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Getting Real: Drifting Into Middle Age by Peter Weissman
First person nonfiction novel covering twenty years
Paperback
First published November 1, 2014
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 13, 2016
I can't really speak objectively about this book, given that I am not only a character in it, but immortalized on the cover. I'll just say that everyone should be lucky enough to learn about their father through such well-written prose.
September 15, 2016
In Getting Real, author Peter Weissman recounts various experiences from his life from the late seventies up through the nineties. Each chapter presents a self-contained episode -- sometimes comical, sometimes bittersweet, but always thoughtful -- which ultimately fit together to paint a picture of both the era and the author.
Some of my favorite chapters cover Weissman’s time as an editor for a labor oriented weekly. The stories of pulling all-nighters to finish putting a newspaper together before deadline are fascinating to me. I have spent some time myself writing for various media outlets, and while modern technological advances have certainly made things easier for writers today, I can’t help but romanticize the days of physically setting page layouts. I would be plenty happy just reading about that, but the newsroom setting is just the backdrop for an even more intriguing story. Eventually Weissman learns that there are some shady things going on behind the scenes with the paper, and after he upsets the upper management, he decides to goes out in a blaze of glory. One cannot help but cheer for the author throughout.
It was perhaps a given that I would enjoy the anecdotes about newspapers and copyediting, considering my own background as a writer. What was more surprising was how much the other parts of the book resonated with me as well. Peter Weissman comes from a very different world than I do. We grew up in different eras, on different coasts, and come from fairly different backgrounds. Despite that, my mind kept returning to a part early on in the book where, while discussing favorite authors in a Manhattan bar, a friend of Weissman’s remarks: “Life doesn’t change much. The same things we experience now, they experienced then.”
I found this sentiment to be equally true with Getting Real. While the stories contained within are uniquely Weissman’s, and filtered through his own personal lens, the feelings and topics are universal. Things like finding love, starting a family, and making a home. How relationships change as you get older, or how people that were once close friends begin to drift away as you grow apart. And of course, how with time we are reminded more and more of our own mortality, as family members and loved ones pass on, leaving us to consider our own legacy.
The very end of the book tells the story of a family friend's final year, and ultimately his funeral. Weissman notes that the funeral -- largely organized by the deceased before his passing -- covers many of the man's accomplishments but makes no mention of the man as a father or husband. This bothers the author at first, but he ultimately decides that is okay if his friend chose to be remembered in his best possible light.
That this is the book's final thought paints an interesting contrast to the fact that the book chronicles many of Weissman's own struggles as a husband and father. For all of the interesting tales Weissman shares with the reader, not once does he go out of his way to paint himself in a positive light -- you never get the sense that he is twisting stories or changing details to make himself look better. Rather it seems Weissman is only interested in presenting himself on the page simply as he is, for better or for worse.
It is that sincerity that makes Weissman’s writing such a pleasure to read. I highly recommend this book.
Some of my favorite chapters cover Weissman’s time as an editor for a labor oriented weekly. The stories of pulling all-nighters to finish putting a newspaper together before deadline are fascinating to me. I have spent some time myself writing for various media outlets, and while modern technological advances have certainly made things easier for writers today, I can’t help but romanticize the days of physically setting page layouts. I would be plenty happy just reading about that, but the newsroom setting is just the backdrop for an even more intriguing story. Eventually Weissman learns that there are some shady things going on behind the scenes with the paper, and after he upsets the upper management, he decides to goes out in a blaze of glory. One cannot help but cheer for the author throughout.
It was perhaps a given that I would enjoy the anecdotes about newspapers and copyediting, considering my own background as a writer. What was more surprising was how much the other parts of the book resonated with me as well. Peter Weissman comes from a very different world than I do. We grew up in different eras, on different coasts, and come from fairly different backgrounds. Despite that, my mind kept returning to a part early on in the book where, while discussing favorite authors in a Manhattan bar, a friend of Weissman’s remarks: “Life doesn’t change much. The same things we experience now, they experienced then.”
I found this sentiment to be equally true with Getting Real. While the stories contained within are uniquely Weissman’s, and filtered through his own personal lens, the feelings and topics are universal. Things like finding love, starting a family, and making a home. How relationships change as you get older, or how people that were once close friends begin to drift away as you grow apart. And of course, how with time we are reminded more and more of our own mortality, as family members and loved ones pass on, leaving us to consider our own legacy.
The very end of the book tells the story of a family friend's final year, and ultimately his funeral. Weissman notes that the funeral -- largely organized by the deceased before his passing -- covers many of the man's accomplishments but makes no mention of the man as a father or husband. This bothers the author at first, but he ultimately decides that is okay if his friend chose to be remembered in his best possible light.
That this is the book's final thought paints an interesting contrast to the fact that the book chronicles many of Weissman's own struggles as a husband and father. For all of the interesting tales Weissman shares with the reader, not once does he go out of his way to paint himself in a positive light -- you never get the sense that he is twisting stories or changing details to make himself look better. Rather it seems Weissman is only interested in presenting himself on the page simply as he is, for better or for worse.
It is that sincerity that makes Weissman’s writing such a pleasure to read. I highly recommend this book.
August 15, 2017
As the author, I offer the back-cover synopsis:
In 1978, when Peter moves back to Manhattan, it's a different world. The kids zipping around Washington Square Park on rollerblades aren't hippies; they leave him feeling old and irrelevant. But there are others like him, a generation fading into history more quickly than he would have imagined. He reconnects with it and his aging past through an old pal who introduces him to a subculture obsessed with feminism and sexual politics, instead of civil rights and the old antiwar movement. Ten years in the cocoon of a safe and eventually unsatisfying marriage have left him unprepared for the raging battle of the sexes. In bemusement, he stumbles through a noir period of casual liaisons and tenuous friendships, takes odd writing jobs to pay the rent on an overpriced studio apartment, and like a Trollope innocent, finds himself editing a weekly newspaper that fronts for a labor racketeering operation. He then latches onto freelance work for book publishers, which rekindles his own enduring obsession to write a great novel about the sixties. That nostalgia for the best and worst of times, or just youth itself, is the subtext of Getting Real as the intrepid narrator moves sardonically through ill-suited relationships and renovated neighborhoods in discrete, interlocking stories as he encounters life's surprising, unpredictable turning points.
In 1978, when Peter moves back to Manhattan, it's a different world. The kids zipping around Washington Square Park on rollerblades aren't hippies; they leave him feeling old and irrelevant. But there are others like him, a generation fading into history more quickly than he would have imagined. He reconnects with it and his aging past through an old pal who introduces him to a subculture obsessed with feminism and sexual politics, instead of civil rights and the old antiwar movement. Ten years in the cocoon of a safe and eventually unsatisfying marriage have left him unprepared for the raging battle of the sexes. In bemusement, he stumbles through a noir period of casual liaisons and tenuous friendships, takes odd writing jobs to pay the rent on an overpriced studio apartment, and like a Trollope innocent, finds himself editing a weekly newspaper that fronts for a labor racketeering operation. He then latches onto freelance work for book publishers, which rekindles his own enduring obsession to write a great novel about the sixties. That nostalgia for the best and worst of times, or just youth itself, is the subtext of Getting Real as the intrepid narrator moves sardonically through ill-suited relationships and renovated neighborhoods in discrete, interlocking stories as he encounters life's surprising, unpredictable turning points.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews