That's How It Is With Me: A Review of Notes from My Phone*

It’s tempting to write off Notes From My Phone* as a gimmicky attempt at memoir without fully plunging into the self-indulgence of writing about oneself. The contents of this book started as notes that Michelle Junot left to herself on her phone. At the urging of Mason Jar Press, they were shaped into a collection of memoir fragments that construct a twentysomething woman’s quarter-life crisis, among other things.

Even that is tempting to write off. Who cares about a twentysomething woman’s quarter-life crisis, you might ask. All of our favorite celebrities are dying and Donald Trump is filling the government with Nazis. Enough with this Thought Catalog “elegy for my twenties” bullshit, the past few months have taken too much from us.

I’m getting really specific here because I had those thoughts when I started this book, and I’m glad I ignored them. As it turns out, Notes From My Phone* is quietly profound.

For one thing, it’s not all lists and reminders to buy contact solution. Themes do emerge from repetition; heartbreak, self-doubt, rejection, attempts to regain confidence as a response to heartbreak, and a mouse in Michelle’s apartment whose appearances get funnier as Michelle gets more exasperated. As someone who once found a mouse sleeping in his damn bed a few apartments ago, she won my sympathies.

“The power just went out. How is this my life?” Michelle wonders at one point during the mouse’s unwelcome tenancy in her apartment. “I’m in the dark with a mouse who may be agitated by the smell of peppermint.”

Earlier, she’d been ruminating on whether it was better to be aware of the mouse’s presence, or ignorant of it. “I am not one for confrontation,” she writes. “I do not like speaking about hard things or the lump that forms in my throat when tears find my eyes. I don’t like the way that men’s faces change when my eyes tear.”

Later, she writes that the mouse “taught me how I deal with fear: I let it consume me. I let the what-ifs rule who I am. I err on the side of seizing a false sense of control over my life.” By this point, the mouse’s original, comedic role in this book has shifted into a mechanism for introspection.

Religion has a similar function in Notes From My Phone*. Michelle is a Christian, and a lot of talking to God happens in this book. In a way, that’s kind of a bold move, to announce one’s religious beliefs beyond the context of ultimately rejecting them, or as part of a grander redemptive arc.

“Lord, I’m tired, and I’m awake again,” she writes, complaining of insomnia. “I want to take comfort in you, rest in the fact that you have a plan for me. Rest in your grace and deep love for me. Rest in the fact that those feelings and desires and misunderstood heartache will go away soon. But how will it go away if I don’t let go of it?”

“I just wish I understood what was of you and what wasn’t,” she says later, while grieving the end of a relationship. “I’m scared of your comfort, and I’m scared what following you might actually mean,” she says in a prayer, of sorts. “How do I learn to trust you when my own heart gets in the way?”

Clearly, Michelle’s relationship with God is complex and frustrated. When she prays for advice about how to move on from a dissolved relationship, or what it means to be an adult when the hallmarks of adulthood (career, house, kids) seem impossible to reach, one wonders if she’s using prayer as a vessel for talking to herself.

Michelle wonders that herself sometimes. “I like to think I put my trust in God,” she says, “but really, I’m functionally trusting myself/and then I screw up/and then I’m shocked by it/because I have this unrealistic view of my own heart.”

The frank, confessional tone of passages like those — and the book’s sparse interior layout — makes the reader feel almost voyeuristic by the end. It’s like finding your outwardly stable older sister’s journal and discovering her hidden frailties; this book genuinely doesn’t read like something that was meant for other people to see. In that sense, it’s unlike any memoir I’ve ever read before. Both in structure and execution, Notes From My Phone* resists the urge to show off, and therein lies its strength.

