[REVIEW] Starve the Vulture, by Jason Carney

vulture

Kaylie Jones Books
300 pages, $15.95

 

Review by Amye Archer

 

When I first heard Jason Carney read in a small, sweaty room on the south side of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, he read a story about pie, the kind his Mamaw made for him, and how one act of kindness by his Mamaw melted him into a million pieces. He cried. I cried. We all cried. This is the Jason Carney I know: the brilliant poet who can hold a crowd in the palms of his gentle hands, even in the most desolate of moments. But this is not the Jason Carney we meet in his new memoir, Starve the Vulture – not at first anyway.

Jason Carney was not born, he was built. Starve the Vulture, is the story of that process. A braided narrative takes us through three separate journeys: a bipolar childhood in which a young Jason bounced between an abusive father, a desperate, young mother, and the soft glow of his grandparent’s home; an adolescence fraught with violence, addiction and despair; and, finally, a single day – the day that would come to mark the end of Jason’s drug addiction. All three threads combine to create the three-dimensional world of an addict who would overcome a lifetime of emotional and physical brutality. Continue reading

[REVIEW] You’re Fine by Gina Tron

fine

Papercut Press

276 pages, $15

 

Review by Spencer Goyette

 

Gina Tron, regular VICE columnist and no stranger to the darker sides of human behavior, has a voice that deserves listening to. In You’re Fine, her autobiography and first book, Tron leads readers on a twisted path through her own personal history detailing events both humorous and dark with a consistent candidness that is excruciatingly honest and magnetic. Tron’s insight into the world around her is often cut with sarcasm and humor, but it carries a depth as she tries to give meaning to the chaos:

“Sometimes people don’t want to understand how a person has become the way they are, they just demonize their current behavior.”

Tron seeks help from a psychiatric facility after being rejected by friends and family following heavy cocaine use and a brutal rape, yet she quickly finds out that the ward she’s entered into has an atmosphere of extreme apathy and neglect. Patients roll around in various states of drugged-up stupor, some shitting themselves so frequently that they are caked in their own excrement. The staff is brutal and negligent, the doctors are cold and mostly absent. Her personal narrative provides insight into how poor the approach to mental health, addiction, and sexual abuse treatment are in this country. Most of us are not aware of these people or fail to acknowledge their existence altogether, as if ignoring fixes the problem. Continue reading

[REVIEW] My Family and Other Hazards, by June Melby

Family
Henry Holt and Co.
320 pages, $25.00


Review by Denton Loving

When June Melby’s family decided to buy the Tom Thumb Miniature Golf course in Waupaca, Wisconsin, nobody understood the myriad ways such a game would affect and influence their family. Melby’s memoir, My Family and Other Hazards, details their relationship with the game of mini-golf, both as a business and as one of the constants in their lives. But Melby’s narrative isn’t merely childhood reminiscence, and although Melby reports about the interesting history of mini-golf, it’s so much more than an historical account.

Melby’s cleverness should be noted in many ways, most obviously with the book’s framework—eighteen chapters, one for every hole in the course. But the beginning of the course isn’t exactly the beginning of the story. The force behind this recounting of Tom Thumb’s history begins with a moment of crisis when Melby’s parents plan to sell the course. Continue reading

[REVIEW] Excavation by Wendy C. Ortiz

Excavation

Future Tense Books

242 pages, $28

 

Review by Alex M. Frankel

 

Wendy Ortiz’s memoir, Excavation, is an outstanding first book. It chronicles how the author, as a middle school student back in the mid 1980s, was seduced by her English teacher, Mr. Ivers, and how he carried on an affair with her over the next several years. The memoir is remarkable not just for its taboo subject, but also for the matter-of-fact tone Ortiz takes as she tells about her most unusual relationship. It is a relationship on which the author has had plenty of time to reflect: now in her forties, she works as a therapist in her native southern California. She has published both poetry and prose (including an essay in the “Modern Love” series in The New York Times) and is the founder and curator of Los Angeles’s Rhapsodomancy Reading Series. Alongside the main story of her teenage years, Ortiz has added vignettes from her personal and professional life as an adult, including her work with at-risk youth. These passages, beautifully interspersed with her adolescent tale, shed light on the person she has become, and also function as brief pauses following cliffhangers, enhancing the book’s atmosphere of danger and foreboding.  All the while, the reader keeps wondering, “When and how is Ivers going to get caught?” Continue reading

