Gravity Hill: A Memoir

by Maximilian Werner

“The sound of parenthood is the sigh.” So begins Gravity Hill, written from the perspective of a new father seeking hope, beauty, and meaning in an uncertain world. Many memoirs recount the author’s experiences of growing up and struggling with demons; Werner’s shows how old demons sometimes return on the heels of something as beautiful as children. Werner’s memoir is about growing up, getting older, looking back, and wondering what lies ahead—a process that becomes all the more complicated and intense when parenting is involved. Moving backward and forward between past, present, and future, Gravity Hill does not delineate time so much as collapse it. Werner narrates his struggle growing up in suburban Utah as anon-Mormon and what it took for him, his siblings, and his friends to feel like they belonged. Bonding in separation, they indulged in each other, in natural and urban landscapes, and sometimes in the destructive behaviors that are the native resort of outsidersincluding promiscuous and occasionally violent sexual behavior—and for some, paths to death and suicide. Gravity Hill is the story of the author’s descent into and eventual emergence from his dysfunction and into a newfound life. Infused with humor, honesty, and reflection, this literary memoir will resonate with readers young and old.

Genres: Memoir

192 pages, Paperback

First published March 31, 2013

About the author

Maximilian Werner is the author of the award-winning essay collection "Black River Dreams" and the upcoming novel "Crooked Creek." When he is not fly fishing on one of his favorite western waters, or elbow-deep in the garden dirt, he is at home writing or in the classroom teaching and trying to help humans live up to their potential as a species.

Reviews

[Larry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Maximilian Werner's novel, Crooked Creek (runner up for the Utah Book Award), is an elegant and truthful feat of fiction. It is like watching a man up to his waist in a cold stream whispering out line with his rod, coaxing a cutthroat to rise. Now, Werner's recent memoir, Gravity Hill, is like that dry-fly dropped over the reader hanging about in the cool dark reaches. You start reading and you will bite and swallow it hard.

Werner quickly dispels any conviction that his life growing up in Maine and later in Utah was a picnic. His was a self-destructive muscle-car burnout fueled by drugs, alcohol and a family-life of furtive discipline. Werner weaves these sliding, barely contained events of his youth with poignant meditations of his life now: A father. A husband. A man fearful of how to reconcile his growing-up and raising his own children. What to pass on. What to withhold. What to bury. And a lot is buried here. But ghosts do rise from the off-ramp, the hospital room, the arms of lovers and lost friends, the cemetery just down the street.

There is a trick that Werner uses to sooth his crying daughter. He lights a match. Lets it go out. Lights another. He burns a candle. All these tiny flames in his house that are like his youthful experiences. They had the potential to ignite and burn through, leave nothing but ash. But the flame is enough to distract, or maybe attract is more fitting, his daughter so that she quiets, closes her eyes and sleeps. Werner wonders what someone looking in might think:

"What would he think is going on in here, in this house of terror and flame and night? Despite my questionings, the world out there seemed no less distant: my neighbor's windows were filled with the same dark as me and the trees and the sky. Beneath them were luminous blue lawns of snow. It was all so frightening and so beautiful; the world outside my dry mouth, my walls, and my sleeping daughter."

There was no shortage of expelled audible breath over my teeth reading this wonderful memoir: acknowledgment of a master turn of phrase, of beauty in the midst of tragedy, of honest not knowing what comes next.

As a parent I've experienced it, that crushing moment when the child let's go to totter down the sidewalk on their first two-wheeler, or to jump into the deep end of the pool, or to push off at the top of the sledding hill. Werner shows it clearly here in this genuine memoir: Life is for the living, no matter how much we would like to withhold that bittersweet detail from our children.

[Tuck · Rating 3 out of 5]

a natural history of growing up and growing old in the salt lake city area, as a gentile. author skips back and forth between memory and raising kids in the burbs, just like he was raised in the burbs. as a somewhat doper straight edge punk, or at least leaning that way, he and his cohorts and older brother had to carve themselves a psychic and physical territory amidst the overwhelming mormon majority, who may yes do believe in fucking, but just to make more mormons, and certainly looked askance at nonmormons, druggies, punks, skaters, etc.. i noticed, lving in north ogden in 1978, that the mormon kids who "rebelled" did so with gusto, longer hair, crazier antics, hotter sex, than say, your typical stoner liberal from califa for ex. but anyway, interesting book and writer. poetic, but also anecdotal.
one thing i wish? he talked more about his experiences with lsd. the image of the birds on the floor is seared in my head now. also wish he would explain more about why him and his wife, pretty solid yuppies, are soooo worried about the world and their children's' future. interesting book all in all, from pov of 70's 80's usa, from inside the mormon world, from a gifted writer and thinker, from a parent, from a drug user (ex we'll assume). and how in gods name he could/can continue to live in that horrible horrible place.