Lies Full of Truths: Rob Roberge's Liar, A Memoir

Rob Roberge’s Liar is a memoir, not so much about re-living the past, but rather trying to put the past together through a series of flashbacks. Written in nonlinear excerpts and vignettes, Roberge seeks to make sense of a past full of alcohol, drugs, relationships, murders, and music. The nonlinear narrative makes complete sense, as Roberge’s life is full of tangled lines, and the only way to make sense of it is to untangle them when and where it’s possible. Within this clashing and clanking and untangling and tangling, there is a remarkable beautiful buzz of energy that keeps his story moving along. This buzz of energy is transferred from one word to the next, from one sentence to the next, and from one memory to the next and as a result, we have Roberge’s life before us. There is elegance in his chaos.

It’s a constant tug-of-war between sobriety and relapses, between love and hate, and between guilt and solace. Told through the second person point of view, there is a triple layering that occurs as Roberge uses “you” to piece together his life. There is a “you” that refers to Rob Roberge writing to himself as he’s trying to make sense of his troubled past. There is a “you” which refers to the reader, solely as the reader, solely learning about the author’s life through bits and pieces. And then there is a “you” which transforms the reader into Roberge, causing some kind of mirroring effect.

In reference to his first girlfriend who was murdered early in their relationship, Roberge writes:

You try to think about what she looked like, but you really have no memories of this. You remember two long brown pigtails, but you could be getting those from her picture now on an Unsolved Murders in CT website, in her last school picture ever, taken the year she was killed. (2)

Here, we see a deep personal reflection of the author thinking to himself about his girlfriend. He is “talking” to himself, trying to make sense of what has happened. It doesn’t feel like he’s telling the reader a story, but rather, telling himself, and this allows us to enter Roberge’s mind, travelling around in his brain amidst the chaos and confusion.

Later on in his memoir, Roberge writes how he had stolen his wife’s painkillers for his own personal use, though his wife needs them for an illness that causes her strong physical pains. The author doesn’t tell her that he took them, but ironically, he pretends to help her find her medicine:

And you help her look. And you think of the saying that a junkie will steal your shoes and then help you look for them. You are a cliché. You are worse than a cliché for your wife. You are someone who hurts her. You are letting her feel terrible pain. What kind of person are you? (197)

Here, there is a distance created between the author and the reader. Roberge is making a commentary on the kind of person he is being, and the “you” separates the author from his audience. We are on the outside, trying to figure out the author, perhaps, judging the author as the author is judging himself.

Then, there is the “you” that transforms the reader into Rob Roberge, giving a feeling of a Choose Your Own Adventure book, where the reader follows along with Roberge’s choices, leading the reader into one dilemma after another in reference to drugs, alcohol, bipolarity, manic episodes and so on. The reader becomes the author, feeling his pain, guilt, and search for hope. Roberge writes, “You snort a line. Very soon, you are calmer and happier than you can ever remember feeling. It’s a perfect waking dream…It’s like you are living in someone else’s body. Someone not at all like you. Someone happy.” (176) The author brings the reader in close–we become the text. We snort the line, we are happier, we are in dream, we are not ourselves, we are happy. Here the reader becomes Roberge as he takes drugs. As he acts, we are acting with him, hoping to survive the text, hoping to survive Roberge’s life.

Roberge confesses that he is a liar–whether it’s to himself, to his friends, to his wife, he lies. He admits that at times, he is unable to separate truth from fiction, and that, ironically, is what makes the memoir so true. True in that his life has been one big blur, full of drugs and liquor and failed relationships and murdered friends. In there, somewhere, there is the truth, or, there are multiple truths. One important truth is the love for his wife, Gayle. This is the essence of his story–how he is still around, though he has thought about killing himself multiple times, because of Gayle. In those moments we see Roberge interact with his wife or write about his wife, we see the author at his humblest. It is in this humility, where the truth lies. It is within the guilt he feels for the pain that Gayle goes through, whether caused by Roberge or not, where the truth exists. He is embarrassed at times, He is remorseful. He is being truthful.