[REVIEW] Kissing Oscar Wilde, by Jade Sylvan

oscar wilde

Write Bloody Publishing
160pages, $15.00

 

Review by Max Vande Vaarst

 

It feels as though nothing could be more Millenial. What better emblem of the “Me Me Me” generational tagline posited by Time Magazine than a memoir written by an author barely on the cusp of thirty, a novelized account of a nascent artist’s ramblings through France and her search for the self in the City of Lights? Yet to fellow members of a debutante generation now nearing the end of its post-recession cotillion – this brief, shared moment of youth, opportunity and national spotlight – Jade Sylan’s dazzling new work Kissing Oscar Wilde can seem, if anything, overwhelming in its urgency. In many regards, it is no more a memoir than a eulogy to one’s twenties, and a prayer for the long, unknowable period of adulthood ahead.

At the center of the novel is Sylvan herself, an up-and-coming poet and all-purpose bohemian presently living in Boston. It is sometimes unclear to what extent Sylvan the author resembles Sylvan the character, a self-styled androgynous, polyamorous, bisexual Dylanphile who wears her wavy knots of hair in perfect mimicry of the folk legend during his mid-‘60s Don’t Look Back days. Perhaps there’s no point in attempting to separate the two. Vonnegut was correct in surmising that “we are what we pretend to be,” and this impulse for projection has never been truer than of artists in the internet age. Continue reading

[REVIEW] Another Insane Devotion, by Peter Trachtenberg

Another insane devotion

 

Da Capo Press

283 pages, $24

 

Review by Erin Hutton

 

Framed by Peter Trachtenberg’s journey to locate his beloved cat Biscuit, Another Insane Devotion: On the Love of Cats and Persons, is a memoir of love stories braided with historic notes on the bonds between humans and cats. This is a book for anyone who has ever let a cat outside and later discovered it has disappeared. It is for anyone who has loved (and lost) a cat. And perhaps even for those who don’t understand what it is cat lovers love about cats, but who want to learn.

When Trachtenberg took a temporary job in North Carolina and his wife, F., was at an artists’ residency in Europe, the couple left their home in New York and their cats in the care of Bruno, who Trachtenberg refers to as a “kid” and “useless as a cat-sitter.” Bruno’s uselessness rose to Trachtenberg’s attention when Bruno called to inform him that their orange cat had been missing for three days. After hearing the news, Trachtenberg purchased a plane ticket to go home and look for the cat, who was not so much orange as golden, biscuit-colored, like her name.

Trachtenberg reflects on his decision to travel in search of Biscuit: “I was half convinced that Biscuit was dead and half convinced that even if she was alive, she was unlikely to be anyplace where I could find her. I didn’t want to spend money I didn’t have traveling seven hundred miles to have my heart broken searching for a cat I wouldn’t find. And yet I did. I went. What was I thinking?” Continue reading

Bizarre Love Triangle

 Me, You and the Music I’m Putting You Through.

~by Sheila Squillante

“Bizarre Love Triangle”
New Order
Brotherhood
Factory Records, 1986

 

Every time I think of you
I feel shot right through with a bolt of blue
It’s no problem of mine
But it’s a problem I find
Living a life that I can’t leave behind

The first thing I need you to know is that I am no audiophile. I did not grow up obsessing about album drop dates or scanning the racks at local record stores for bootleg copies or rare imports. I did not camp out to get tickets to big arena shows and I rarely attended small club venues. I don’t like crowds. The swell and crush of them. The everywhere of them. I’m short and can’t see over them. In 1987, I had to balance on the back of the chair in front of me at the Hartford Civic Center, with my arms wrapped around a Very Tall Friend’s neck so I wouldn’t fall, just to catch a glimpse of the top of Bonos’ big, swaying head. With some very specific exceptions, I am not someone who cares all that much about the sound quality of vinyl versus digital.

