My pickled Life (Mein Leben in Aspik)

A young man looks back on his childhood, which was influenced by his close relationship with his grandmother. A highlight was Grandma’s bedtime stories that featured some ingenious ways to murder her husband. But all of a sudden, Grandpa really is dead and Grandma’s stories turn to sexual enlightenment. Is this just a coincidence? Why is his mother so tense when he and Grandma are around? And why has she been on the prowl for a new boyfriend for so long? The son begins to inquire, uncover and reveal. What begins as a harmless story turns into a madcap family history. The young man is so deeply embroiled in radical depravity that he is forced to continue the endless breach of taboos and twists to the point of grotesqueness. Just as long as it all stays in the family.

Steven Uhly’s debut exaggerates the depths and perversions of a fictional family to such an extent that they reverse course and lead to a discovery of the truth. My pickled Life explores perspectives on the opposite sex and the limits of our seemingly open and tolerant society. Ancestry and the dark labyrinth of the biographies glimpsed in this bizarre family history raise the question of genetic trauma, a West German past riddled with lies and our bitter, unresolvable lack of freedom.