When Zach Zimmerman was a boy, his father, a mechanic and assistant pastor at the local church, would preach at the dinner table, telling his son, “If you’re not saved, Zachary, you go to Hell when you die.”
His mother shared those beliefs and routinely prepared a dinner table of southern dishes that, as Zimmerman writes, seemed to declare, “We’re all gonna die of heart attacks, so let’s do it as a family.”
Related: Sign up for our free newsletter about books, authors, reading and more
For Zimmerman, who grew up to be gay, atheist and vegetarian, childhood was a period filled with questions and self-doubt, causing pain and insecurity but also providing plenty of fodder for a career in comedy.
Now Zimmerman, whose stand-up career has earned him plaudits in the New York Times, Vulture and USA Today, has written his first book, a collection of essays called, “Is It Hot in Here? Or Am I Suffering for All Eternity for the Sins I Committed on Earth?”
There are humor pieces and essays about his love life and working at Papa John’s, but much of the book revolves around family.
“Family members always have the nuclear codes for each other, the precise collection of words and phrases that, when entered, cause total annihilation.”
Zimmerman discussed the essays recently over a vegetarian lunch at a Brooklyn diner he references in his stand-up for all the donuts he has bought there. (So, vegetarian, but heading for that heart attack, anyway.)
Q. What made you think you could write a book?
Delusion. Actually, there is a book “The Delusion” by a different Zach Zimmerman. I think it’s self-published. I heard about it during the pandemic when a telemarketer called and said, “Zach, we’d love to publish your book.” And I said, “What?” And they said they’d seen it online. When I said it wasn’t me, they asked if I had a book and I said, “I guess I could have a book.”
Since I was a kid I wanted to write a book. Just to feel immortal.
In high school, I dramatized my life in a novel, but I was mostly just screenshotting messages of me flirting and putting them into a book. While working in Second City sketch comedy on a cruise ship, I’d hide in my room and I wrote a very bad novel about passwords.
It really was the pandemic that was the trigger for this book because I had way too much free time to analyze all my demons. I have some perspective on my life and funny stories to put them all together so I thought this was the right time.
I felt imposter syndrome the whole time I was writing it and even now it doesn’t feel quite real. I learned what “DNF” means. It’s on Goodreads for Did Not Finish. That was very traumatic. I have to stay away from Goodreads.
I think there are three fantastic sentences in this book that are worth the $17.
Q. What are they?
I can’t give that away.
Q. Was it hard to figure out what was funny on the page without an audience’s laughter?
What’s the difference between stand-up and writing? Writing is sad and lonely, whereas stand-up is sad and lonely.
But I’ve honed my voice through stand-up enough to know what is and isn’t funny. Stand-up is more one note and in prose you play a whole orchestra of sounds and the punchline doesn’t have to be the last word in the sentence. You can invoke an idea that’s humorous and say funny things along the way.
Q. Did writing the book help you know yourself better?
A hundred percent. You face your own negative self-talk. You hear that voice that says, “This story’s not worth it” or “This is a terrible line” and I had to learn to quiet that voice when I’m writing and being playful. Then when you’re editing, you can be mean to yourself. But I’ve also learned to be amused by and gentle with myself. I’ll say, “Oh, Zach from a month ago, I see what you were trying to do there. But it didn’t quite land on the page.”
But I think you understand your whole life only the day you die so any book written before that is a work in progress.
Q. There’s a mix of personal essays and there are straightforward humor pieces. Was that always part of the plan?
I wanted to have different types of essays some a single slice-of-life moment and somewhere there’s a jump through time. For the essays, I tried choosing moments that are significant, whether they be funny because something awful happened to me and now I have perspective, or moments that are not funny and I’m just trying to capture the truth and rawness of the moment. I didn’t originally plan to have the humor pieces but that was a suggestion from my editor and it was exciting to me. Humor can definitely get people’s guards down and then I can hit them with a devastating truth.
Some of the weirder things got cut, like a piece about getting put in a Facebook group with all these other Zach Zimmmermans; my editor said all the other pieces left her thinking about multiple things and this was one note.
Q. How much do you heighten the reality of your stories in stand-up and then in these essays?
I skew toward 100 percent true because of my evangelical fear of lying. I remember the first time I created a composite character in stand-up— I’d gone on dates with two different people and it was a cleaner, funnier story to combine them — and I felt like I was lying. But ultimately I think that it’s okay in stand-up to heighten scenarios. In this, as non-fiction prose, I did my best to be factual and honest.
Q. What do your parents think of the book?
Mom has made it to the threesome chapter and then said there are some things a mom doesn’t need to read. I talked to Dan Savage and he said he redacted certain chapters before he gave his book to his mom so in hindsight I didn’t need to send her those parts.
We’ve been through this before. It turns out my mom loves the spotlight. I have a standup bit about her working at Red Lobster and it went viral on TikTok and her first response was “I’m gonna get fired” but then she saw all the responses and the love and she said, “I guess this is fun.”
