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A Comedy & A Tragedy: A Memoir of Learning How to Read and Write
In this powerful memoir, former bicycle messenger and acclaimed author of The Immortal Class recounts his difficult journey to literacy.
A Comedy & A Tragedy is the story of one young man’s effort to teach himself to read. Complex and many-leveled, this book is also a manifesto about the acquisition of intellectual independence. It is a plea for better understanding of the impact of dysfunctional family dynamics in education, and a passionate indictment of a broken school system that lets so-called problem kids slip through the cracks.
When Travis Hugh Culley moves with his family to Miami in the spring of 1980, the bright six-year-old hopes things will be easier for him. Instead, he is dubbed “Birdbrain” by his older brother and classified by his new teachers as a discipline problem. Travis fakes his way through tests and homework assignments, mimicking his fellow students and pretending to know how to read. When his music teacher suggests that he audition for an acting program, Travis begins an unlikely path toward literacy.
The moment Travis begins to perform, he is confronted by his angry father, who is threatened by the transformation in his son. Unsure of how to make sense of what has happened, Travis grabs a pen and writes his experience down. Suddenly, everything can be seen in a new light. Having written, he begins to understand in a new way the relationship between words and actions.
When his parents separate and his grades fall, Travis clings to a journal in which he notes the details of his changing life. Having no place else to turn to process his emotions, Travis lays claim to the project of his own emancipation. This troubled student runs away from home but does not drop out of school. With pen in hand, he commits to an education in the theater and begins to fully realize the power and importance of literacy. Travis discovers that only through the mastery of writing can he determine his place in the world. Eventually, he will become an accomplished author—with a triumphant story to tell.
A Comedy & A Tragedy is an important and inspired memoir that will touch the hearts of parents, teachers, students, and anyone who has struggled with traumatic experiences in education. It is a work of love, of friendship, and of confidence in one young scholar’s infinite belief in language.
A Comedy & A Tragedy is the story of one young man’s effort to teach himself to read. Complex and many-leveled, this book is also a manifesto about the acquisition of intellectual independence. It is a plea for better understanding of the impact of dysfunctional family dynamics in education, and a passionate indictment of a broken school system that lets so-called problem kids slip through the cracks.
When Travis Hugh Culley moves with his family to Miami in the spring of 1980, the bright six-year-old hopes things will be easier for him. Instead, he is dubbed “Birdbrain” by his older brother and classified by his new teachers as a discipline problem. Travis fakes his way through tests and homework assignments, mimicking his fellow students and pretending to know how to read. When his music teacher suggests that he audition for an acting program, Travis begins an unlikely path toward literacy.
The moment Travis begins to perform, he is confronted by his angry father, who is threatened by the transformation in his son. Unsure of how to make sense of what has happened, Travis grabs a pen and writes his experience down. Suddenly, everything can be seen in a new light. Having written, he begins to understand in a new way the relationship between words and actions.
When his parents separate and his grades fall, Travis clings to a journal in which he notes the details of his changing life. Having no place else to turn to process his emotions, Travis lays claim to the project of his own emancipation. This troubled student runs away from home but does not drop out of school. With pen in hand, he commits to an education in the theater and begins to fully realize the power and importance of literacy. Travis discovers that only through the mastery of writing can he determine his place in the world. Eventually, he will become an accomplished author—with a triumphant story to tell.
A Comedy & A Tragedy is an important and inspired memoir that will touch the hearts of parents, teachers, students, and anyone who has struggled with traumatic experiences in education. It is a work of love, of friendship, and of confidence in one young scholar’s infinite belief in language.
- GenresMemoirNonfiction
272 pages, Hardcover
First published July 14, 2015
1 person is currently reading
223 people want to read
About the author
Travis Hugh Culley
3 books16 followersAuthor of A Comedy & A Tragedy: A Memoir of Learning to Read & Write, Ballantine Books, 2015.