Roberge is seeking for the truth in his own memoir. He’s putting bits and pieces together, and it’s almost like he’s posting a series of Post-it notes against his own brain so that he can remember what has happened in the past to the best of his ability. He reveals a countless amount of dark moments in his life, and it’s easy to see why it’s difficult for him to remember. You wouldn’t want to remember some of these events. You would feel pain trying to seek the past, trying to make sense out of a life that was on the brink of death more than once. You would wonder if it’s all worth it.

Liar is a memoir full of puzzle pieces, with some of the pieces missing. It is through these holes, we find beauty in Roberge’s writing. The constant inconsistencies in his life make his memoir extraordinary because there is no happy ending or sad ending–there is no ending, in fact, there’s just Rob Roberge. His willingness to give himself up, to call himself out, to tell us how he has been struggling with life since he was a child gives us a world where beauty doesn’t necessarily mean happiness, but where beauty means the truth. And by facing the truth, you are able to move forward.

Out of the Depths: Wendy C. Ortiz's Excavation

When I first read Wendy C. Ortiz’s Excavation: A Memoir, I was living in a house at the top of a hill overlooking the harbor. I sat on a couch in the lounge, reading in the sun while my friends watched My Girl. I had only just returned to New Zealand from a trip to the United States, where had seen old friends from the Internet and made some new ones. And then, the same week I sat down to read Ortiz’s memoir, someone back in the States whom I care for quite a bit had stepped forward and named a mutual online friend in a string of revealed sexual offenders in our community.

So I sat and I read and I kept reading, but it was hard and slow going. I felt carved up, learning about these men back in the States, most of whom I had trusted and thought I had known, and the personal stories of women coming forward, some far younger than the men they had trusted and thought they had known. And Excavation bled into this, My Girl bled into this, every crush on an older man, a high school teacher, a friend’s older brother, an older cousin’s friend bled into this and what could have been, this and what was.

Wendy C. Ortiz writes about herself and for herself, for her former self and her present self and everything she lost and gained from knowing Mr Ivers. Her style is easy and accessible, and without all of my emotional baggage I saw myself flying through the book. If only I wasn’t feeling so shitty about everything, I thought, I’d have this read by now. I was doing her a disservice, I thought. I felt guilty for liking Excavation, guilty for being swept up by Wendy and Jeff and Nicholas and Veronica, guilty for not being able to give them my undivided attention. In the end, it took me about three weeks to read Excavation cover to cover; it took eight months to process it enough to get past saving an empty word document.

Ortiz writes devastatingly well. Excavation is crafted to be effortless, eyes racing over the page, caught up in prose easily attributed to the language of one specific, articulate teenager, prose that reads like poetry in its fluidity. This is writing that sounds great when read aloud, which is alarming, given the measure of its content and the weight of its impact. This is writing that carries the feeling of summer, a carefree sensibility the reader surely cannot, should not, be feeling but that teenaged Wendy so desperately craves. This placement bears an emotional toll on the reader – lassitude chained to gravity, and an inability to separate the two.

Wendy the teenager is an everygirl pushed to the extremes. She is myself at fifteen, heavy black eyeliner and dark clothing, a penchant for danger and poetry and darkly soothing music. She is someone else’s self in her tie-dye and her wild mother, someone else’s self in her recklessness, someone else’s self in her choice of friends. She is all of us in the details, staying up late talking to her crush on the phone and then writing about it in her diary, sneaking around, feeling alive and ecstatic and above, removed from, parental understanding.

Except, with Wendy the crush on the phone is in his late 20s and Wendy is 13, she is 14, she is creeping toward 15. The crush is her teacher and he is a manipulator, he is playing a game so well he’s forgotten how to stop. Wendy is so smart and she knows it and she wants to learn everything, and he is a bad man (but they all are, aren’t they?), such a bad man he can make himself look good.

This is how Ortiz makes it work so well – writing compellingly, consumingly, about this thing. Because it would be consuming, it would be darkly compelling, it would feel sexy and dangerous in the good way at 13, at 14, at 15, and terrifying only later, terrible only in contemplation, as all sorts of risky behaviors are; Ortiz knows this because she lived it, and that makes it all the worse on the reader. It is Ortiz’s ability to reflect, to slip back into this headspace and write from the depths of Wendy at 13, 14, 15, that allows the reader this insight, this extent of connection, and this power of knowing.

And that is why I sat, mourning Wendy the child, as Wendy the woman ‘looks back at that fossilized time’, mourning for the Wendy pushing her daughter’s stroller around the tar pits, for the piece of her that ‘feels trapped in time’, for the women on the Internet and for all of us, for Ortiz the author who carries it all with her, the Wendy who finally feels a ‘sense of belonging’ in her current life, the Ortiz who was ready to pull it up from the tar pit and excavate it all.

These days, I am living in a house on the other side of the city at the top of a valley. From here, I can see my old house, the window I looked out of while I was reading Excavation. I can see a tiny version of the harbor I gazed down upon. I can almost see a tiny version of myself and my friends watching My Girl that October afternoon so long ago.

A Portrait of Contemporary Rural Dysfunction: Scott McClanahan's Crapalachia

As a product of the blah-inducing New England suburban sprawl, I remember being fascinated by Appalachia. That rugged, heavily forested mountain corridor that isn’t out West but is still mysterious territory to a child of I-95’s coastal homogeneity, its intrigue made large by middle school textbooks describing the fortitude of the legendary settlers of the country’s first real frontier and later sensational reports of all-out clan warfare and moonshiner vigilantes. The trees seemed like they’d be bigger, and so did the people. Scott McClanahan’s Crapalachia is nothing and everything like those stories. His memoir of growing up in backwoods West Virginia – a broken cultural microcosm wrapped in a tourist-friendly haze, languishing amidst the specters of mining casualties and even older ghosts – is more an unflinching, heartbreaking, and laugh-inducing portrait of contemporary rural dysfunction than a compendium of tall tales, though there are plenty of those as well.

A prolific short story writer, McClanahan imbues his mosaic of brief yet enduring memory bursts with same easy, gritty exuberance that makes his fiction so distinctly habit-forming. From the outset, he grabs the reader, initiating him into the captivating Southern Gothic grotesqueries of his adolescence. There’s Grandma Ruby, the deeply flawed but endearing matriarch whose hobbies include extreme manipulation and taking photographs of corpses, and who cares for 52-year-old Uncle Nathan, a sufferer of cerebral palsy who’s also a big fan of six packs and Walker, Texas Ranger sans the irony. The dozen other aunts and uncles, distinguished by the Y sounds at the end of their names (Stanley, Elgie, Terry) and a proclivity for verbal brevity (“sheeeeeeeeeeeeet”). And the embarrassingly neurotic Little Bill whose hardcore OCD will make you never want to listen to Kansas’ “Dust in the Wind” again. McClanahan shows a deep regard for not only the people of his home state but also the facets of its unique history, embellishing his painfully funny, jarring prose with bits of local and family lore, coal miner death tolls, fried chicken recipes, and the repeated exclamations (“What the fuck?”) of a perverse country preacher striving for a taste of the supernatural but only allowed to choke down the harshness of the world’s absurdity: “I knew that the dying were selfish, and the living were too.”

Subtitled, “A Biography of a Place,” Crapalachia is a fascinating and thoroughly entertaining delving into the inextricable linkage of a writer and where he’s from, but it’s also a gut-stabbing meditation on the universality and pointlessness of suffering. Casual teenage viciousness, ambivalent and at times borderline criminal parenting, drug use, and especially death – what McClanahan cheekily anoints as “THE THEME OF THIS BOOK AND ALL BOOKS” – are motifs as prevalent as the 40 ounces the author and his friends slug to relieve constant boredom and a sinister, gnawing suspicion:

I awoke and saw that life was one big practical joke full of pain. Someone was laughing at us. Someone was torturing us. I remember being at Grandma Ruby’s as a little boy and crushing the ants on her sidewalk.

But there’s also hope, a fiercely ingrained hope for better days ahead and a deep-rooted cultural satisfaction in making the best of a tough situation, a sense of resilience McClanahan admires in his coal miner forebears and ostensibly in himself. It is evident in his poignant attempts to prolong the legacy and memory of his dead grandmother and uncle by depositing bags of Appalachian dirt throughout the country, in the tenderness he shows an illiterate child while substitute teaching. It is also a feeling he desperately wants to share with the reader, whom he addresses at the end of most of the short chapters, a call and response technique usually employed, interestingly enough, by the religious zealots he often ridicules. This loud plea for inclusivity, for me, is ultimately what sets Crapalachia apart and above other recent works of autobiography. In order to find meaning in the past and to solidify his identity, McClanahan wants, no needs the reader to acknowledge the harsh realities of his own decaying life. Only through understanding and acknowledging a shared condition can we create the solidarity necessary for survival: “We pass the torch of life for one another like runners in the night. I WILL forever be reaching for you. PLEASE keep reaching for me. Please.”

Daunting, but undeniably powerful. This punchy, inimitable book is one of the best memoirs I can remember reading, a prescient and preposterous ode to Americana’s charms and failures with enough greasiness to stick to your bones like homemade gravy for as long as you let it.

Stories About Scars: On Peter Grandbois's The Arsenic Lobster

For my thirtieth birthday, I had a storytelling party. When no one knew what to talk about, I asked for a story about a scar. Even though I cringe through them, even though I cover my mouth, even as I gasp and violently shake my head and fall just short of shrieking, I love them. Stories about scars give me an experience I could never otherwise have.

My own scars are uninteresting. Surgeries. Tattoos. Stupid adult mistakes. My only scars I find interesting are the ones that precede my memory. I’ve got a straight line down my bicep a couple inches long. I’ve had it “forever,” but I haven’t a clue what happened. I’ve got a flat slug under my chin, gnarled and white and mysterious. I wasn’t born with it — something happened to me. It happened one time and it stayed with me, living in my skin all the way to now.

Back when it first happened, I was a different person. It was anyone’s guess who or what I’d become. At some point, it was possible that I could’ve been the sort of person who sought out scars. I could have decided that stories weren’t enough. Self-sabotage is attractive when dressed up as experience. Undoing, erasing, or ruining your life becomes a viable prospect when the alternative is never doing anything: a life of inexperience. But even after you’re experienced, self-sabotage stays with you, just like a scar. And you wind up fighting every person you’ve ever been.

So it goes in Peter Grandbois’s book, The Arsenic Lobster. Labeled as a “hybrid memoir,” I found myself wondering how much was true — did the second person narrator really swim for miles in a rancid canal? Did he really chase down a six-foot boa constrictor? Did he really hang off the top of his friend’s car while his friend tried to send him flying with his own recklessness? Of course he did. And of course it’s true. The physically dangerous decisions we foolishly made in childhood — especially a suburban childhood like Grandbois had (and like I had) — were easier to accept because, when you’re just a body, you don’t care what happens. You’ll heal eventually. But after you become a mind, a conflicted, oversensitive brain, decisions become harder to make. It becomes more difficult to accept what you’ve done because you’ll remember it, because experience is permanent. Grandbois exploits the transition between body and mind, between childlike faux-impermanence and concrete, selective amnesia:

“The further back you go, the more shadows you find. You catch glimpses beneath the surface of memory: Kids alone in their house sniffing glue. Do you want some? Another kid takes a baseball bat to a parked car. Do you join him? Another tells you to distract a clerk while he steals the Dungeon Master’s guide. Do you go along? Another pulls down his pants and asks you to suck his dick. Do you? Another hits a defenseless kid. Calls a kid a faggot. Calls a kid a queer. Do you stop them? Many, many kids drinking, taking shrooms, smoking pot, disappearing in rooms. Images flash through your mind, but strangely, your part in these memories remains in shadow. Flicking in and out like the old TV show, The Outer Limits. Don’t adjust your vertical hold. There’s nothing wrong with your television set. You stand on the edge of memory, always observing, wondering when, how, if ever, you participated.”

