Immortal for Quite Some Time

by Scott Abbott

“This is not a memoir. Rather, this is a fraternal meditation on the ‘Are we friends, my brother?’ The story is uncertain, the characters are in flux, the voices are plural, the photographs are as troubled as the prose. This is not a memoir.” 
     Thus Scott Abbott introduces the reader to his exploration of the life of his brother John, a man who died of AIDS in 1991 at the age of forty. Writing about his brother, he finds he is writing about himself and about the warm-hearted, educated, and homophobic LDS family that forged the core of his identity.
     Images and quotations are interwoven with the reflections, as is a critical female voice that questions his assertions and ridicules his rhetoric. The book moves from the starkness of a morgue’s autopsy through familial disintegration and adult defiance to a culminating fraternal conversation. This exquisitely written work will challenge notions of resolution and wholeness. Winner of the book manuscript prize in creative nonfiction in the Utah Arts Council’s Original Writing Competition. 
Winner of the 15 Bytes Book Award for Creative Nonfiction.

Genres: Biography

268 pages, Paperback

Published October 30, 2016

About the author

Scott Abbott likes to think of himself as an architect, builder, and custodian of prosperous companies, leadership, and growth. He has 35+ years of credentialed experience and expertise launching, operating, buying, and selling great companies. Along the way, Scott has worked with hundreds of startups, small, midsize, and Fortune 1000 companies. He has raised over $35M+ in venture capital, with several successful exits (and some not so successful). In total, Scott has led teams and organizations that generated billions in sales, serviced thousands of clients, and hired hundreds of employees. He is a finalist for the E&Y Technology Entrepreneur of the Year Award, a former Entrepreneur in Residence at Indiana University Kelley School of Business, Inc. 5000 Winner, Fast Company Executive Board Member, hosts a top-rated podcast, and is the author of 4 best-selling books, including BOS-UP, BOS-UP Moments, The Co+Factor, and Level-UP to Professional. For the record, Scott likes to emphasis that he’s also learned a lot, through a truckload of failures and mistakes.

As for his current professions and passions: he has the joy and privilege of being the Founder & CEO of BOS-UP, Straticos, and Phase4 Investments. He’s also a Business & Executive Coach, Angel Investor, and Board Member. Most of all, Scott loves helping good and caring people - along with team-centric organizations - effectively learn, implement, and leverage the essential concepts, tools, and disciplines for exceptional leadership, management, teamwork, and accountability: in business, work, and life.

Learn more about Scott at http://www.scottabbottabc.com and connect on social media @scottabbottabc.

Reviews

[Steven Peck · Rating 5 out of 5]

Scott Abbott’s book was devastating. Its fearless reflections and meditations on his life and his brother, held a mirror to my own. The work left me with numerous questions about how I have lived, about the choices I’ve made, the perspective’s I’ve taken up and abandoned, and about my relationships with my own family and friends and institutions. This is powerful stuff. It is beautiful and sad. Potent in its confrontation with vulnerability. Rich in evocations. I want to say I could not put it down, because it has that force, but I had to again and again to deal with the resonate emotions it drew from me and that demanded confrontation. Read this book. You won’t be sorry. This is a magnificent memoir—unique, compelling, hopeful, funny, healing, and as I said, devastating. Or then again maybe you will sorry because it drills into hidden nerves over and over and doesn’t offer simple patches or novocaine to ease the lesions.

[Don LaVange · Rating 5 out of 5]

Who am I to give a book a rating that is supposed to mean something to someone else?

What I can say is that I loved this book. Full disclosure, I know Scott, I've been hearing about this book for years, I know some of the stories from other venues. I'm a disaffected mormon who loves many mormons. I'm brotherless.
Scott calls this a fraternal meditation. It unpacks issues involved with family, love, mormonism, religion in general, homosexuality, culture, and familial -- especially fraternal love.
Scott's interlocutors are alive and terrifying in their critique of his narrative. His own voice is terrifyingly honest. He exposes what culture and well meaning love can do to humans who cannot live in that culture as themselves, and how insidious such attempts to shuttle us into little boxes can be. How deadly, in this case.
I wish I was writer enough to convey how beautiful this book is. I am anxious to begin my first re-read.

[Joseph Schreiber · Rating 4 out of 5]

For my thoughts on this moving "fraternal meditation" see: https://roughghosts.com/2017/08/21/ou...

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Scott was one of (the best, actually) my German professors at BYU in the late nineties. Reading this book was partly for me finding out about his struggles during the time I knew him. I was part of the marginalized left at BYU at the same time he was, and this book told that story as well as the larger one of how someone who grew up on the periphery of Mormon Country was pulled to its center and then found the institution stultifying. His family relationships bear some similarity to my own and I hope this sparks a bit of a reintroduction. Scott began a minor faculty exodus from BYU to UVU, being followed by Sam Rushforth, Eugene England, Alex Caldiero, Dennis Potter, and others.

[Hash Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't think this book is for everyone. In fact, it might just be for the author. It's the most sincere and intimate reading experience I've ever had, and simultaniously the most alien. It is perfectly transparent window into the oddities of Mormon life over the last half century or so, Christian-American homophobia, and most importantly, grief and its regretful company. But that doesn't mean it is straightforward. In fact, the intensly direct and uncensored account Scott gives us, only seems to highlight just how opaque the world is. Throughout, you get the strong impression that it is utterly unassailable, emotionally, morally, and theoretically. Its form, its characters, its development, they all embody the sense of automation that we get when we look backward, but specifically the automation that acompanies choice rather than opposes it.
Personally, I think this book occupies a strange but important place in literature. It captures the uncomfortable, but tendersweet, interchanging of what is mundane and what is significant, in a life that is equally mundane and signficant, in a society that is again equal parts mundane and significant.
In that sense this book will probably bore you, but you won't shake the nagging sense that it reflects the same way your own life bores you. You will finish this book feeling like you have formed a kind of zero-degree understanding a person.

[Shirlene · Rating 5 out of 5]

Moving

This book has been in my shopping cart for over a year. I should have read it sooner. It speaks to many of my experiences, although I am about 10 years younger. Scott speaks about the problems the church has with intellectual freedom and homosexuality in a very personal way. The tone is just right--"this is who I am and how I got here. " The question is as the church grows can it make room for people like Scott, or will it shrink the boundaries further and exclude others who have contributions they want to make.

[Arlene Arnold · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a fairly easy read because of the diary format. I found it interesting. as it took place in my area and during the years I was growing up. I could relate to the struggles of the author and his Gay brother. Insightful and cathartic.

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very insightful, made me realise that some authors are gifted. If your bored and looking for a book to read, Scott Abbott Immortal is for you.

[Gregory · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thoughtful and moving memoir, if memoir is what it is. I think it's part memoir, and part a sort of poetic mediation on how well we can ever really know even the people that are closest to us. It was compelling and I read it in one sitting.

[flowerville · Rating 5 out of 5]

http://fortlaufen.blogspot.co.uk/2017...