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I Will Be Complete: A Memoir
From the bestselling author of Carter Beats the Devil and Sunnyside, a shocking, big-hearted memoir about his bizarre upbringing in California in the 1970s and how he survived it.
Glen David Gold grew up rich on the beaches of 1970s California, until his father lost a fortune and his parents divorced when he was ten.
Glen and his English mother moved to San Francisco, where she was fleeced by a series of charming con men and turned increasingly wayward. When he was twelve, she took off for New York without telling him, leaving him alone for several months. On midnight streets and at drug-fuelled parties, wise-cracking his way through an alarming adult world, Glen watched his mother's countless, wild attempts to reinvent herself.
In this exceptional memoir, acclaimed novelist Glen David Gold captures his bizarre, lonely upbringing and how it shaped him as an adult with stunning insight and unsparing candour. Shocking, mordantly funny and achingly affecting, he tells an unforgettable story of the years he spent trying to rescue his mother - and his ultimate realisation that only by breaking free could he ever hope to be complete.
512 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2018
54 people are currently reading
1908 people want to read
About the author
Glen David Gold
24 books254 followersGlen David Gold is the author of Carter Beats the Devil (Hyperion, 2001), a historical novel about Charles Carter, a real-life San Francisco stage magician who performs for President Warren Harding on the evening of Harding's mysterious death. It has been translated into 14 languages.
His next novel, Sunnyside (Knopf, 2009), is a dark romp concerning Charlie Chaplin's rise to fame during World War I and its parallels with America's embrace of its part on the world stage.
His most recent book is a memoir, I Will Be Complete (Knopf, 2018). About it, Darin Strauss (Half a Life, Chang and Eng) writes, "“I Will Be Complete is the best memoir I’ve read in years. It’s likely the best memoir published in years."
Gold's short stories have appeared in a number of issues of McSweeney's. He has also published fiction, essays, memoir and reviews in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Playboy, Wired and Zyzzyva.
Gold wrote a single 1997 episode of the cartoon show Hey Arnold. He has also ventured into comic books, including The Spirit, featuring artwork by Eduardo Risso, and The Escapist, with artwork by Gene Colan. He has written extensively about comics creator Jack Kirby, most notably for the Masters of American Comics and Comic Book Apocalypse museum show catalogues.
More recently, Gold co-wrote episodes of the stage show The Thrilling Adventure Hour and the podcast Welcome to Night Vale. He lives in Los Angeles not with but adjacent to his girlfriend, in a duplex, the logistics of which are addressed in a 2018 Modern Love column for The New York Times.
His next novel, Sunnyside (Knopf, 2009), is a dark romp concerning Charlie Chaplin's rise to fame during World War I and its parallels with America's embrace of its part on the world stage.
His most recent book is a memoir, I Will Be Complete (Knopf, 2018). About it, Darin Strauss (Half a Life, Chang and Eng) writes, "“I Will Be Complete is the best memoir I’ve read in years. It’s likely the best memoir published in years."
Gold's short stories have appeared in a number of issues of McSweeney's. He has also published fiction, essays, memoir and reviews in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Playboy, Wired and Zyzzyva.
Gold wrote a single 1997 episode of the cartoon show Hey Arnold. He has also ventured into comic books, including The Spirit, featuring artwork by Eduardo Risso, and The Escapist, with artwork by Gene Colan. He has written extensively about comics creator Jack Kirby, most notably for the Masters of American Comics and Comic Book Apocalypse museum show catalogues.
More recently, Gold co-wrote episodes of the stage show The Thrilling Adventure Hour and the podcast Welcome to Night Vale. He lives in Los Angeles not with but adjacent to his girlfriend, in a duplex, the logistics of which are addressed in a 2018 Modern Love column for The New York Times.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 66 reviews
December 15, 2018
Novelist Glen David Gold (Carter Beats the Devil) takes on the literate autobiography - which has always resembled, for me, the beatnik cousin of memoir. It's the outsider in, aswirl with influences, attractive in a disturbing sort of way and dismissive of this. You'll get him or you won't, he doesn't really care...except he does and so there's always an aftertaste of despair. Is this authenticity? I'm never quite sure, though I'm often left with the certainty that the failing is mine.
The title tells you most of what you need to know. After years of living life on the psychological run, he's turning around to reclaim the childhood truths he's been fleeing from. One was his father's loss of fortune. Another, the divorce. Yet the demon looming largest here is the mother whose mental illness found far too sufficient disguise in free-wheeling California as a delightful bohemian nature. She flits from man to man and cruelty to cruelty, investing in a future that might someday include her son - just not yet, not now; at age twelve he's left to his own devices in a basement apartment that scares him as she wings her way to a new dream in the promised land of New York.
In his note on the accuracy of the text, he states quite plainly: My mother assures me none of this happened.
Well, of course she does.
Gold gifts himself very little breathing room as he scrutinizes the effect of his upbringing on his life choices and relationships. The man is determined to map the full and frustrating legacy of that child's neglect and abandonment. This he does quite well; the cleave on those developmental pathways is jagged enough to draw blood.
She promised not to love me. That was part of the deal. I was fine with that, I didn't ask questions. Watch me be fine with that.
What most moved me, though, was the manner in which he displayed the resulting voids in his character. There are insights that simply don't occur to him, and which he has to labor for, even today.
Hence, again, the title. Here is that man at work.
The title tells you most of what you need to know. After years of living life on the psychological run, he's turning around to reclaim the childhood truths he's been fleeing from. One was his father's loss of fortune. Another, the divorce. Yet the demon looming largest here is the mother whose mental illness found far too sufficient disguise in free-wheeling California as a delightful bohemian nature. She flits from man to man and cruelty to cruelty, investing in a future that might someday include her son - just not yet, not now; at age twelve he's left to his own devices in a basement apartment that scares him as she wings her way to a new dream in the promised land of New York.
In his note on the accuracy of the text, he states quite plainly: My mother assures me none of this happened.
Well, of course she does.
Gold gifts himself very little breathing room as he scrutinizes the effect of his upbringing on his life choices and relationships. The man is determined to map the full and frustrating legacy of that child's neglect and abandonment. This he does quite well; the cleave on those developmental pathways is jagged enough to draw blood.
She promised not to love me. That was part of the deal. I was fine with that, I didn't ask questions. Watch me be fine with that.