What I’m saying is that I have almost no musical cred.

And yet I’m compelled to write about what this song does to me just as I’m compelled to drop my head to my chest and move my shoulders back and forth and back and forth as as I sit here at my dining room table strewn with my children’s art project detritus, dirty spoons and coffee mugs, while the stereo speakers crackle and thump with 80s New Wave.

Continue reading

On Writing Memoir (Or The Lying Game)

I have a friend on Twitter. Well, I have 104 friends on Twitter as of today–a nice number given my account lockdown–but anyway, I have a friend who, last year, sent me some direct messages. I publicly vented my frustrations over writing memoir. I kept missing something, kept striking out when I re-read the work.

In true Twitter form, I fired passive-aggressive vitriol into the ether. She took me to the side and genuinely tried to help me. She offered worthwhile advice: writing in different narrative styles to unlock the block, if you will; narrow the scope for a more focused work. I tried to write about depression. I said, “I’m just a black man who’s depressed. Nothing special.”

She said, “Black men are depressed and don’t know it–or are too afraid to admit help. How is that not special?”

***

I write about my depression–indeed, anything involving my life–in broad generalities. No details, no descriptions, no names–no exposure. I can write four or five expository paragraphs about a house, a color, a feeling: so long as those things relate to fictional characters.

In my memoir pieces, my brothers and sister are named “my brother” or “my sister.” I carve out huge, significant swathes of time when writing about my first depressive episode: my ex-wife and our divorce; my second, and current, wife who saved me [I said as much in my vows]; my playing with knives; taking my car up to 100 MPH on a highway to let things happen; the suicidal sides.

Every memoir I write is a lie. Not like you-know-who and such-and-such. I lie by omission; I lie by cowardice. Or discomfort. To write it right, I must summon up an exposure analogous to my personality: secretive, private, silent–see the connection?

My Twitter friend said, “Maybe you’re better served writing fiction.”

This bothers me a great deal. It fucking pisses me off.

***

But I’m not mad at my Twitter friend. Her conclusion is logical, sound. I don’t want to be that kind of fiction writer, though. I don’t want to write a short story and play coy, let a wry smile roll from corner to corner of my mouth–Grinch-style–and wave off the questions. “Nah, it’s not autobiographical” although it is to some degree.

It’s easier to create an asshole protagonist versus writing a memoir about my father versus telling my father, “Sometimes? You’re an asshole.” It’s easier to lie and lie and lie–play coward in memoir or play passive aggressive punk in fiction–than to tell the truth. The whole truth. All of that shit.

I wish I had the balls to willfully lie in a memoir–to say I attempted suicide versus contemplating it like a riddle. I toe the line, though. I’ll write about my father’s pistol and a night when I was home alone; I’ll write about finding the muted gray gun on the top shelf of his closet, about where he hid the plastic box of bullets; I’ll write about holding a bullet in one hand, the gun in the other.

But I stop there, digging into the scene and looking for value. I stop short. I held two equal parts of suicide’s sum, but I was too scared to bring them together. I feared Hell. I feared the unknowability of Heaven. I feared the end of life. I thought it silly to take my life because I was lonely, because my family fell apart, because a half Black/half Puerto Rican girl with the fat ass pretended like she didn’t love me–Evelyn–so I put the gun back, I climbed into the bed, I played music in my headphones and cried myself to sleep.

I try to show insight without tears; I try to show growth without pain and the precipice of madness; I try to show wisdom in the absence of vulnerability. My memoirs ring false.

***

My disease is a real-life secret, discussed publicly online because I’m attempting to connect. Everything I do online–ever since I signed on in 1997–is about connection. So far, with respect to depression, I haven’t achieved the connection. I’m a half-assed advocate. People need the details, the puzzle pieces to hold up and compare with their own problems.

It’s those details I struggle to share. It’s the vulnerability I won’t express. I coat my words–memoirs, blogs, tweets–with a steely ambivalence. I’m often in pain–most times emotional, sometimes physical–and connection assumes an exchange. I want to help people, depressed or otherwise, get through whatever shit that ails them. I don’t even know why. It’s a calling I discovered when I first started writing at age seventeen. But I’m trying to have it one way.

Maybe help is the wrong word. Here, from my landing pad in South Jersey, stuck in ennui surrounded by flea markets and farmland, I send out communiques to strangers. I try to reach across land masses and bodies of water to let you know I know–you know?–but it’s a one way affair. I won’t show the messy parts of me. I think the messy parts are worthless.

***

What’s messy is love. It arrives in the most inopportune times, but love–the true variant, the one which commits strangulation until submission–cannot be ignored. I didn’t mean for it to happen. Not really.

I could’ve told her, “Hold up. Let me finalize things with my wife first.” That was the responsible thing, the by-the-script method. My wife and I were in shambles; my first major depressive episode arose out of a single thought: I don’t want this life. I told her days before my 25th birthday, “I want a divorce.” She slapped me. I almost punched her–fist cocked, instincts alarmed–but I chilled and let the shock rumble through my left cheek.

Love made things worse. I met the love of my life while still married. Though we were friends for ten years, seeing the love of your life is a religious experience. My ex-wife said, “You’re going to Hell.” Maybe. I broke away from fissured vows; we weren’t going to make it, but some suggest when a marriage erodes, you stick it out to the end. These people aren’t married or remain trapped in shitty relationships, too scared and weak to break free. That’s a messy part of me–wanton anger and self-righteousness.

***

I thought about my Twitter friend’s assertion–sharing my depressive experiences for all the black men out there. I thought to myself, “But I can’t even admit to leaving my wife.”

Memoir requires truth. Not just facts, but the messy parts, too. I write around the blood, the viscera, and I’m left with a bunch of words. Empty words. Lies.

@thomasdemary. @thomas demary.

First Person Memoirs For People Who Don't Exist

I write first person memoirs for people who don’t exist. I just thought this to myself and it sounded cool and authoritative (in the author sense of the word). It may be accurate, since they’re as bewildered and mistaken about their pasts, and of themselves, as I am. And with that in mind, I don’t have to ponder my own problems; I can sort the issues of other people…who don’t exist. I’m tempted to think of it as a pathetic exercise, though it explains, in part, my difficulty with the third person voice. 

There, I sound too authoritative (in the classical sense) and my habit is to over write—that is, to overcompensate for the third person’s inherent distance from the subject. Funny since depression makes me feel distant and neutral—or not so funny, since writing affords me the time and space to elude reality, a daily and dissociative experience.  It makes sense that my strength as a writer, for now, lies underneath the skins of other people…who don’t exist…because that’s where I’d rather be—in the shoes and life of another, any other, besides myself. 

Most of the stories I’ve read of late were written in the first person. Individuals smarter—or perhaps more committed to the topic—than me have, perhaps, wondered about the proliferation of “I” in fiction. I tend to believe that it’s a form of warding off nonfiction’s recent surge in popularity and so-called “relevance.” If readers are so hungry for personal essays and memoirs, then fiction’s response—or mimicry, I suppose—is the first person. 

Who knows? I’m looking to justify my usage of the form, to explain in a roundabout way my difficulties with third person, which is more about aesthetic than execution. Indeed, I can write a third person story—I’ve written many—but my ear, so to speak, prefers the sound of first person. It forces me to find the character’s voice, its nuance and pitch and vocabulary, which develops an economy for the story to which I must adhere. It calls for discipline, a sensibility I lack when in third person. I take it as license to act like a wild man with the prose, lobbing tedious descriptions and dense swathes of narrative as if they were blunt objects or blades; I can only imagine what the poor reader, unsuspecting and innocent, feels at the other end of these weapons.

