Shalom Auslander sees himself as a foreskin—"unwanted, cut off, bloodied, tossed aside"—because of his repressive ultra-religious upbringing among the Orthodox Jews of Monsey, New York. This tortured and, let's face it, icky metaphor underlies all the stories in 'The Foreskin's Lament,' which is about Shalom's struggle to come to terms with a nasty, vindictive, stickler of a God who, much to his chagrin, he still sorta believes in. Weirdly, I was reminded of 'A Million Little Pieces' while reading 'The Foreskin's Lament'—it is an addiction memoir, of a sort. A 'this is how I manfully dealt with my terrible addiction' memoir. Sucks for Shalom that the drug he's trying to kick is the sick thrill of worrying desperately that some omnipresent deity cares enough about what you eat and how you surgically alter your child's genitalia to punish you for screwing it up.