Eric Simpson's Blog: Marginal Accretion - Posts Tagged "memoir"

The Eighties: A Bitchen Time To Be a Teenager! by Tom Harvey

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Until now, Bret Easton Ellis has been the consummate profiler of the decade of decadence, the 80s, listing the various indulgences and attitudes of its elite members, while Tom Wolfe has produced voluminous works on its ethic of greed. We can relate to these, perhaps, from a distance, as those watching those who have more getting more, but what about regular guys and average, small-town American girls?

With the backdrop of a decade revolting from the chaos of the 20-25 year period collectively referred to as the "sixties", the 80s was a period that witnessed the fall of sports athletes as role models as well as monumental disasters such as the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger; the era of Ronald Reagan and cabbage patch kids, new wave music and Disneyland cocaine. Against this general backdrop, Tom Harvey grows up.

Unlike the character in Ellis's numerous tomes or a few Wall Street elite in Wolfe, he isn't a drug-addled speed freak, or a rich and spoiled adolescent struggling with impulse buying and ennui. Instead, we are presented with the memoir of a normal guy growing up in a particular period of American history that sat on the precipice between alienated veterans of everything the 60s represented, and the oncoming technology revolution, replete with smart cell phones, the internet, and Presidential Twitter accounts, before you had to stand in front of a live person and use your vocal cords and body language to friend somebody, and when minimum wage was just $3.25 an hour. In other words, a "bitchen time to be a teenager".

Told in a very readable and compelling narrative, Harvey sets the backdrop in the late 70s when he is a child, then moves forward to describe his years in the 80s, beginning with his first year in middle school, through high school and college. There's plenty of opportunity as we follow him for laughter or tears, whichever you might be more inclined toward. I was not sold on, initially, and still feel ambivalent about, some of the historical interventions, the fun facts, or the sometimes seemingly obligatory mentions of events, but these did not detract, for me, from the narrative, and I suppose they are a selling point for many people. (I wonder how well I did with my commas in that previous sentence?)

What strikes me most about Tom Harvey's memoir of growing up in the 80s are three basic elements: his straightforward, pretty much no-nonsense style; his honesty and lack of braggadocio; and his heartfelt vitality and love of life.

The style is linear and to the point, which makes it a comfortable and compelling narrative. You don't feel as though you're trapped in an elderly man's dusty apartment, barely able to breathe, as he meanders pointlessly down memory lane. Harvey has learned the art of brevity, combined with a little reflection, but mostly as appeals to emotion rather than the complicated alleyways of suspicion and over-thinking that I would likely produce if I tried to write a similar memoir.

His honesty is raw and almost like a presence on every page. Honesty is a saving talent when it comes to writing because you always get some kind of bad feeling in the gut that something is wrong when a writer is not telling the truth. Harvey comes across as a basically honest, upfront guy through and through, and it shows on these pages. He doesn't flinch to tell us when he messes up, but he doesn't dwell on his deficiencies either. Why would he,and who would find that interesting, anyway?

Harvey loves life. He rightly loves his own life, his own teenage years, those varied sea changes that mark the course of a life. His love infuses these pages -- for his mother, his brothers, his friends and most strikingly, his good and natural love for himself. Unlike so many contemporary memoirs that hinge upon the conflict of people in psychological peril who finally have a pique experience that transforms them, Harvey's book is imbued with a sense of healthy vitality. He doesn't think back on his 18 year old visage, rocking out with an air guitar, with regret or any bitterness, but speaks of how he loves that guy. This pure feeling is what makes this book worthwhile, and works as a kind of cathartic reliving of a period others of us might not have enjoyed so much. I came away from the book thinking, it's what you bring to the experience that brings it value -- not what external things may do to you. Harvey, even when he's messing up, seems to bring all that he has to his experiences, and that makes a difference. that kind of attention is the very definition of love.



View all my reviews