Author of The Immortal Class: Bike Messengers and the Cult of Human Power, Villard Books, 2001.
Author of The Immortal Class: Bike Messengers and the Cult of Human Power, Villard Books, 2001.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
August 18, 2015
I received this book from LibraryThing's Early Reviewer program in return for an honest review.
I thought the story compelling, if a bit disjointed. I felt this was more a memoir, or rather a young man who is trying to make sense of what happened to him as a child. The problem is that there really isn't rational for the abuse and neglect that he faced. I was saddened that none of the adults in his life were able to see that he needed help. As a reader I was disheartened to hear that Travis learned to read for knowledge and not for the simple pleasure of a story.
While I don't think this was an easy read it was a necessary read. Hopefully people will read this book and realize that we all need to do a better job of caring for our children - all of us. Truly amazed by the resiliency of this young man.
I thought the story compelling, if a bit disjointed. I felt this was more a memoir, or rather a young man who is trying to make sense of what happened to him as a child. The problem is that there really isn't rational for the abuse and neglect that he faced. I was saddened that none of the adults in his life were able to see that he needed help. As a reader I was disheartened to hear that Travis learned to read for knowledge and not for the simple pleasure of a story.
While I don't think this was an easy read it was a necessary read. Hopefully people will read this book and realize that we all need to do a better job of caring for our children - all of us. Truly amazed by the resiliency of this young man.
March 2, 2021
In a sense reading this felt no different than being around many a lad in college who had finally focused enough to Become Smart and bestowed on the rest of us their brutal, unique, especially perceptive insights.
In another sense reading this felt like an author made incredibly vulnerable by many circumstances and traumas and hid that behind Reason and Rhetoric. Maybe he can't bear to seem weak or can't bear to tell it any other way.
To me, Culley didn't teach himself to read and write. The rudiments were there and were built upon. More it seemed Culley taught himself how to escape and survive, again and again and again. At first this meant evading and refusing reading (unnecessary, a hindrance, not gonna just 'cause you told me). Until reading and deconstruction of text was the path out. Both seemed more rooted in atypical learning / defiance / motivated self-interest than inability and then overcoming.
Maybe this explains the continual emphasis on becoming ~literary~ versus able-to-read.
Our unreliable narrator went thorough some bad shit and I would take none of that from him; it's mundane in so many senses, lived again and again through the generations, but that only adds to the 'tragedy.' But my sympathy -- much less empathy -- often couldn't bridge the gap created by the author's own remove. I honestly couldn't tell the difference between what might be an exhaustingly deep pretension or layers and layers of coping mechanisms against trauma.
On one hand, listing all the books by all the great & real smart thinkers now amassed is eye-rollingly affected. On the moon hand, it's proof of what was overcome and must be listed to get credit.
And coping mechanisms for what we might now identify as someone whose cognition isn't mainstream. I'll go no further, because there's nothing I could or should diagnose, but it's still clear he wasn't given adequate support in just about anything. And whatever inherent issues were exacerbated by lack of care following trauma that seemed entwined with a contempt for authority.
I felt there might be a device buried underneath the dense prose and uneven structure, showing the difference from his powerlessness in the years he couldn't (wouldn't) read and coming into power after becoming 'literate.' But the slant was so exaggerated it didn't coalesce for me. From an overlooked kid who got kicked when down to a braggart brash teenager smarter than everyone and thus were humbled in his wake. He got the better of them all, in the end, and wanted us to know it, to be impressed, to marvel.
He was so stoic, so deep man, so uncanny in his ability to punch out with the perfect one-liners. Those seemed stagey to me, fake; overwritten like a screenplay's first draft. But he was also in hiding and turmoil for all those years, and allowed there was a lot of playacting to get himself by, so.
Big moments were under explained; the small stuff was sometimes magnified so much it got blurry.
