Larry David's Mother Once Wrote to an Advice Columnist Because Her 12-Year-Old Son 'Hates People'

There are arguments to be made about nature vs. nurture, but the case of Larry David, it seems as though the Curb Your Enthusiasm creator has his notoriously curmudgeonly personality hardwired into his DNA. Case in point, David recalled stumbling across a letter to an advice columnist that his mother penned when he was just 12 years old, asking why her son "hates people."

The 76-year-old told the story during a Tuesday appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. As he explained, his mother was a fan of the New York Post advice columnist, psychiatrist Dr. Rose Franzblau.

"She wrote a letter to Dr. Franzblau and I read it!" he exclaimed. "Because she used to talk about Dr. Franzblau, so I would read the column, and I recognized that this was my mother writing to the psychiatrist!"

Not for nothing, but it also seems very in-character that a 12-year-old Larry David would be reading a New York Post advice column instead of say, comic books.

At any rate, David continued, telling Fallon: "She's saying, 'My son, he's 12 years old. He hates people. He’s morose. He’s taciturn.'"

But to add insult to injury, David said there was a tell in the letter that made him realize it was about him. "And what really gave it away, ‘He doesn’t trick-or-treat. He doesn’t go out trick-or-treating!' That’s me! I didn’t trick or treat. I knew it was me!" he explained.

Unfortunately, he didn't think to clip the article out and save it, as it's clear the incident was an extremely formative one for him. But when Fallon asked David if that was true that he didn't like trick-or-treating as a child, the picture began to become clearer.

"Trick-or-treating ... it’s stupid," he continued. "You’re dealing with strangers all over the place. Every apartment is a stranger. It’s rude to ... banging on someone’s door. It’s stupid."

"And at 12 years old, you thought this?" Fallon asked, somewhat incredulously. "Yeah, I knew that at 12," David insisted. “I don’t want to see all those people. And then the costume?! The costume! You gotta put a costume on? Come on."

"When was the last time you put a costume on, in your life?" he asked Fallon. "You cannot—you cannot put costumes on."

If nothing else, while David's surly demeanor and general dislike of people apparently made him a difficult child, those qualities have clearly served him well in life, as he went on to create both Curb and Seinfeld, both shows in the zeitgeist for similarly short-tempered folks.