If You Knew Then What I Know Now

by Ryan Van Meter

The middle American coming-of-age has found new life in Ryan Van Meter's coming-out, made as strange as it is familiar by acknowledging the role played by gender and sexuality. In fourteen linked essays, "If You Knew Then What I Know Now" reinvents the memoir with all-encompassing empathy--for bully and bullied alike. A father pitches baseballs at his hapless son and a grandmother watches with silent forbearance as the same slim, quiet boy sets the table dressed in a blue satin dress. Another essay explores origins of the word "faggot" and its etymological connection to "flaming queen." This deft collection maps the unremarkable landscapes of childhood with compassion and precision, allowing awkwardness its own beauty. This is essay as an argument for the intimate--not the sensational--and an embrace of all the skinned knees in our stumble toward adulthood.Ryan Van Meter grew up in Missouri and studied English at the University of Missouri-Columbia. After graduating, he lived in Chicago for ten years and worked in advertising. He holds an MA in creative writing from DePaul University and an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa. His essays have appeared in "The Gettysburg Review," "Indiana Review," "Gulf Coast," "Arts & Letters, and Fourth Genre, among others, and selected for anthologies including Best American Essays 2009." In the summer of 2009, he was awarded a residency at the MacDowell Colony. He currently lives in California where he is an assistant professor of creative nonfiction at the University of San Francisco.

Genres: Memoir, Essays, Nonfiction, LGBT, Gay, Queer, Coming Of Age

223 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 1, 2011

About the author

Ryan Van Meter's essays have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Indiana Review, Gulf Coast, Arts & Letters, and Fourth Genre, among others, and selected for anthologies including Best American Essays 2009. In the summer of 2009, he was awarded a residency at the MacDowell Colony. He currently is an assistant professor of creative nonfiction at The University of San Francisco.

Reviews

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

A moving, quietly powerful essay collection about growing up gay in the Midwest. In these 14 linked pieces of memoir, Ryan Van Meter writes about his struggles and experiences with sexuality and gender spanning his childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. One of the most stunning aspects of Van Meter's writing includes his ability to focus in on a singular moment from his past and describe it with riveting detail and immediacy, so we feel an understated yet immense level of emotion. For example, in "First," he writes about when he first holds hands with a boy at five-years-old and says that he will marry him, only for his mother to lash out and state that boys do not marry other boys. And in "Lake Effect," he describes the moment his father catches him staring at another adolescent boy's shirtless chest, capturing his curiosity and desire and also the shame instilled by his father's reprimand. Van Meter's use of sensory detail and his vulnerability gives this collection an intimate, immediate feel. By the end of the book, I wanted to give his younger self a huge hug, or to help him help himself sort through his issues with identity.

Overall, I would recommend If You Knew Then What I Know Now to anyone interested in a quick, touching essay collection. In addition to his self-awareness and honesty, I appreciated the compassion and gentleness Van Meter showed to himself and the people in his life within these essays. Society socializes men to be aggressive and unfeeling, and I wish we could widely distribute writing like Van Meter's to show that we can encourage love and kindness and emotional awareness within boys and men instead. While there were some moments I wanted Van Meter to go deeper, either through connecting present to past, or through commenting about or showing through detail the impact of toxic masculinity and patriarchy, I still really enjoyed this memoir via essays. I am definitely adding Ryan Van Meter to my list of sensitive queer male writers I have author crushes on, alongside Adam Haslett and Martin Wilson.

[Matthew Allard · Rating 5 out of 5]

I couldn't put this down. It's smart and thoughtful and honest. It's a book I'd want to write and never know how or where to begin. There was eerily so much of my youth in here, feelings and moments so succinctly described, that I felt Van Meter was writing about me. Special.

[Doug · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5, rounded up.

This collection of 14 linked autobiographical essays will certainly resonate with any gay man, particularly if you have grown up in the Midwest, but really with anyone who realizes their 'difference' from an early age. Some of these I didn't really cotton to; the initial stories rely on sports stories that held little interest, but the pieces got stronger and more personal for me, and the final three blew me away. Not sure if Van Meter has continued to publish new pieces in magazines (this came out 8 years ago), but this remains his only collection, which seems a shame - he's a born storyteller.

[Vin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't want to besmirch this sweet memoir w/ one of my lame-ass reviews, because I really liked it. So I'll just say: I laughed, I cried. Mostly cried. In a good way.

[Ethan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m so thankful I bought this book after one of my professors recommended I read the title essay. This essay collection has easily slid its way into my heart and my all-time favorites list.