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 1/2 stars. I enjoyed the "disjointed" feel of the writing style - how the author seamlessly moved between present time and the past. Although he never came out and said it, I like the implication of how the author looks at his past and is worried about his own children and how they will behave/act in the future. I also liked how the book's setting was SLC/Sandy and I knew all of the areas he spoke about.

[Nancy Werner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gravity Hill: A Memoir, is both touching and beautiful,horrifying and ugly. Laying himself open to such vulnerability, Werner gives an honest account of his earlier years of being a tranplant, at age 11, from rural Maine to the predominantly Mormon culture in Salt Lake City. He describes his descention into hell with drug and alcohol abuse,sexual promiscuity,inability to get to school on a regular basis eventually being thrown out of high school and eventually having to attend an alternative school in order to graduate. In retrospect, all of his behavior were coping mechanisms to "fit in." He tells of his home life, an absent father figure, a single, working mother trying to raise three teenagers on her own, while also dealing with her own constant depression. All in all, a family background where love abounded but due to many circumstances total dysfunction also abounded. He describes his eventual ascention into fatherhood of two beautiful children and his anxiety and fear of his youth creeping into his thoughts constantly in the beginning years of parenthood. This book is so honest and touching and real. It is a genuine piece of beauty in a world where youth have so many choices to make and, too often, these early choices come to eventually mark who we become and only a select few have what it takes to make it back to who we should have become had not these things happened to mar our outcome. I admire Werner's ability to be so honest with his youth and, who now, after being kicked out of high school a number of times, college at one point due to his continuance of unhealthy choices,he perservered, and eventually did graduate from college, got his MA degree and now has four books that have been published. Kudos! Mr. Werner, you made it...took many detours but have that "special something" which moved you in the right direction. Loved this book. I highly recommend it!

[Salt Lake City Public Library]

Gravity Hill is a book about pain. About how rarely our expectations live up to our realities. It is a story—many stories—about what it means to lose our way, to find it again, to lose it again, then to find it somewhere else. The thought that returned to me over and over while reading Gravity Hill was that pain can be a great teacher, but only if it changes your behavior.

Gravity Hill , an elegiac memoir from Salt Lake City author Maximilian Werner, is about learning to listen to that teacher. He is 42 years old and has two small children. He is not proud of the man he was. He has done many things (violence, drugs, violent sex and more) that he would not want his children to look up to. But were these chaotic, unnerving experiences actually what made him the man he is today? This is a book about him making sense of these ideas and asking himself difficult questions.

This works particularly well set against the backdrop of a childhood in Mormon Salt Lake City, since Werner grew up here as a non-Mormon. The most fascinating thing about living here as a non-Mormon is that the “fringe” elements of Salt Lake City can get even fringier, because it is so important for some people to make it clear that they have nothing to do with the church.

Describing the story is a challenge, because what I’ll remember most about Gravity Hill is what it felt like to read the book. It has a mood that I haven’t encountered very often. I can’t say it’s a lot of fun, but the writing is lovely; it prompted me to reaffirm the things I believe, the things I do not, and to recommit to being a kind, gentle, forgiving person.

Highly recommended. You’ll know within a few pages whether it’s a book for you.

—Josh Hanagarne, Librarian at the Main Library

[Suzanne · Rating 2 out of 5]

There are a lot of beautiful sentences and some lovely insights in this book, but I did not enjoy the extensive chronicling of Werner's misspent youth and the fluid swimming through time. I stuck with it only because it took place in Salt Lake and because it described boys and a world I knew, but mostly I found it boring. It was hard to care about characters who suddenly vanish. So much of the book is about being inebriated in various ways and that is just not very interesting from the outside. The contrast between then and now was stark and poignant, but there was much too much "then" for me.

[Matt · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some very, very good writing. But, I'll be honest, getting to the end of this fairly brief memoir felt like a bit of a slog. The present-day scenes were just too heavy and melancholy. As he watches his children grow, the author describes his own life stage as "...the season of the demon". If it weren't for the setting in SLC, I wouldn't have made it to the end.

[Amy · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is dreadful. If you want to know how it really was watch SLC Punk