I think, when we read, we relish and devour remarkable voices, but these are, in the end, stories we remember. I wrote an early novel, and then my parents disinherited me, so I moved to New York, which is where small-town people move to do and say the things they can't do or say at home, and I ended up working in advertising, a profession that feeds on young people who have an amorphous talent and no particular focus.įired in my early fifties, the way people are in advertising, I tried to figure out what to do with the rest of my life, and I came back around to the pastime that had filled the days and nights of my childhood: telling complex anecdotes about the living and the dead. I went to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and then lived in Europe for several years, thinking that I would be an actor or a painter, two things for which I had a passion that outran my talent. For southerners, the past is as real as the present it is not even past, as Faulkner said. A brave, haunting, riveting book.I was born in a small university town in Virginia, a town in which, besides teaching, the chief preoccupations were drinking bourbon and telling complex anecdotes, stories about people who lived down the road, stories about ancestors who had died a hundred years before. It is through the eyes of that boy-a grown man now, revisiting that time-that we see this seemingly serene world and watch as it slowly comes completely and irrevocably undone.īeautifully written, often humorous, sometimes sweet, ultimately shocking, this is a son's story of looking back with both love and anger at the parents who gave him life and then robbed him of it, who created his world and then destroyed it.Īs author Lee Smith, who knew this world and this family, observed, "Alcohol may be the real villain in this pain-permeated, exquisitely written memoir of childhood-but it is also filled with absolutely dead-on social commentary of this very particular time and place.
But behind the facade this family had created lurked secrets so dark, so painful for this one little boy, that his life would never be the same. Lineage, tradition, making the right impression-these were matters of great importance, especially to the mother. To all appearances, their life seemed ideal. They gave parties, hosted picnics, went to church-just like their neighbors. They lived on a sunny street in a small college town nestled neatly in a leafy valley. They were parents to three bright, smiling children: two boys and a girl.
The father was a respected professor, the mother a witty and elegant lady, someone everyone loved. To all appearances, he and his family lived an almost idyllic life. A few years before, a noble war had been won, and now life had returned to normal.įor one little boy, however, life had become anything but "normal." It was the 1950s, a time of calm, a time when all things were new and everything seemed possible.
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