This Must Be Where My Obsession With Infinity Began

by Joe Bonomo

In these essays, Bonomo interrogates the dark edges of his suburban youth and explores issues of spirituality, sex, violence, and myth. From the memory of a rebellious Catholic schoolgirl to a coming-of-age story in a porn theater, he turns a prism lens on desire and faith and the body’s role in both, and ultimately questions the fallibility as well as the enduring power of memory.

Unknown Binding

First published March 1, 2013

About the author

Joe Bonomo's books include Play This Book Loud: Noisy Essays, No Place I Would Rather Be: Roger Angell and a Life In Baseball Writing, Field Recordings from The Inside (essays), AC/DC’s Highway to Hell (33 1/3 Series), Jerry Lee Lewis: Lost and Found, Installations (National Poetry Series), Sweat: The Story of The Fleshtones, America’s Garage Band, and Conversations With Greil Marcus. A five-time "Notable Essays" selection at Best American Essays, he's the Music Columnist at The Normal School and Professor of English at Northern Illinois University.

Reviews

[Richard Gilbert · Rating 5 out of 5]

Memoir is made of memories, by definition; some theorists assert memoir must be about memory. Yet it’s notable how much Joe Bonomo explores memory and takes it as his subject. His new collection of essays summons and examines a wide range of memories, expressed in often lyrical sentences. He’s had an ordinary suburban boyhood and adult life, but he makes this material interesting because—as he tells stories, and muses interestingly on their meaning—we find ourselves catching our own cast-off thoughts and doubts, thinking about our own stories.

Some of his essays are strongly narrative, with personal experience dramatized in scenes; others are models of the classical ruminative approach (as run through a poet’s sensibility) and some are short prose poems. Since he’s got all the chops and deploys them artfully, slapping a label on his creative nonfiction is difficult and would be misleading.

Sexuality runs as one theme through this collection, which made me realize how seldom creative nonfiction even mentions the topic of sex in passing, whereas fiction fairly reeks of it. Not that it’s a big deal here, just another thread, as in life, but arresting in its candor. Equally unusual is the spiritual theme in some of Bonomo’s essays, and perhaps a riskier one than sex. “Occasional Prayer” opens with an adult ritual, Bonomo and his wife praying as they set out on a trip, and depicts how and why Bonomo returned to prayer in college. One thing I like about his essays on faith is their roots in a frankly utilitarian view of religion, which after all is most usefully about practical matters—not abstractions like whether an external God exists but how we might live more humanely.

If you like personal and memoir essays, and ones that make you look at your own life and material in a new way, I recommend this book highly.

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Only halfway through this book which I've been eagerly anticipating. Bonomo has a gift of finding the poetic in the common--the beauty in collective memories. His essay called The Blur Family--featured in this collection, which turns out be an astute meditation on memory in the age of Facebook, is the most clear eyed view on what we've lost despite all of social media's gifts I've ever read. Each chapter is a tour de force with striking discoveries on every page.