I was mostly alone, and then lived alone, as a teenager. I related to some of the circumstances, and there was a poignancy in the description of a small room that's awful and wonderful at once, making do with what you can scrape together and build and find. For that, I continued to feel separate, kept at that remove.
It's minor and yet it's everything that at the climax/denouement of his getting-literary-got-me-out he still couldn't (wouldn't) write a coherent paper for a class final. He gave *himself* credit though, mulling that his performance in his final play must have been so commanding, so arresting, so adept, he's sure that teacher changed his paper grade from an F to passing so he could graduate. I wonder if he got over himself in college -- and continued to learn 'literary' also means containment and synthesis, not just being kerouac in the forum of a FL park -- or if everyone kept shaking their heads and chuckling, indulging his eccentricities.
I'm glad the /second/ gifted school he got into protected him and ushered him into a better life. I'm troubled that no one, not even the diagnosing psychiatrist, ever seemed to say hm hey how about therapy. I'm not surprised that parents + systems = neglect and shuttling him along, regardless markers of readiness and aptitude.
I don't say lightly or glibly that he's lucky he's a white kid. I don't say this only about him, or as a personal criticism. It's something I often think about while reading my way through memoirs--primarily of white kids, as that's primarily who publishers publish--and the authors careen from one bad (choice, move, situation) thing to another. But are also extended multiple opportunities to correct course and recover. Non-white kids rarely get so many opportunities, whether they're literary or not.
The preface is an anecdote of an encounter with someone in a bookshop who would in time become a friend. As they talk about books, it occurs to him he probably sounds pretentious--but that there's no other way he could possibly sound, you see. How else do you grapple with the big smart things that liberated you from one world and gained entry to another? But also because he is pretentious, Literary, and is desperate for people to perceive and know that. It's not only a mental aside or a laugh between now-friends, it's a warning to us, a foreshadowing. And perhaps the best illustrative device in the whole book.
In another sense reading this felt like an author made incredibly vulnerable by many circumstances and traumas and hid that behind Reason and Rhetoric. Maybe he can't bear to seem weak or can't bear to tell it any other way.
To me, Culley didn't teach himself to read and write. The rudiments were there and were built upon. More it seemed Culley taught himself how to escape and survive, again and again and again. At first this meant evading and refusing reading (unnecessary, a hindrance, not gonna just 'cause you told me). Until reading and deconstruction of text was the path out. Both seemed more rooted in atypical learning / defiance / motivated self-interest than inability and then overcoming.
Maybe this explains the continual emphasis on becoming ~literary~ versus able-to-read.
Our unreliable narrator went thorough some bad shit and I would take none of that from him; it's mundane in so many senses, lived again and again through the generations, but that only adds to the 'tragedy.' But my sympathy -- much less empathy -- often couldn't bridge the gap created by the author's own remove. I honestly couldn't tell the difference between what might be an exhaustingly deep pretension or layers and layers of coping mechanisms against trauma.
On one hand, listing all the books by all the great & real smart thinkers now amassed is eye-rollingly affected. On the moon hand, it's proof of what was overcome and must be listed to get credit.
And coping mechanisms for what we might now identify as someone whose cognition isn't mainstream. I'll go no further, because there's nothing I could or should diagnose, but it's still clear he wasn't given adequate support in just about anything. And whatever inherent issues were exacerbated by lack of care following trauma that seemed entwined with a contempt for authority.
I felt there might be a device buried underneath the dense prose and uneven structure, showing the difference from his powerlessness in the years he couldn't (wouldn't) read and coming into power after becoming 'literate.' But the slant was so exaggerated it didn't coalesce for me. From an overlooked kid who got kicked when down to a braggart brash teenager smarter than everyone and thus were humbled in his wake. He got the better of them all, in the end, and wanted us to know it, to be impressed, to marvel.
He was so stoic, so deep man, so uncanny in his ability to punch out with the perfect one-liners. Those seemed stagey to me, fake; overwritten like a screenplay's first draft. But he was also in hiding and turmoil for all those years, and allowed there was a lot of playacting to get himself by, so.
Big moments were under explained; the small stuff was sometimes magnified so much it got blurry.
I was mostly alone, and then lived alone, as a teenager. I related to some of the circumstances, and there was a poignancy in the description of a small room that's awful and wonderful at once, making do with what you can scrape together and build and find. For that, I continued to feel separate, kept at that remove.
It's minor and yet it's everything that at the climax/denouement of his getting-literary-got-me-out he still couldn't (wouldn't) write a coherent paper for a class final. He gave *himself* credit though, mulling that his performance in his final play must have been so commanding, so arresting, so adept, he's sure that teacher changed his paper grade from an F to passing so he could graduate. I wonder if he got over himself in college -- and continued to learn 'literary' also means containment and synthesis, not just being kerouac in the forum of a FL park -- or if everyone kept shaking their heads and chuckling, indulging his eccentricities.
I'm glad the /second/ gifted school he got into protected him and ushered him into a better life. I'm troubled that no one, not even the diagnosing psychiatrist, ever seemed to say hm hey how about therapy. I'm not surprised that parents + systems = neglect and shuttling him along, regardless markers of readiness and aptitude.
I don't say lightly or glibly that he's lucky he's a white kid. I don't say this only about him, or as a personal criticism. It's something I often think about while reading my way through memoirs--primarily of white kids, as that's primarily who publishers publish--and the authors careen from one bad (choice, move, situation) thing to another. But are also extended multiple opportunities to correct course and recover. Non-white kids rarely get so many opportunities, whether they're literary or not.
The preface is an anecdote of an encounter with someone in a bookshop who would in time become a friend. As they talk about books, it occurs to him he probably sounds pretentious--but that there's no other way he could possibly sound, you see. How else do you grapple with the big smart things that liberated you from one world and gained entry to another? But also because he is pretentious, Literary, and is desperate for people to perceive and know that. It's not only a mental aside or a laugh between now-friends, it's a warning to us, a foreshadowing. And perhaps the best illustrative device in the whole book.
December 27, 2018
I loved this book. Even though I HATED the camp experience for him, the insight to a creative mind is something I will treasure forever.
Seeing dysfunction in families is so important. Often, people don't realize the dysfunction until they hear/read/see it elsewhere. Sharing our stories, I think, helps free people from thier pasts.
Seeing dysfunction in families is so important. Often, people don't realize the dysfunction until they hear/read/see it elsewhere. Sharing our stories, I think, helps free people from thier pasts.
August 18, 2018
I just started getting in to memoirs and his story was pretty interesting I really enjoyed the book.
August 4, 2015
Oh I wanted to love this book so I could recommend it to people who think they don't like to read! However... I don't know if this memoir was really about learning to read and write. I feel like theater was the main focus of the book, and the author's salvation. Taken as a memoir, without the subtitle, this is well-written and heartbreaking. Culley writes about his parent's almost-neglect, and their refusal to really do anything to help him as he so clearly struggled in both school and life. Thanks to some alert teachers, and a gift for acting, Culley was able to find his place in the world. This novel made me sad in the middle, but by the end I was happy to see Culley come out the other side of his family's total indifference to him as a person.
This has nothing to do with learning to read and write, correct? That part of the memoir was mentioned vaguely here and there. He kept mentioning his illiteracy. He wasn't the best student, and obviously got no real world practice reading and writing, but he could clearly do these things. He writes about not being able to read the plays he was given, but he knew enough about reading to memorize a (pretty long and long-worded) Shel Silverstein poem. He couldn't breeze through reading and writing, but he was able to keep a journal. I empathize with his struggles, but I don't know if I would call him illiterate, and I don't think I would call this a memoir of learning to read and write.