I could take the position that the first person is my schtick, except that I want to be well-rounded. My style, whatever that is, might be better served through the first person, but that’s a far-off determination after years of trial and error, experimentation and failure and success. I’m keenly aware of the deficiency; no matter the number of publications I rack up in the future (God willing), I’m more concerned with becoming a student of all forms. Hell, I wrote a story in second voice—my own and only thus far—just to see how it worked, to feel how the story funneled itself through what some might call a gimmicky narrative element. Long story short, I’m trying to push myself out of my comfort zone. I think I love writing first person memoirs for people who don’t exist; I just don’t want it to be the only thing I can do. Sooner or later, readers will get wise—then bored.

Questionnaire time! Do you have a voice of preference within your own work? Are you strong in one perspective, but perhaps in need of practice with others? Got any tips for a lost soul like me?

@thomasdemary. @Thomas DeMary.

First Person Memoirs For People Who Don’t Exist

I write first person memoirs for people who don’t exist. I just thought this to myself and it sounded cool and authoritative (in the author sense of the word). It may be accurate, since they’re as bewildered and mistaken about their pasts, and of themselves, as I am. And with that in mind, I don’t have to ponder my own problems; I can sort the issues of other people…who don’t exist. I’m tempted to think of it as a pathetic exercise, though it explains, in part, my difficulty with the third person voice. 

There, I sound too authoritative (in the classical sense) and my habit is to over write—that is, to overcompensate for the third person’s inherent distance from the subject. Funny since depression makes me feel distant and neutral—or not so funny, since writing affords me the time and space to elude reality, a daily and dissociative experience.  It makes sense that my strength as a writer, for now, lies underneath the skins of other people…who don’t exist…because that’s where I’d rather be—in the shoes and life of another, any other, besides myself. 

Most of the stories I’ve read of late were written in the first person. Individuals smarter—or perhaps more committed to the topic—than me have, perhaps, wondered about the proliferation of “I” in fiction. I tend to believe that it’s a form of warding off nonfiction’s recent surge in popularity and so-called “relevance.” If readers are so hungry for personal essays and memoirs, then fiction’s response—or mimicry, I suppose—is the first person. 

Who knows? I’m looking to justify my usage of the form, to explain in a roundabout way my difficulties with third person, which is more about aesthetic than execution. Indeed, I can write a third person story—I’ve written many—but my ear, so to speak, prefers the sound of first person. It forces me to find the character’s voice, its nuance and pitch and vocabulary, which develops an economy for the story to which I must adhere. It calls for discipline, a sensibility I lack when in third person. I take it as license to act like a wild man with the prose, lobbing tedious descriptions and dense swathes of narrative as if they were blunt objects or blades; I can only imagine what the poor reader, unsuspecting and innocent, feels at the other end of these weapons.

I could take the position that the first person is my schtick, except that I want to be well-rounded. My style, whatever that is, might be better served through the first person, but that’s a far-off determination after years of trial and error, experimentation and failure and success. I’m keenly aware of the deficiency; no matter the number of publications I rack up in the future (God willing), I’m more concerned with becoming a student of all forms. Hell, I wrote a story in second voice—my own and only thus far—just to see how it worked, to feel how the story funneled itself through what some might call a gimmicky narrative element. Long story short, I’m trying to push myself out of my comfort zone. I think I love writing first person memoirs for people who don’t exist; I just don’t want it to be the only thing I can do. Sooner or later, readers will get wise—then bored.

Questionnaire time! Do you have a voice of preference within your own work? Are you strong in one perspective, but perhaps in need of practice with others? Got any tips for a lost soul like me?

@thomasdemary. @Thomas DeMary.