So much of Van Meter’s writing and experiences just hit so close to home for me, and Jesus that last handful essays just really go for the heart. With each essay there’s just this mounting quiet devastation that builds and builds but then we get to the final pages of the last essay, “You Can’t Turn Off the Snake Light,” and there’s just this beautiful, tangible comfort that’s delivered that doesn’t erase the devastation but sits with it, letting it know it’s not alone.

I adore this collection.

[Barrie · Rating 4 out of 5]

“"So how do we learn to love?" asks Van Meter toward the end of this touchingly honest memoir and the answer is, we don't; we keep trying to reinvent love sometime succeeding for fleetingly precious moments of time, more often than not ending up disappointed. Van Meter's own answer . . . "The only thing I know about love is that I don’t know anything."

[Chance Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Today I'm analying Ryan van Meter's essay colleciton If You Knew Then What I Know Now. Like Joey Lawrence or Keanu Reeves, I can only say, "Whoa."

There were few essays in this collection that didn't leave me misty-eyed for some reason or another, yet I never once felt manipulated.

Van Meter's collection is a series of essays, in mostly chronological order, about his childhood. Many of the essays revolve around coming to terms with his sexuality. Because most of the essays were published in a variety of publications (I think maybe all of them), and not written explicitly for a book, there is sometimes an overlap of detail. This might annoy me, but with van Meter, it was like "Oh! I remember when he talked about that!" in a way I might if a friend was telling me a story and he repeated himself.

His details are insanely good, and follow a good writing rule that I've seem to forgotten: utilize all the senses. His details are tactile ("Hope is a goldfish in a plastic bag of water: the weight of the bag in your hands, [...] and as the car rounds a curve, you feel the flutter of his translucent tail against your skin through the plastic" (159)), aural ("sizzling noises fry out the background" (119)), and, um, tasty: ("These cherry bars taste sweaty." (92)) Or not tasty, as this specific instance may be.

There is a great interview with Van Meter on bookslut. http://www.bookslut.com/features/2011...

Two of his responses stood out to me. The interview mentions how he finds empathy in his "antagonist" characters, and he responds, "I care very much about most of the people in the essays. The technical challenge was writing about them in a way that the reader cares about them too."

And the way van Meter talks about the title essay fascinates me. In this essay, he writes about an incident that happens in sixth grade that is never spoken again... until a reunion. He says, "Back when I was trying to just write it as a story, before that apology at the reunion, it wasn't a story. It was just an anecdote of suffering, and that's not interesting. After the reunion, I couldn't stop thinking about the fact that I wasn't the only one who'd been bothered all those years by that one day in sixth grade. What I thought was private wasn't just mine. So the anecdote started being an essay, because as I hint at in the finished piece, a short story with a bully apologizing at a high school reunion would be hokey and sentimental. But it happened in actual life." There's so much interestingness in that paragraph. The fact that stories that might seem trite in fiction are suddenly exciting when they actually happen. The mention that "an anecdote of suffering" is NOT INTERESTING. It just isn't! The age of the misery memoir is over, and there needs to be a greater context (like empathy) to these stories.

Okay, I'll stop gushing. I have a total literary crush on him. Also, he and I own the same taco socks. I saw them on his Tumblr http://ryanvanmeter.net/post/79661746862.

[Charles Cobine · Rating 5 out of 5]

I started out reading this book in the early hours of the Fourth of July, and I just couldn’t put it down until I finished it. I was uncertain whether I would find it painful to reflect on how I felt about my identity at different points in my youth as I expected. Instead, what I found are coming-of-age stories that so closely reflect my feelings growing up at the same time, that it was fascinating, affirming, resonant. How can the author have known that this was what it was like, almost exactly, for me, with a 1980s childhood and high school in the early 1990s? It was enormously comforting to read how closely his confused feelings, self-esteem issues, and rage-inspiring torture at the hands of casual school bullies, mirrors my own life story as a gay man, now scooting along into my mid-forties. I found all of it to be poignant, touching. It was a helpful exercise to read this book, to hear someone else’s stories about parental concerns and expectations directed toward a young child, feeling so many things: that you’ve absorbed “AIDS” as a child by osmosis because of inevitability and guilt, that you can save yourself by praying the gay away, and the paralysis-inducing fear of the school locker room. Even the author’s recounting of difficulty sleeping, of night terrors and deathly fear of alien abduction at age 13 mirrors precisely what I felt, and now is, as I understand with more clarity, a symptom of entirely other fears, of being alien myself and deathly afraid and not knowing what was to become of me as time went on. I think many gay men will identify with this work, see a bit of themselves, in the author’s reminiscences and the language he uses to bring to life his feelings, really many of our shared feelings, at a certain age and time. For others, for straight allies, younger queer readers, it will give you an idea of how it feels and what it’s like to not know what others all around you profess to know about you, and what it is/was like to grow into your sexuality and identity as a gay man.

[Alex · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

I see this book in two acts and I think the organization of these essays is very good and effective since taking a chronological approach. I would define Act I as Van Meter’s confusing childhood with discovering his sexuality. Descriptions here were heightened so well that Van Meter is able to capture a nostalgic painting of anyone’s childhood to some degree, I think, especially anyone’s anxiety with not wanting to disappoint others.

Act II, to me, is when Van Meter describes his adult life. There’s great growth here since Van Meter implies that when we might feel like we can escape parts of our past, it doesn’t mean we’re done growing since our perception of relationships is always evolving. I just think something got lost along the way toward the latter half of these essays, likely due to the fact that these are mostly an assembly of essays published at different times and formatted in a linear fashion for this collection. It is a strength, as I mentioned earlier, but also shows some gap for flaws.

[Kat V · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was good! I read it for class.

[Charlotte K · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 stars if only for the mention of Tipton Appliances. admirable CNF/addition to the memoir parlor

[Josh Rouq · Rating 4 out of 5]

i have class in 5 min so idk what to say except i enjoyed this collection

[Maureen Stanton · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book, which feels like half memoir that shifts into essays later, may be the best book I've read on what it is like to grow up gay, or even just "different" from the cultural norm, especially in a small Midwestern town, with a father desperately trying to shape his son into a "boy" in the traditional sense. This part of the books is poignant and affecting, the essays lucid and beautifully written. The book then leaps to RVM after he has come out and his first serious relationship, with interesting meditations on the word "faggot," its etymology and its power in our culture. I really liked these pieces as well, but the shift makes me feel like this book is kind of a hybrid. What seemed crucially missing in the narrative arc that takes us through the first half of the book is the reconciliation (or at least encounter) with his father and mother when he came out. Because the childhood part is so fraught with tension, palpable to the reader as its so skillyfully written, to leap over this crucial part feels like a dodge. But this is a wonderful book, well written, a pleasure to read for anyone, but certainly will be a balm to anyone who is growing up gay in America. It called to mind Mark Doty's "Firebird" (a more lyrical book, but less affecting).

[Courtney · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is sweet and riveting and timely and so many other qualities that I was looking for in a book. Definitely a gift to the queer world, the human world.

"...she was obsessed with Tetris, a game where small jagged bricks inch down the screen, and the point is to fit them back together. It was a game about making order out of chaos, putting back together what rained down in pieces.
...On the screen in front of her, I imagined the bricks falling faster and faster, and how at some point, she wouldn't be able to keep up. Which was the tough secret of that kind of game -- the better you got at it, the harder it was."

"I ask Tom, 'Why are you sure our relationships are different? If love isnt all the same, then how do gay men learn to do it?' We both think. If we learn to love by trying and failing, then I wonder how many times it takes before you get it right? Tom answers, 'I don't think we do learn. Or we don't just do what straight people do.' He brings his glass to his lips but doesn't drink. 'I think we reinvent love every time.'"

[Cody · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read one of the short stories in this book online before purchasing the book, so I knew that it was likely I would love it - and I absolutely did. Ryan's talent as a writer contains a specific beauty to capture those moments of childhood that words seem to not be able to describe - feelings, emotions, fears. This is particularly true for a young child wrestling with their sexuality.

I'm extremely thankful to Ryan for sharing this beautiful insight into his childhood and for his contribution to LGBT literature. The heartbreak is the same, the innocence is the same, the love is the same - no matter who you are or who you love.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book makes me want to write. It reminds me that when we tell our stories in the right way they can be just as cathartic to read as to put on the page. Moving through these essays I felt like I was gaining insights into how to retell my own youth... and not just because I grew up gay in suburbia hating baseball and trying on dresses. But because these stories manifest like our memories - with all the emotion and images we carry recreated through our current reserve of experience and knowledge. Anyone interested in the writing of personal history should read this book!

[Greg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this one in two sittings, which is amazing for me these days. A beautifully written memoir in the form of coming-of-age coming-out essays. Van Meter has a great ear for dialogue and an eye for detail. Stories of his midwestern anxiety-ridden childhood and his struggles with romance were compelling in that easy, inevitable way - never self-pitying or maudlin. I'm sure I'll come back to this book to reread it.

[Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lovely collection of essays about growing up gay. Some really wonderful gems in this book, especially "First," the title essay, "Youth Group," "Tightrope," and "Things I Will Want to Tell You on Our First Date but Won't."

[Artemis · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read an excerpt in creative non-fiction class three years ago in Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: Work from 1970 to the Present, and this was one of the essays that stood out to me most and left a deep impression. His prose was incredible, the emotions were so palpable – I loved every page of that essay. So I decided to read the entire book. :)

I found this a very raw coming-of-age, coming-to-terms memoir, ish, about his sexuality and love. Ah, the human experience! It must've took a lot of courage to spill your guts to the world. :( But at the same time, I relate, as a writer and poet. Heheh. Writing about emotions is how we process it. I also felt a connection with the fact that the author worked as a copywriter in the advertising field, and also dabbled in poetry.

One thing I really liked from the get-go was the title. I think it speaks volumes of the emotional richness that lies within his essays – a touch of nostalgia, a hint of regret and wonder for the could-have-beens and what-ifs.

The only flaw was that sometimes I felt like the essays were a bit over the place, especially when he was looking back on his eight-year romantic relationship. I understand that it's not an autobiography, and more of a memoir, so there's that freedom in timeline and such, but I sort of wished he went more into his new relationship to show his growth about grieving for his past love, and understanding what love is/can be.

I did think the ending was perfect in the way that it was how I would have written it too. Very poignant, layered, and literary. I sometimes found the content and richness in emotions a little heavy, so I had to read it in various settings, which took me awhile to come back to it, haha. Hence the three-year reading period. xD

[Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ryan Van Meter was my first real experience with creative nonfiction. And after reading "First" and "If You Knew Then What I Know Now" with my class, I knew I needed more. When Van Meter came to read at my school, a friend of mine purchased his book for me so I could get it signed, and I only just managed to finish it more than three months later.

I found myself crying several times while reading this because it was so relatable. Even though my experiences as a queer person differ from Van Meter's as a gay man, there werw so many emotions that I've felt, that were so real.

I definitely recommend this to anyone looking to read some creative nonfiction.

[Sammy Harper · Rating 3 out of 5]

I did really enjoy the stories told in this book, but there were times where it was hard to follow from start to finish. The book is set up to read as a collection of short stories, but when events, characters, and other tidbits carry over and build off of each other between stories, I kept finding myself flipping back and forth. It was hard to keep track of, 'okay, is this a different character in the grand scheme of things', or 'is this the same character from a previous story, just with a different name'.

[Morgan Miller-Portales · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ryan Van Meter's collection of essays on growing up gay in small-town America is a brilliant and poignant depository of memories that perfectly encapsulates the experiences most gay males go through - the prejudices, the differences and ultimately in the best of cases, our emancipation from heterocentrist norms. One of the best books I have read so far in 2017.

[Lou · Rating 4 out of 5]

The childhood essays were viscerally gripping, the later essays less so, perhaps, but still emotionally connected. I would love for Van Meter to write YA gay fiction. He has a gift for transporting me back to memories from my early years I had to push away, and now both resist and yearn to fully remember.

[Amelia · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was recommended to me by a coworker who said it made him cry, and he was not wrong. Ryan Van Meter is such a masterful essayist. He tells moving personal stories that are simple, yet I've never seen them told before. And, without layering in a ton of analysis, he somehow makes them universal. Marched right out and bought a copy to give to a friend and pass on the love.

[Brian Benson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such a moving, inventive, exceedingly well-written collection. We need more writers like Ryan Van Meter, who write with candor and humor and vulnerability about all of the turmoil that comes of being a boy (especially a boy who likes other boys) in America. The lead essay, "First," is a stunner, one I've read countless times, as is the title piece. Grateful to have found this book.

[trin · Rating 4 out of 5]

started reading this and was like trying to figure out where van meter was from with context clues until he talked about driving from missouri so kansas to which that finally tied the book together to me. sometimes the references to other storiees got repetitive but other than that i really enjoyed this.

[Jeanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

These stories pull you in with the descriptions and emotion. I am glad that the author is now a successful author and professor--reading through the earlier chapters, I was worried for him. I am glad that he made it through.

[Pie · Rating 3 out of 5]

beautiful writing but nothing new, radical, or even (so sorry) interesting. tender, sure, but also so repetitive and some things were just ridiculous.

[Vilja · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful stories about life itself, in all its simplicity and complications. Stories about being young and unsure, of friendship and love, of failing and winning. A wonderful, meaningful read.

[Sadie Chelsea · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved every word and every second! Will read again and again.