This has nothing to do with learning to read and write, correct? That part of the memoir was mentioned vaguely here and there. He kept mentioning his illiteracy. He wasn't the best student, and obviously got no real world practice reading and writing, but he could clearly do these things. He writes about not being able to read the plays he was given, but he knew enough about reading to memorize a (pretty long and long-worded) Shel Silverstein poem. He couldn't breeze through reading and writing, but he was able to keep a journal. I empathize with his struggles, but I don't know if I would call him illiterate, and I don't think I would call this a memoir of learning to read and write.
July 31, 2015
I received this book as an Early Review from LibraryThing. I really wanted to love this book. I found it interesting; however, the story was not at all cohesive. Perhaps the author intended the story to be so disjointed as an example of the chaotic nature of his thoughts and feelings during his childhood; however, I found it disruptive and irritating at times. Also, I found it difficult believe that he was fortunate enough to earn spots at two innovative schools and yet was unable to ask for or receive assistance with literacy. At some time during the book, the author states he wanted to write down everything so he could tell later who was telling the truth and who was a liar. However, someone who has read as widely as the author would surely understand that there is no such thing as "one truth" and that two people can live through the exact same event but form entirely different memories and conclusions from that event.
July 26, 2015
I was a goodreads first reads winner of this book. Travis Hugh Culley. writes about his struggles in school, his home and a bad experience at summer camp. Travis faked his way through most of his school years due to being illiterate. he acted out in school and at home. his parents divorced leaving him with a mother who did not understand him and insisted on having him "tested" and put on medications. ' He also writes about one summer at camp where he was betrayed by a counselor. in middle school he discovers a love for acting that helped him to cope with his difficult childhood. toward the end of school he finds a way to teach himself to read. this book is mostly about his childhood. a pretty decent read but at times i found myself having a hard time keeping focused on his book.
July 28, 2015
65 of 75 for 2015. An Early Reviewers award that I found hard to read. Not that the language was difficult, but the author's life as a youngster was so different from my own, that it was hard for me to fathom how anyone could survive such a childhood. Billed as "A memoir of learning how to read and write," the book struck me more as a lesson in how to survive intellectual abuse by hiding. The fact that Culley was able to not only graduate from high school, but go on and get an MFA is downright amazing, and frankly inspirational, once you get over the revulsion of how he was treated by his parents. I look forward to reading more of this author's work.
November 11, 2015
Engrossing and heartbreaking, this revealing memoir is a testament to someone that was illiterate until a breakthrough in his teens. I ached for the boy and young man's hardships, and cheer for his triumph that is partly in this book. Anyway who feels like they don't belong will see a piece of themselves in his story.
July 31, 2015
I received this book as part of the Goodreads Giveaways. Thank you for the opportunity to read this book. It is an easy and enjoyable read, detailing the life of a child who's mind thinks differently.
December 4, 2015
A raw and gripping story. I expected to read about our failed education system. Instead it was about how the author's family failed him and he was saved by school. He saved himself with creativity. Amazing that he has taken on writing as a profession after struggling so hard to learn to read.
July 18, 2015
Found it hard to understand.
April 2, 2017
A Comedy & a Tragedy: A Memoir of Learning How to Read and Write by Hugh Travis Culley (Ballantine Books 2015) (Biography). Poor Travis. No one seems to like him, and no one understands him either. Not his mother, not his father, and not his brother. Our author is either (1) one misunderstood little snowflake, or (2) as self-absorbed and self-involved a human as I have ever known. Everything that's gone wrong in the life of this self-entitled little fellow is someone else's fault. It must be nice to be able to absolve oneself of any and all blame. I note that the reviews of this work tend to sort themselves by the reviewer's age, with the youngest readers guilelessly sympathizing most strongly with the author and with the older readers assigning the author a much higher share of the blame for his own problems. I suspect that the older readers are more skeptical of tales that invoke memories of the author James Frey than are the younger set. My rating: 6/10, finished 3/28/17.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews