First published 2013
Howard Norman opens his memoir with a Midwestern summer spent working on a bookmobile, navigating his grifter father's schemes while falling under the influence of his brother's girlfriend. His journey takes him to the Arctic, where he spends years translating Inuit stories, including the tale of a soapstone carver transformed into a goose who cries "I hate to leave this beautiful place" during migration. While in the far north, Norman hears over the radio that John Lennon has been murdered in New York City. Later, back in the United States, violence strikes closer to home when Norman and his wife loan their Washington D.C. house to a poet and her young son, only to have tragedy unfold in a murder-suicide. Norman weaves these moments of what he calls "arresting strangeness" together with quieter scenes from his Vermont farmhouse and his bird-watching days in Point Reyes, California. He shows how these experiences, both disturbing and beautiful, fed into his creative work as a novelist.
Genres: 20th-century, autobiography, biography-memoir, 21st-century
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Arctic, California, New York City, Vermont, Washington D.C.
Period: 1980s
194 pages · Hardcover · Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Content warnings: death, murder, violence