those that held power in the room around them, which were usually husbands, fathers—the men. Just saying things in a funny way, making fun of them in a way they can’t understand.

This is inside baseball. But I’m interested in the idea of—not minimalism, but miniaturism, which is a way to talk about Mary Robison’s and Amy Hempel’s writing. I think of it as a real attention to what’s in the corners of the room as opposed to what’s in the center of the room. So attention to the lamps, the towels, as opposed to these wide, sweeping epic narratives.

Was the famous radio DJ in the novel always based on Howard Stern?

I’ve listened to Howard Stern for a long time. I wouldn’t say that this is about him—I think he was very much an inspiration or jumping-off point. He’s always talking about how people who don’t listen to him really misunderstand him. I’ve always been interested in how [people might be] misunderstood, given how important it is to me to be understood for who I am, in all my complexity.

I’m also interested in difficult men, difficult fathers—how they cast shadows over everyone around them, especially their daughters. I was a little bit inspired by The Great Man by Kate Christensen, which is based on a famous artist whose career just never came together. But I wasn’t that interested in the artist. I was interested in one woman and how her life was affected.

I didn’t know you were a Howard Stern fan. I’m tickled to hear it.

I’m a fan of the way he does interviews, and I’m a fan of his obsession with the taboo. He’s always talking about freaky sex and all this stuff, but in his personal life, he’s really straitlaced.

I can see how you’ve put that to use for the character you’ve created. It’s thrilling to see that this shock jock DJ is gentlemanly and old-school—but also believably insecure. This plays out in his relationship with his own daughter, who’s an aspiring comedian: he’s so dismissive of her ambitions. Could you talk about that?

I am a stand-up comedian of middling success, and I spend a lot of time around comedians of all success levels. It’s a really strange job. A lot of self-loathing and self-absorption, but [comedians are] also sensitive and tender in the way that fiction writers are.

I think, mental health–wise, if you’re in stand-up for a really long time, it’s difficult to keep steady. You want to be close to people, and you want to be onstage and make people laugh, but then inherent to that is a kind of distance between you and the audience. So many stand-ups are like addicts, especially in the very beginning. You have a bad set. You can’t wait to get up and prove yourself and have a good set. Or the opposite. You have a good set. You can’t wait to feel it again.

I play poker. A lot of comedians play poker. They’re people who want to feel their pulse race and experience high adrenaline. But there’s also a lot of competitiveness and envy among comedians—the feeling that you’re not getting your due. Which I think writers have too, but (at least in my experience) not to the same level.

What a relief. If I remember correctly, you were once writing a novel about the stand-up comedian scene in L.A.

I don’t remember ever wanting to write a novel about that—because I actually hate writing about it.

I clearly misremembered!

I am very interested in performance in general. It’s hard to write about the actual performance you do, but I always make, like, someone else an actor. I have a short story in The Paris Review called “The Duplex.” That protagonist was a singer and I wanted to talk about performance, but I didn’t want them to be a comedian. I almost always sub comedy out for something else that is performance. But with this novel, I was running out of time. It became easier to let the protagonist watch it from afar.

In the novel, people tell Allison that her comedian brother is insane, but insane enough to “make it.” It’s hard to love somebody like that, and I think that you write about that so well.

It was important to me to avoid easy categorizations—so, to not give [the comedian brother] some kind of mental illness, not give the father some kind of mental illness. Not necessarily categorizing the protagonist’s sexuality, either. And just sort of letting people exist in this in-between, which I think is more true to life.

A lot of what makes people really funny also makes them unpredictable in regular life. I just sort of let the brother’s character unfold in that way. I certainly have known comedians who are like that or who are so fun to be around, but it’s difficult to get close to them in any real way. It’s interesting to think about what it would be like to be part of their family or date them or marry them.

You also write really well about the complicated inheritance of being in a family.

I grew up in a close, codependent family where one person’s mood was dictating the mood of the rest of the house, which is not so uncommon, and not even necessarily in a negative way. That’s just the way that it was. I’m interested in how every family is their own bizarre world.

Do you think that the difficult father in this novel fuels the attraction Allison feels for the radio DJ?

I think so many people, including myself, are attracted to people who remind us of the world we came from—or were repelled by. That trying to either overcorrect or being unable to correct is really mysterious to me.

In one of my favorite passages, you relate being in love to sharing a private language.

I’ve been in a lot of relationships and a lot of breakups in my thirties. I’ve felt a lot of different kinds of romance. But when I try to define that intimacy and closeness, I think of a shared vocabulary and language—making the world “like new” with each other.

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Amy Silverberg is a writer and comedian. She holds a PhD in creative writing and literature from the University of Southern California. Her fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories, The Paris Review, Granta, The Idaho Review, TriQuarterly, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. Her stand-up has been featured on Comedy Central, Hulu, and Amazon Prime. She also writes for television, most recently for The Movie Show on the SYFY channel.

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Featured image: Photo of Amy Silverberg by John-Michael Bond.