Upon reaching adolescent self-awareness, Grandbois taps into hyperawareness, watching everyone watching him. So he takes up fencing, a spectator sport that scars him physically and emotionally, breaking his hand, ending his first marriage, making him both more and less noble than he would’ve been otherwise. He describes his life away from fencing as a dream, the sort you can’t wake up from. He is most alive when fighting, be it with himself, or with an imagined self. He risks those selves each times, but they always seem to multiply, just like choices. With the right amount of perspective, anything is possible, but then, how do you choose? It’s no easier than choosing who to be. While Grandbois is himself, always, he is only one of many selves, with each self becoming more dominant, more permanent, more willing to sacrifice another part to be the real you in the end. And even in the end, still taking risks, abandoning dreams both likely and remote, he imagines the future, wherein he’s still fighting and still collecting scars and making new possibilities and imagining the self that will get to win out, the one that hopes “when he is that age, he will be able to look in the mirror and whisper to himself, Go to hell.”

My most unmysterious, pre-memory scar comes from a mirror. I first discovered it when I was twenty-two. I shaved my head, making me look very different than the person I’d been before, and about four inches from my forehead, there was a length of sickly white skin where my hair didn’t grow. I remembered an inconsequential story my father once told me about a mirror that had fallen on me when I was very young. Apparently, I caught the corner with my head. In my invented recollection, it happens one of two ways. Either I see a baby, which I understand is me, and the mirror falls and hits my head and there’s a bit of blood, then it’s over; or I’m very short, but not a child — that is, I’m me, only smaller, and the mirror falls toward me and breaks before it makes contact. Neither is true, but I don’t really think it matters. Like any experience, I can’t go back and undo it. And, like the experience I borrow whenever I hear a story or read a book, it’s difficult to imagine a mirror that doesn’t hold a dozen selves.

Fact or Fiction? Your Guess Is As Good As Mine: Herta B. Feely's Confessions

I’ll admit it. I really respect James Frey. I followed the controversy surrounding A Million Little Pieces (which contained numerous exaggerations and lies) and its aftermath. I watched the Oprah interviews — when she grilled him, and when she made peace with him. I watched it all, and if there’s one thing that really stuck with me, it’s a comment that Frey made in his final meeting with Oprah. He said, “Let’s say you look at a cubist self-portrait by Picasso. . . . It doesn’t actually look anything like Picasso, or if it does, it does in ways that might only make sense to him.” This seems to suggest that there are more leniencies (and perhaps undeservedly so) in the categorization of genres in visual arts than in literature.

Before the start of his work of fiction, Bright Shiny Morning, Frey stuck in a humorous disclaimer that stands as an acknowledgement of his past: “Nothing in this book should be considered accurate or reliable.” If Herta B. Feely were to do the same, it would probably read something like: “Some of the stories in Confessions should be considered true, but it’s up to you decide which ones.”

Confessions is an anthology comprised of twenty-two short stories and memoirs whose genres remain unrevealed unless you look them up in the “answer key” at the book’s end. This format provokes questions regarding the boundaries between “fact and fiction,” the degree to which the traditional definition of “truth” is acceptable, and the consequent liberties that authors take as a response to their own interpretations. Feely seeks to engage readers in the subject — to invite them to examine if they wanted a story to be true or not, and if they felt betrayed when it wasn’t what they expected.

Knowing the way the book was set up, I read Confessions much more skeptically than I’d even read a newspaper. I was a juror and each story was a case. It frequently seemed that certain feelings were described specifically enough that one would have to have experienced them to write them so well. But still, “reasonable doubt” existed. I would often end up contemplating whether these segments seemed to be described a bit too specifically — whether more detail was revealed than one would have naturally noticed if the said events did, in fact, occur. On the whole, verdicts were difficult to reach.

At the heart of Confessions lies the big question: Does genre even matter, and do authors have a responsibility to inform their readers of the truth (or lack thereof)? George Nicholas, author of the anthology’s “If, Then, But,” states, “Pulp magazines of the ‘40s and ‘50s enticed readers with ‘True Confessions’ in 48-point type on their covers (would their reader have turned away from ‘False Confessions’?).” Nicholas goes on to say, “The Sonoran desert is part of the United States. It is also part of Mexico. But whichever side of the border you’re on, it’s still the desert. That’s what I think about fact or fiction. Makes no difference. It’s the story that counts, and the line has been blurry from day one.”

Confessions is an enthralling literary guessing game. Reading it, I often found myself disillusioned, stranded in the middle of the desert, wondering where the borderlines were and if it even mattered.

On and Off . . . The Road to Somewhere

I’ve been driving legally since I was 15. Back in those Iron Age days, a mere learner’s permit was all that was required to haul my indolent arse to a minimum wage ($3.10/hr.) gig at the local multiplex. Since then, I figure I’ve easily slapped on over half a million miles on the myriad vehicles I’ve owned, leased, or rented. Unlike the romantic, quintessential literary version of the “American writer” finding himself on this country’s back roads and small, rural routes, my traveling experience has come wrestling with the brutality of our ill-paved, Eisenhower-era highways.

In the 21st Century, trekking across America’s deteriorating thoroughfares is harsh business; not only on the machine itself (hello $175 front wheel alignment + labor!), but on the psyche as well. I crossed this vast country twice in my 20s; both winter trips made solo in a standard VW with no heat, power windows or steering, armed with only a mix tape of Steel Pulse tunes to keep me anchored in reality, sanity, and emotional warmth. Continuing my numerous East/West, North/South adventures since, I’ve withstood a relentless barrage of psychological warfare and propaganda dished out via billboards and AM Talk Radio. Propaganda which either tried to bully me into consuming chemically tweaked burgers, fries, and other mechanically separated chicken parts, or decreed my certain damnation unless I embraced the power of Jesus and cleansed my soul like some glazed-look Aye-aye in urgent need of salvation.

You can imagine my vindicated sense of brotherhood when I read James Reeves’s generous offering of his own, similar experiences in The Road to Somewhere. Aha, I screamed: finally a fellow writer who shuns romanticizing America’s highways in favor of the truth.

“What does it mean to be a man in the 21st Century?” is one of the questions Reeves asks in this personal and emotional memoir, and love/hate affair with The Road. And does one really find anything within oneself on the savage highways of America, like Kerouac and Cassady did back in the ’50s?

Examining Reeves’s account and literally witnessing his vision of our country through wonderful, personal photographs (Reeves is an educator, a photographer, and a designer as well) as it enters the new millennium in a chaotic, almost dismembered condition, only further obfuscates the (declining) force that is a complicated America. And that is a good thing. It’s one of the truths evident. Through his search for his own answers, contemplating family history and expected societal roles, James reveals the partitioned state that is our country, at times unveiling its Philistine, fundamentalist tendencies for maintaining status quo, at others underscoring its inventive, modern, innovative, and optimistic drive into a new era. At the core of these dueling forces we find . . . people.

Reeves personalizes The Road with profile slices of those who inhabit it, who hitchhike it, who love or loathe it, who defend it. In reading this book I found my America quickly slipping away from me; I found I know no more of it now than I did thirty-two years ago when I came to it as a refugee from a totalitarian regime. And as strange as it may sound, that should stand as a credit to this country — rapidly moving either forward or tragically backward.

Within his expansive, several-thousand-mile journey, James reveals the profile of a young, travelling man fighting to understand ideas passed down through his culture and familial rituals, and how they intersperse with the mentation of his own experiences, in his own time, as a man in America. I love this book because of its balanced helping of melancholy and brutal truth of what The Road means and how it has defined this country—both in the past and present. I love this book because it presents The Road as it is: a laborious, 15-round bout with Ali or Frazier; a ferocious ballet.