What most moved me, though, was the manner in which he displayed the resulting voids in his character. There are insights that simply don't occur to him, and which he has to labor for, even today.
Hence, again, the title. Here is that man at work.
June 5, 2018
I loved this book--the first nonfiction from novelist Glen David Gold (Carter Beats the Devil, Sunnyside)--so much that I blurbed it. Here's what I wanted to say in the short blurb, but of course there's no room on the back of a book to expand on what you really think.
Memoir is an audacious act, something as a novelist I'd never do in a million years. I admire Gold so much for revealing his life this way, and how he became a writer is by no means the only story here.
This is the story of Gold's attempt to recover the repressed pieces of himself, left behind after the the breakup of his parents--the father retreating into the protection of a second marriage and a second family, the mother breaking with ‘convention’--she's a Sixties Auntie Mame type, delightful but even Gold is unaware of the damage until later-- to embroil herself with dubious men and doubtful business investments, leaving a young Gold to increasingly fend for himself.
This book is his attempt to draw the pieces of himself together, and understand what had happened to him and his mother, how it affected his inability to know his own feelings and trust his own reactions. As a small child, Gold saw a TV show where the actors spoke ‘direclty to camera’, and the boy went on to narrage his life as he was living it, in an attempt to understand from the outside what was lost to him on the inside—the ability to know his own emotions and reactions.
This need to get a witness--the reason for many a writer’s career choice--begins the memoir’s search for self. The emotional damage leaves Gold adrift in his own life, struggling to tell himself he does not care—a type of adaptation which is profound for the subject but is translucent (thought never transparent) to the reader.
A child who learned early on that one could “speak to camera," Gold continued to do it in his young life and in many ways, writing is just that, and especially, writing a memoir. the tone of this memoir is both cool and witty, the voice of a man who has had to see himself from the outside for much of his life, to look to see how others are doing, how they think of him, how they are reacting, before deciding what in fact things mean.
REcovering his own emotions takes a very long time—paralleling his growing understanding of his mother’s determined need to undermine herself and pal up with lost causes and dangerous men. The ending is a quiet heartbreaker—this is the way the world ends and Gold grows up, to understand what was done to him, what was done to her, and why he must decide whether to break with his mother, to give up on her, to declare his loss of love, or keep trying to make it right.
Memoir is an audacious act, something as a novelist I'd never do in a million years. I admire Gold so much for revealing his life this way, and how he became a writer is by no means the only story here.
This is the story of Gold's attempt to recover the repressed pieces of himself, left behind after the the breakup of his parents--the father retreating into the protection of a second marriage and a second family, the mother breaking with ‘convention’--she's a Sixties Auntie Mame type, delightful but even Gold is unaware of the damage until later-- to embroil herself with dubious men and doubtful business investments, leaving a young Gold to increasingly fend for himself.
This book is his attempt to draw the pieces of himself together, and understand what had happened to him and his mother, how it affected his inability to know his own feelings and trust his own reactions. As a small child, Gold saw a TV show where the actors spoke ‘direclty to camera’, and the boy went on to narrage his life as he was living it, in an attempt to understand from the outside what was lost to him on the inside—the ability to know his own emotions and reactions.
This need to get a witness--the reason for many a writer’s career choice--begins the memoir’s search for self. The emotional damage leaves Gold adrift in his own life, struggling to tell himself he does not care—a type of adaptation which is profound for the subject but is translucent (thought never transparent) to the reader.
A child who learned early on that one could “speak to camera," Gold continued to do it in his young life and in many ways, writing is just that, and especially, writing a memoir. the tone of this memoir is both cool and witty, the voice of a man who has had to see himself from the outside for much of his life, to look to see how others are doing, how they think of him, how they are reacting, before deciding what in fact things mean.
REcovering his own emotions takes a very long time—paralleling his growing understanding of his mother’s determined need to undermine herself and pal up with lost causes and dangerous men. The ending is a quiet heartbreaker—this is the way the world ends and Gold grows up, to understand what was done to him, what was done to her, and why he must decide whether to break with his mother, to give up on her, to declare his loss of love, or keep trying to make it right.
July 23, 2018
I was reticent to read an almost 500 page memoir written by a straight man since I'm kind of done with straight white men at the moment, but once I picked it up, I just couldn't stop reading it, that's how compelling it was. You would think that Gold's very specific experience with his mother (being left alone at 11 whole his mother moved to NYC with a lover, being called upon throughout the years to bear witness to the state of her life after one failed scheme after another, etc.) would not be relatable, but Gold manages to get to the heart of any person's relationship with their parents, particularly if you struggle with their fallibility and humanness. To listen to someone give themsleves permission to not love a parent is heartbreaking and liberating, both.
July 21, 2018
i didn’t know how badly i needed almost every word of this book until i finished the last page and put it down.
July 27, 2018
This memoir is astonishing.
First of all, the easy to articulate parts: I read a 500-page book in two sittings because it was that fascinating. Gold is a person who not only has lived a hell of a life (so far), but he's a storyteller of the highest order, so none of it has been wasted on him. Not a single moment.
But beyond that, the skill it took to write this book, which is both expansive and intimate, painful and glorious, and above all incredibly, humblingly human, is — words fail. I read this book, enjoyed this book, and then put it down, thinking, "I don't know how the F he pulled this off." I finished reading it a couple weeks ago, and I still don't.
This book is a triumph. You should read it.
First of all, the easy to articulate parts: I read a 500-page book in two sittings because it was that fascinating. Gold is a person who not only has lived a hell of a life (so far), but he's a storyteller of the highest order, so none of it has been wasted on him. Not a single moment.
But beyond that, the skill it took to write this book, which is both expansive and intimate, painful and glorious, and above all incredibly, humblingly human, is — words fail. I read this book, enjoyed this book, and then put it down, thinking, "I don't know how the F he pulled this off." I finished reading it a couple weeks ago, and I still don't.
This book is a triumph. You should read it.
January 17, 2019
We listened to this on a road trip from the Bay Area to Newport Beach and back, and it made the miles fly by. It's a deeply moving book, beautifully written -- the metaphors precise and perfect -- as the author attempts to understand his life and his mother's and the damage through generations. It's also a peek into the writing world, into the ambitions of a young writer coming to understand what compels him. A must-read!
April 8, 2018
This five-star rating is based on my reading of an Advanced Review Copy (ARC) which is, um, slightly defective. A few pages are missing and/or transposed, and there are the usual minor errors of grammar, spelling, and titles (it's not "East Travel to Other Planets," by Ted Mooney, but "EasY Travel," etc.). But those flaws feel like small skips on an otherwise gorgeous full-length album.
I wouldn't normally bring up those kinds of errors in an ARC--I've read a lot of them in my time--but I do it here because this memoir is, if nothing else, about precision: about exactly how the writer felt--feels--about certain momentous events in his life, described with details as exact as the various mailing addresses of the places he used to live. (I couldn't help but notice this, as a mailman myself.)
It is also weirdly a story I can connect to in personal ways, even though he mostly grew up in California, and I mostly grew up in the Washington, DC, area. Glen David Gold is only about a year older than I am, so most all of his references to the timetables of his maturation fit snugly alongside my own. He read comic books (and still does), and I do as well. He wanted to be a writer for most of his life, and succeeded far beyond anything I could ever hope to achieve (his first published novel, Carter Beats the Devil, remains one of my favorite books to this very day).
Also, I almost literally could not put this book down. Once I started it, I was compelled to continue from one fascinating chapter to another.
I try very hard not to write reviews with "spoilers," and I will continue to do so here. But know that Gold's family is weird, and weirdly compelling, and that his anecdotes about concerts and schools and women he's dated are all absolutely riveting, even if you're not nearly the same age as he is.
I wouldn't normally bring up those kinds of errors in an ARC--I've read a lot of them in my time--but I do it here because this memoir is, if nothing else, about precision: about exactly how the writer felt--feels--about certain momentous events in his life, described with details as exact as the various mailing addresses of the places he used to live. (I couldn't help but notice this, as a mailman myself.)
It is also weirdly a story I can connect to in personal ways, even though he mostly grew up in California, and I mostly grew up in the Washington, DC, area. Glen David Gold is only about a year older than I am, so most all of his references to the timetables of his maturation fit snugly alongside my own. He read comic books (and still does), and I do as well. He wanted to be a writer for most of his life, and succeeded far beyond anything I could ever hope to achieve (his first published novel, Carter Beats the Devil, remains one of my favorite books to this very day).
Also, I almost literally could not put this book down. Once I started it, I was compelled to continue from one fascinating chapter to another.
I try very hard not to write reviews with "spoilers," and I will continue to do so here. But know that Gold's family is weird, and weirdly compelling, and that his anecdotes about concerts and schools and women he's dated are all absolutely riveting, even if you're not nearly the same age as he is.
July 24, 2018
It is a testament to Glen David Gold's skills as a writer that I could find a book filled with such unlikeable people (including Gold himself) to be so compelling. Even though I am a few years younger than Gold, the world he inhabited was so far removed from my boring upbringing that it strikes me as almost fictional. Reading "I will Be Complete" casts other books by Gold -- particularly "Carter Beats the Devil" (one of my favorite books in the past 20 years) -- in a different light. How could someone who lived through what Gold describes produce such a masterpiece? Would he have produced such a masterpiece had he not lived such a life?
May 15, 2018
This masterwork of a memoir will take you so many places. Heartbreaking, surreal at times, intensely honest and very funny. The author dismantles himself on these pages and with a brave artistry brings us a complete person, wholly new and original.
August 6, 2018
To use the author's own words, Glen Gold's memoir is a life 'exquisitely described'. It's a difficult book to review without ruining the experience of what's to come for a new reader given the almost brutal level of honesty and candidness with which he writes. Upon first read, there are moments of absolute shock at what is being shared. But, it's fair to say Gold delves into the deepest recesses of anyone's most private and fragile relationships - parents, first loves, etc. And, while certainly attacking 'big' personal connections and moments, Gold also presents the small and the mundane - the secrets we tell only ourselves because it’s too embarrassing to do otherwise. They’re here, too. All in all, he leaves no stone unturned...including sharing with the reader when he may have gotten his memory wrong. It's a mesmerizing piece of work that is difficult to put down...and may redefine the word 'memoir' for you.
August 8, 2018
PEACE OUT OF PIECES
By Terry Sue Harms
8/8/2018
If for no other reason, I was compelled to read Glen David Gold’s new memoir, I Will Be Complete, because, up front, he explains that he’s after neither redemption nor indictment, but has written “...for those of us who can no longer love our mothers.” That is one daring statement to make on a public stage, and I was eager to see how it would work out—unlovable mothers being the hottest third rail of all relationships.
In the first chapter, readers are given a taste of what’s to come. We are made aware of the narrator’s quest for answers, or more specifically, how he should feel about his mother and the life they shared. He knows she’s exhausting. In explaining his response to her, he often employs metaphorically laden asides. There’s overwhelm, “trying to accommodate too much at once.” He relates to sons who were “raised by shattered women.” His debate is on; what is there to do about the complicated woman who is his mother? She’s the story and she’s not the story, he is; it’s his memoir after all.
At the other end of the book, in the acknowledgements, he confesses that the finished copy took years to complete. His efforts to abandon the project as impossible to write were thwarted by several supportive readers and advisers. I fully appreciate the talent and fortitude it took to articulate his life’s experiences in story form. Putting words to a maternal relationship that doesn’t include “love” has got to be like describing candy and not saying “sweet.” It’s almost unimaginable. I always feel a debt of gratitude to the few who dare go there.
The book is filled with a combination of funny, squirmy, and sometimes gut-flip disturbing descriptions of Gold’s life vis-à-vis his mother, all told in an effort to justify his loveless conclusion. The author describes various, incisively observed incidents, producing evidence in a case for his freedom from her, which he prefers to call “autonomy.” This memoir is rich with entertaining Tales of the City style excesses. The problem with that is PG13 Glen is in a theater filled with an X rated clientele.
We are told that ticking off one episode in his life after another is a practice that he developed as a child. Alone in his room at night, he would self-sooth, compulsively reciting details from his day to an imagined benevolent on-looker. Sleep would come only once he got it all out correctly. This memoir is told in a similar manner, which explains the rather long (almost five-hundred pages) accounting. The opening sentence, “I think you’re an adult when you can no longer tell your life story over the course of a first date,” is a heads-up.
My favorite chapter in the book, found very nearly in the middle, I’d like to say it was at the heart of the story, was the chapter titled “Anthropology.” In it, the narrator and his friend are attending a punk rock concert in LA; The Dead Kennedys were headlining, D.O.A was the opening act. Unfamiliar with the scene, bloody punks hurling in and out of a mosh pit, the narrator yells to his friend, “Is this normal?” It cracked me up. That refrain could land on just about every page. I was struck by how often I had to re-read a passage, saying to myself, “Wait. What?” Abnormal was all over the place and not always comically rendered.
Gold’s father, an engineer with more head than heart, gets airtime in the story, but not much after exercising the divorce/speedy remarriage option. He successfully distances himself from his ex-wife and son’s riches to rags trajectory. Dad’s stability mostly serves to highlight Mommy Dearest’s instability. I found him infuriating, and it annoyed me that he was given so little scrutiny, but given the family breakdown, it fit.
By the end, Gold doesn’t want to slap any labels on his mom. If she can’t be
diagnosed with something that a pill will fix, then he finds it no more helpful than astrology. Well, rejecting the DSM is like rejecting climate change; the science is there; mental illness is real. Gold’s got a mother who operates from a self-sequestered playbook that has all the hallmarks of a borderline personality. To me, her behavior screams of psychological trauma, and given her childhood horrors, it’s a wonder she’s even upright.
How all of this unfolds is a feat of amazing story telling acumen and makes for some arresting reading. I have to say, when I finished, I thought the declarative title, I Will Be Complete, was more an aspiration than promise, but by then, it fit.
By Terry Sue Harms
8/8/2018
If for no other reason, I was compelled to read Glen David Gold’s new memoir, I Will Be Complete, because, up front, he explains that he’s after neither redemption nor indictment, but has written “...for those of us who can no longer love our mothers.” That is one daring statement to make on a public stage, and I was eager to see how it would work out—unlovable mothers being the hottest third rail of all relationships.
In the first chapter, readers are given a taste of what’s to come. We are made aware of the narrator’s quest for answers, or more specifically, how he should feel about his mother and the life they shared. He knows she’s exhausting. In explaining his response to her, he often employs metaphorically laden asides. There’s overwhelm, “trying to accommodate too much at once.” He relates to sons who were “raised by shattered women.” His debate is on; what is there to do about the complicated woman who is his mother? She’s the story and she’s not the story, he is; it’s his memoir after all.
At the other end of the book, in the acknowledgements, he confesses that the finished copy took years to complete. His efforts to abandon the project as impossible to write were thwarted by several supportive readers and advisers. I fully appreciate the talent and fortitude it took to articulate his life’s experiences in story form. Putting words to a maternal relationship that doesn’t include “love” has got to be like describing candy and not saying “sweet.” It’s almost unimaginable. I always feel a debt of gratitude to the few who dare go there.
The book is filled with a combination of funny, squirmy, and sometimes gut-flip disturbing descriptions of Gold’s life vis-à-vis his mother, all told in an effort to justify his loveless conclusion. The author describes various, incisively observed incidents, producing evidence in a case for his freedom from her, which he prefers to call “autonomy.” This memoir is rich with entertaining Tales of the City style excesses. The problem with that is PG13 Glen is in a theater filled with an X rated clientele.
We are told that ticking off one episode in his life after another is a practice that he developed as a child. Alone in his room at night, he would self-sooth, compulsively reciting details from his day to an imagined benevolent on-looker. Sleep would come only once he got it all out correctly. This memoir is told in a similar manner, which explains the rather long (almost five-hundred pages) accounting. The opening sentence, “I think you’re an adult when you can no longer tell your life story over the course of a first date,” is a heads-up.
My favorite chapter in the book, found very nearly in the middle, I’d like to say it was at the heart of the story, was the chapter titled “Anthropology.” In it, the narrator and his friend are attending a punk rock concert in LA; The Dead Kennedys were headlining, D.O.A was the opening act. Unfamiliar with the scene, bloody punks hurling in and out of a mosh pit, the narrator yells to his friend, “Is this normal?” It cracked me up. That refrain could land on just about every page. I was struck by how often I had to re-read a passage, saying to myself, “Wait. What?” Abnormal was all over the place and not always comically rendered.
Gold’s father, an engineer with more head than heart, gets airtime in the story, but not much after exercising the divorce/speedy remarriage option. He successfully distances himself from his ex-wife and son’s riches to rags trajectory. Dad’s stability mostly serves to highlight Mommy Dearest’s instability. I found him infuriating, and it annoyed me that he was given so little scrutiny, but given the family breakdown, it fit.
By the end, Gold doesn’t want to slap any labels on his mom. If she can’t be
diagnosed with something that a pill will fix, then he finds it no more helpful than astrology. Well, rejecting the DSM is like rejecting climate change; the science is there; mental illness is real. Gold’s got a mother who operates from a self-sequestered playbook that has all the hallmarks of a borderline personality. To me, her behavior screams of psychological trauma, and given her childhood horrors, it’s a wonder she’s even upright.
How all of this unfolds is a feat of amazing story telling acumen and makes for some arresting reading. I have to say, when I finished, I thought the declarative title, I Will Be Complete, was more an aspiration than promise, but by then, it fit.
Read
July 9, 2020Back in the early noughties, I read Carter Beats The Devil around the same time as Kavalier & Clay and finally it clicked, this whole thing people had for sprawling novels about America written with the half-outsider perspective of a Jewish guy. I'd never quite connected with Bellow or Roth, or on screen with Woody Allen (which with hindsight perhaps turned out to be a lucky escape), but these, these I got. Since then, Chabon has written approximately 57 further works of fiction, 16 non-fiction collections, showrun a TV series which made me give Star Trek another go (even if it did then lose me again by not having enough of the dog), and briefly helmed one of the many doomed attempts at emulating the MCU. Meanwhile, Gold did a couple of bits and pieces of comics, one further novel which didn't seem to do a fraction of the business that Carter did, and now this memoir. That might not seem like much of a workrate, but when you read about his early life the wonder is that he's even a professional writer at all, instead of living under a bridge and screaming at traffic, or else carefully maintaining the most entirely calm, stable and boring life possible.
But then, I suppose in its outlines, it's maybe not a spectacularly bad, misery memoir kind of upbringing. Just really not a good one. A father who didn't much care, invested more in the next marriage (which also fell apart); a mother who was a flake, always convinced her ship was coming in as she took up with another unsuitable man, starting with the charming yet unreliable ones and gradually declining to the flat-out awful ones. Herself, of course, in turn damaged by her own upbringing, as per the rest of that Larkin poem, the bits I always think carried the real weight of it far more than the couplet we usually hear. Maybe it's more that over the best part of 500 pages, anyone's childhood traumas would come to seem like a big deal to a reader who's invested. An investment Gold grabbed with those novels, and then kept on the hook with still being able to write at that artful but catchy level I always enjoyed in him. Lines like "When I arrived the first day, the silence in the classroom was like that of Barbary apes interrupted in their dens by the appearance of a goat smeared in candy". There were times it teetered right on the edge: the line "I felt a calling. I had to notice all the world's wonders and sadness and to report to someone somewhere how much there was left to lose", even applied with a certain distance to one's younger self, is the sort of thing I can easily see putting off the sort of reader who's not necessarily in the market for another story of a white-ish male creator's struggles. For myself, it reminded me of A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius, and how around the same time as I was getting into Gold and Chabon I loved that so much more than I thought I would, only to not retain anything like the same interest in what seemed increasingly like a determined erasure of self and joy in much of Eggers' subsequent work.
Obviously, there's a certain get-out clause in a memoir like this: if something comes off, it's because the writer is brilliant, and if it doesn't, it's because he's already admitted his younger self is an asshole. It's noticeable, for instance, that we get a lot about his unpublishable early writing*, but almost nothing about how his successful stuff happened, or about much of anything else after he got together with Alice Sebold. And before that? The indicia lists characters whose names and details have been changed, including most of the author's exes. 'A Note On The Accuracy Of The Text' opens the book proper, reading, in full, "My mother assures me that none of this happened". The acknowledgements have more errata, and we know from the text itself that Gold is an unreliable narrator. Just...probably not as unreliable as his mother. I didn't have a background like this myself, thank heavens, but I recognise too much of it from too many other people's lives. Though maybe not quite to the extent of a 12-year-old being left alone in San Francisco because his mother has moved on to pursue her latest unsuitable relationship in New York. Or having a junkie OD in your bedroom at a party, or going for night walks through the city at that age (I like that our generation was more readily allowed out alone, but even I can tell that this extreme is a problem). The setting is another part of the appeal, of course; an adult looking back at a child's eye view of San Francisco as sixties idealism soured into the coked-up seventies. The weird bouncing off the early edges of the IT revolution that has since transformed the West Coast; Glen's dad was briefly a cassette millionaire, his mum an early Pong tycoon, and he himself maybe the first Pong champion.
Elsewhere, the experiences are more relatable, whether that be broad stuff (being the academic kid who didn't entirely get people; trying to work out what Michael Stipe is singing about) or the things that, even if they aren't really rarer, certainly feel that way. Like the way Gold captures that wonderful, dangerous stage of a relationship where you work out your own shared mythology – and how bleak it feels when that crumbles. This is a book where emotional content like that sits alongside the excitement of a kid getting a call from Jim Shooter, or being introduced to Simak and Zelazny, and once I wouldn't have thought of that as a very big crossover, but whatever the continuing problems with geek culture, I think Gold and Chabon are at least a little part of the reason that much at least has changed.
Inevitably, it's a tough read in places. Gold isn't entirely trying to get himself off the hook, or get us to hate his parents, but with a situation like this, whoever's to blame it's still difficult just being reminded that humans suffer like this and make each other suffer like this. Who wouldn't wince at a line like "The part of my brain that knows how to hurt the people I love moves faster than the part that knows whether I should. Ask anyone who loves me, especially those who don't anymore"? Or how, even before a certain awful band rendered the phrase 'be here now' permanently unfit for service, Gold spots the obvious problem: "I don't want to be here now. It's horrible here right now." Equally, there's the hope: after all, he made it through, and seems happy-ish now, so maybe we will too.
*Though while the novels proper do sound terrible, the ideas for impossible stories that came to him in dreams are things I would, at least in theory, absolutely read.
But then, I suppose in its outlines, it's maybe not a spectacularly bad, misery memoir kind of upbringing. Just really not a good one. A father who didn't much care, invested more in the next marriage (which also fell apart); a mother who was a flake, always convinced her ship was coming in as she took up with another unsuitable man, starting with the charming yet unreliable ones and gradually declining to the flat-out awful ones. Herself, of course, in turn damaged by her own upbringing, as per the rest of that Larkin poem, the bits I always think carried the real weight of it far more than the couplet we usually hear. Maybe it's more that over the best part of 500 pages, anyone's childhood traumas would come to seem like a big deal to a reader who's invested. An investment Gold grabbed with those novels, and then kept on the hook with still being able to write at that artful but catchy level I always enjoyed in him. Lines like "When I arrived the first day, the silence in the classroom was like that of Barbary apes interrupted in their dens by the appearance of a goat smeared in candy". There were times it teetered right on the edge: the line "I felt a calling. I had to notice all the world's wonders and sadness and to report to someone somewhere how much there was left to lose", even applied with a certain distance to one's younger self, is the sort of thing I can easily see putting off the sort of reader who's not necessarily in the market for another story of a white-ish male creator's struggles. For myself, it reminded me of A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius, and how around the same time as I was getting into Gold and Chabon I loved that so much more than I thought I would, only to not retain anything like the same interest in what seemed increasingly like a determined erasure of self and joy in much of Eggers' subsequent work.
Obviously, there's a certain get-out clause in a memoir like this: if something comes off, it's because the writer is brilliant, and if it doesn't, it's because he's already admitted his younger self is an asshole. It's noticeable, for instance, that we get a lot about his unpublishable early writing*, but almost nothing about how his successful stuff happened, or about much of anything else after he got together with Alice Sebold. And before that? The indicia lists characters whose names and details have been changed, including most of the author's exes. 'A Note On The Accuracy Of The Text' opens the book proper, reading, in full, "My mother assures me that none of this happened". The acknowledgements have more errata, and we know from the text itself that Gold is an unreliable narrator. Just...probably not as unreliable as his mother. I didn't have a background like this myself, thank heavens, but I recognise too much of it from too many other people's lives. Though maybe not quite to the extent of a 12-year-old being left alone in San Francisco because his mother has moved on to pursue her latest unsuitable relationship in New York. Or having a junkie OD in your bedroom at a party, or going for night walks through the city at that age (I like that our generation was more readily allowed out alone, but even I can tell that this extreme is a problem). The setting is another part of the appeal, of course; an adult looking back at a child's eye view of San Francisco as sixties idealism soured into the coked-up seventies. The weird bouncing off the early edges of the IT revolution that has since transformed the West Coast; Glen's dad was briefly a cassette millionaire, his mum an early Pong tycoon, and he himself maybe the first Pong champion.
Elsewhere, the experiences are more relatable, whether that be broad stuff (being the academic kid who didn't entirely get people; trying to work out what Michael Stipe is singing about) or the things that, even if they aren't really rarer, certainly feel that way. Like the way Gold captures that wonderful, dangerous stage of a relationship where you work out your own shared mythology – and how bleak it feels when that crumbles. This is a book where emotional content like that sits alongside the excitement of a kid getting a call from Jim Shooter, or being introduced to Simak and Zelazny, and once I wouldn't have thought of that as a very big crossover, but whatever the continuing problems with geek culture, I think Gold and Chabon are at least a little part of the reason that much at least has changed.
Inevitably, it's a tough read in places. Gold isn't entirely trying to get himself off the hook, or get us to hate his parents, but with a situation like this, whoever's to blame it's still difficult just being reminded that humans suffer like this and make each other suffer like this. Who wouldn't wince at a line like "The part of my brain that knows how to hurt the people I love moves faster than the part that knows whether I should. Ask anyone who loves me, especially those who don't anymore"? Or how, even before a certain awful band rendered the phrase 'be here now' permanently unfit for service, Gold spots the obvious problem: "I don't want to be here now. It's horrible here right now." Equally, there's the hope: after all, he made it through, and seems happy-ish now, so maybe we will too.
*Though while the novels proper do sound terrible, the ideas for impossible stories that came to him in dreams are things I would, at least in theory, absolutely read.
June 20, 2018
This review is based upon my reading an advanced copy of the book:
“I Will Be Complete” is a remarkable memoir by Glen David Gold. I’ve previously read Gold’s wonderful “Carter Beats the Devil” and “Sunnyside” and was looking forward to this book with great anticipation. That anticipation was well-rewarded, as Gold crafts a narrative that is sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes head-shaking, sometimes self-deprecating, and sometimes humorous. But what struck me most about the book is Gold’s honesty in his voice and writing. He relates chapters of his life with a clarity and rawness that I don’t often find this accessible, and mesmerizing. There is no self-puffery here. No I-am-the-hero-of-my-own-story. There is the fragility of imperfect people, and in the end, it is the still-developing story about a son and his mother; one full of highs and lows, confusion and clarity. “I Will Be Complete” is a book that will grab you and will not let go until you have finished it. Even then, it continues to hold on.
“I Will Be Complete” is a remarkable memoir by Glen David Gold. I’ve previously read Gold’s wonderful “Carter Beats the Devil” and “Sunnyside” and was looking forward to this book with great anticipation. That anticipation was well-rewarded, as Gold crafts a narrative that is sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes head-shaking, sometimes self-deprecating, and sometimes humorous. But what struck me most about the book is Gold’s honesty in his voice and writing. He relates chapters of his life with a clarity and rawness that I don’t often find this accessible, and mesmerizing. There is no self-puffery here. No I-am-the-hero-of-my-own-story. There is the fragility of imperfect people, and in the end, it is the still-developing story about a son and his mother; one full of highs and lows, confusion and clarity. “I Will Be Complete” is a book that will grab you and will not let go until you have finished it. Even then, it continues to hold on.
July 9, 2019
Damn. Glen Davis Gold has done an amazing thing here in one of the best memoirs I’ve ever read. He’s transported real life, or its closest approximation, into book form. He’s articulated the ways we search for the answers, thinking they’ll solve something — even if they don’t, not really. How the searching helps us situate ourselves, to whatever small extent, and how the searching is worthwhile, even if it’s for very different reasons than we expected. How to search is to be human..
It’s taken Gold his entire life to write I Will Be Complete, and it really shows. I can’t shake the sensation I’ll be thinking about this book for a long time to come.
It’s taken Gold his entire life to write I Will Be Complete, and it really shows. I can’t shake the sensation I’ll be thinking about this book for a long time to come.
December 4, 2019
Gold has certainly led an unusual life, but I think this memoir is really so engaging because of his storytelling and unflinching insights into himself and the people around him.
August 26, 2018
A very affecting memoir, which made me appreciate my wonderful Mother. I look forward to reading the author’s novels.
August 6, 2018
This book was a devastating memoir of a man I had never heard of previously.
I'd say it was the opposite of Scott Simon's book "Unforgettable," about his relationship with his mother. When I finished that book, it felt for a few seconds as if no mom ever loved her son more.
Glen's story was more along the lines of a mother who was utterly unequipped (ill-equipped?) to care for a boy she quickly knew was much smarter than her, so she simply abandoned him and instead chased abusive and dangerous men who needed to be mothered in a way more suited to her abilities. Glen's mom had a truly tragic and brutal childhood but instead of using it as a way to learn how not to be, she used it as an excuse to not parent her son.
So many of us had parents who were not what we needed them to be at the time. This story is so unreal it defies belief. Glen's truth really is stranger than fiction.
Recommended for anyone with difficult family of origin relationships.
I'd say it was the opposite of Scott Simon's book "Unforgettable," about his relationship with his mother. When I finished that book, it felt for a few seconds as if no mom ever loved her son more.
Glen's story was more along the lines of a mother who was utterly unequipped (ill-equipped?) to care for a boy she quickly knew was much smarter than her, so she simply abandoned him and instead chased abusive and dangerous men who needed to be mothered in a way more suited to her abilities. Glen's mom had a truly tragic and brutal childhood but instead of using it as a way to learn how not to be, she used it as an excuse to not parent her son.
So many of us had parents who were not what we needed them to be at the time. This story is so unreal it defies belief. Glen's truth really is stranger than fiction.
Recommended for anyone with difficult family of origin relationships.
July 6, 2018
Months after reading an advance copy of I Will Be Complete, I still haven't processed all of it. Glen's unflinching memoir careens from comedy to tragedy to comic tragedy with such intensity that you're never 100% sure he's going to make it to the end of the book intact. And who's to say if he did?
It's a powerful book, not for the faint of heart, but it's unlike any memoir I've read before, and maybe one day I'll finally wrap my head around it.
It's a powerful book, not for the faint of heart, but it's unlike any memoir I've read before, and maybe one day I'll finally wrap my head around it.
July 28, 2019
Even though I liked this book, there are parts that are very disturbing and not enjoyable to read. But that mentioned, there is a tangible lesson in this memoir of a young man growing up with a very dysfunctional mother. He is eventually able to find peace, and professional success, in separating himself from her.
Glen's parents divorce, painfully, when he is a young child, but there are already cracks in his mother's trophy wife facade. Her horrific childhood in England has formed her, and no amount of money or success will keep her from choosing inappropriate, even dangerous, men. Glen's father moves from Southern California to the midwest, and their relationship suffers from distance and the father's reluctance to do anything which would require him to interact with his ex-wife.
A good portion of the book, early on, covers the time when Glen's mother leaves him for weeks at a time in San Francisco, where they move after the divorce, while she pursues a man to New York. Glen is still not even officially a teen. As Glen approaches his high school years, he applies and is accepted to a boarding school in southern California. This is a good thing for him, as his mother continues to stay in New York.
After finishing high school, he attends a private Connecticut college for a couple years, but during one summer living with his father, who has moved back to southern California, he decides to transfer to U.C. Berkeley, where he completes his degree and pursues a career as a writer. He also begins a series of romantic relationships, often with angry or unlikable women.
His mother continues to appear intermittently into his life, but she has moved on to yet another dangerous man, Daniel, a violent, unemployed drug addict. Her addiction is to him, and Glen just can't stomach it.
Untreated mental illness and its effects on those who live with it is a thread throughout this story. But Glen isn't certain that his mother has a mental illness. He thinks she may just make poor decisions, repeatedly. I'm not sure it matters which it is. Unaddressed, this environment was harrowing for a child, requiring them to rise up and survive, or surrender and fail. Fortunately for Glen, he's a bright, insightful, realistic man, able to observe and respond effectively.
At the end, Glen comes to some very dramatic realizations about his childhood, suddenly remembering and reevaluating his experiences. It is unclear whether he just wasn't ready to process these things earlier, or if he had forgotten them, but coming to terms with what happened seems to set him free to live his own life now, which made me happy for him.
Glen's parents divorce, painfully, when he is a young child, but there are already cracks in his mother's trophy wife facade. Her horrific childhood in England has formed her, and no amount of money or success will keep her from choosing inappropriate, even dangerous, men. Glen's father moves from Southern California to the midwest, and their relationship suffers from distance and the father's reluctance to do anything which would require him to interact with his ex-wife.
A good portion of the book, early on, covers the time when Glen's mother leaves him for weeks at a time in San Francisco, where they move after the divorce, while she pursues a man to New York. Glen is still not even officially a teen. As Glen approaches his high school years, he applies and is accepted to a boarding school in southern California. This is a good thing for him, as his mother continues to stay in New York.
After finishing high school, he attends a private Connecticut college for a couple years, but during one summer living with his father, who has moved back to southern California, he decides to transfer to U.C. Berkeley, where he completes his degree and pursues a career as a writer. He also begins a series of romantic relationships, often with angry or unlikable women.
His mother continues to appear intermittently into his life, but she has moved on to yet another dangerous man, Daniel, a violent, unemployed drug addict. Her addiction is to him, and Glen just can't stomach it.
Untreated mental illness and its effects on those who live with it is a thread throughout this story. But Glen isn't certain that his mother has a mental illness. He thinks she may just make poor decisions, repeatedly. I'm not sure it matters which it is. Unaddressed, this environment was harrowing for a child, requiring them to rise up and survive, or surrender and fail. Fortunately for Glen, he's a bright, insightful, realistic man, able to observe and respond effectively.
At the end, Glen comes to some very dramatic realizations about his childhood, suddenly remembering and reevaluating his experiences. It is unclear whether he just wasn't ready to process these things earlier, or if he had forgotten them, but coming to terms with what happened seems to set him free to live his own life now, which made me happy for him.
July 14, 2020
If I felt like being fair, I would just say that I think I don't like memoir. (I think I really just don't like dude memoir—this is almost as intensely dude memoir as David Carr's, which I did hate more than this.) But I'm not feeling fair this morning, and thus I'll say that this makes me actually want to re-absorb from the universe the time I spent reading Carter Beats the Devil (which I really liked).
This is punishingly bloated. It is, for hundreds of pages at a stretch, boring. as. fuck. The Berkeley stretches seem to be written from the perspective of the least insightful, least functional John Hughes character of all time.
I once read a review (or have since invented it) of Showgirls that described it as so bad, the reviewer didn't believe Elizabeth Berkeley was naked. I kind of don't believe the Bay Area exists after reading this. And I certainly don't believe any person in Gold's life ever did, felt, or said anything he "reports" with the journalistic eye he's so proud of.
Also, dude: Your father, your stepmother, every other person in your life is just as damaging a narcissistic fuck as your mother—they're just not poors.
This is punishingly bloated. It is, for hundreds of pages at a stretch, boring. as. fuck. The Berkeley stretches seem to be written from the perspective of the least insightful, least functional John Hughes character of all time.
I once read a review (or have since invented it) of Showgirls that described it as so bad, the reviewer didn't believe Elizabeth Berkeley was naked. I kind of don't believe the Bay Area exists after reading this. And I certainly don't believe any person in Gold's life ever did, felt, or said anything he "reports" with the journalistic eye he's so proud of.
Also, dude: Your father, your stepmother, every other person in your life is just as damaging a narcissistic fuck as your mother—they're just not poors.
September 3, 2018
I really enjoyed this memoir. I felt as though I really grew up alongside Glen and saw the way he viewed his life and his current situations as they happened. Glen's past is one big roller coaster and his mother is at the epicenter of it all. Their relationship is a very confusing one. As a child, Glen needed his mother, even if he didn't want to admit it because he thought it made him weak. However, his mother didn't seem like she needed Glen much, she always thought he was fine on his own which is why she left him so much. But as they both got older, it seemed as if things switched. His mother was always looking for his approval and attention and Glen had become numb to the situations she put herself in.
I felt this was very well written. I've never read anything else by Glen Gold before but I definitely look forward to some of his novels.
I felt this was very well written. I've never read anything else by Glen Gold before but I definitely look forward to some of his novels.
February 22, 2019
Leaving aside the negatives of page after page of pretty horrible behaviour and lost and troubled people, Gold produces some awesome metaphors as he examines his life, essentially through the lens of his mother. Given the acknowledged propensity of his mother for lying and a general casual attitude to truth from most of the people in the book, it is hard to know what is factual in this memoir and what is pure fiction.
As I read I alternated mainly between three feelings: intrigue, boredom and discomfort. I only awarded three stars because I think it was well written, even if a little over written at times, but the content of the memoir and Gold's resolution (how he became, or is becoming, complete) were unsatisfying to me. It's terribly sad actually. I think I Will be Complete is basically about child abuse and how that leads to victims becoming perpetrators.
As I read I alternated mainly between three feelings: intrigue, boredom and discomfort. I only awarded three stars because I think it was well written, even if a little over written at times, but the content of the memoir and Gold's resolution (how he became, or is becoming, complete) were unsatisfying to me. It's terribly sad actually. I think I Will be Complete is basically about child abuse and how that leads to victims becoming perpetrators.
November 6, 2018
Nearly a 5, definitely a 4.5. I’m amazed no one on GR has reviewed this (ah, just this edition it seems). I read this in 2 chunks and would have benefitted from a continuous reading. Essentially an autobiography but Gold covers so much more - memory, truth, the tortuous road to becoming an adult, what family is and the effects they can wreak. Deftly handled and significantly more complex than it initially reads, I would highly recommend. (And I still want to know what his mother saw Daniel doing....)
December 20, 2018
A struggle, for both of us. The first third is perfect, blistering with honesty and insight, and the last section is equally raw and incisive. The middle chunk, covering the author's adolescence and college years, is unfortunately exactly what you would expect--navel-gazing, self-obsessed, too clever by half, and unkind to women.
October 17, 2019
I really enjoyed this memoir, particularly when he writes about his childhood. He gives the impression of not pulling any punches when he looks at his younger self. That, and the description of Daniel and his mother were probably the strongest, most interesting parts of the book for me, but I enjoyed the whole thing.
November 10, 2018
This memoir is very well written and entertaining, and a great escape if you are looking for one. On the other hand, I did wonder how many people would be interested in the crazy story of the author. At times, it felt a little self-absorbed (it's a memoir so of course!).
December 28, 2018
This is over 400 pages long but I read it in a couple of days because it was SO GOOD and I COULD NOT STOP!! Mainly about his relationship with his mother and also bits about trying to get published. I wanted more about Alice Sebold - I'm sad they are divorced.....
May 4, 2023
One of the best books I've read this year.
October 26, 2018
"Watch me be fine with that."
November 2, 2023
Glen David Gold starts brilliantly, then piffles out and loses me. He does not travel in the direction of self-completion. In fact, the vague focus of this book is on the author’s mother, not the “I” signified in the title.
Glen makes insightful observations and he writes some singing sentences and paragraphs:
San Francisco ran on melancholy. People here knew San Francisco wasn’t what it had been. If only you’d been here a little while ago, that era when things were more festive. The attitude was, We’ll play, we’ll make life a game, but that other time we can’t quite put our finger on, that’s when you should have been here. Every boutique owner, every bearded street artisan with a booth of hammered silver rings, every cab driver loved it here, but the love came with sadness. San Francisco forgave that feeling. I know you’re sad, let’s all be sad together.
He fails, however, to assemble these well-crafted parts into a coherent, book-length statement. Other favorite authors fall short in the same way; I’m thinking of Armistead Maupin and Edmund White, who place immortal sentences in forgettable books.
Synopsis: Glen’s parents lived an opulent life in Southern California, then divorced. After the divorce, he went with his mother to live in San Francisco. She abandoned him for extended periods, while she attempted to “save” one worthless, parasitic boyfriend after another. Glen went to prep school, college, graduate school. He wrote with passion and lived with several girlfriends. Through it all, Glen’s mother continued to deteriorate, and for many years she barely survived. Glen attempts to catalog his parents’ influence and his own experiences, and use them to understand himself. He needs a working attitude toward life.
Major points of interest for me: Glen and I are close in age, and while we never met, I lived a few miles away from him at one time. How did he perceive our shared formative events and environment? How did he play with the toys available to us? This shared history riveted my attention through the first half of the book. I couldn’t get back to reading soon enough.
In the second half, the book’s flaws produce catastrophic results. He does not build a strong structure or timeline. He flips from future to past to present, and delivers no compensation for the resulting confusion. He writes long detours, ending nowhere, exhausting me. These include excruciatingly detailed accounts of an embarrassing punk rock concert, his dreams and his drug experiences.
The last two subjects are especially problematic, as they are often impossible to communicate to another person. When we dream or take mind-altering drugs, we may experience profound feelings. Unable to reproduce the feelings themselves, we can only recount the images and stories associated with them. Those images and stories tend toward the nonsensical or ridiculous, thus rarely produce any similar feeling in our readers. The strong feelings occur in altered states of consciousness. When fully aware brains read our descriptions, they fall flat, to wit:
Astronauts struggled on the banks of rivers while flowers tried to strangle them. The court of a fairy-tale king backstabbed each other and conspired to insert needles under their skin in order to feel life more intensely.
Glen, can’t you see the futility of this? He wastes pages on other detours that go nowhere:
Noelle changed her hair color from purple to blue to violet every few weeks. I was trying to assess whether she might try blond next, and that now seemed more important, in the sense that it fully filled my brain, than having an argument.
She sounded like she was saying she was in a terrible place and didn’t want to be rescued. Only a man who saw her twice would wonder whether he should rescue her anyway.
At last we reach the final chapter. Summary: “My mother, my mother, my mother, my mother, my mother, The End.”
Verdict: This could have been a great book. Great books begin with an idea, a design. They can’t discover their purpose on the way. I close with more skillful quotes:
[Daniel] had in common with [my mother’s] previous boyfriends a desire to explain how the world worked, but unlike Anton or Trevor or Peter, he had never succeeded in anything. He had observed rich people for his entire life, long enough that he looked down on them. I tried to say one or two things, but it wasn’t necessary. Daniel had already learned what he was going to learn, and nothing like me was going to affect him.
That’s when I realized, not for the first time, my mother believed everything she said, until the next thing she said.
Glen makes insightful observations and he writes some singing sentences and paragraphs:
San Francisco ran on melancholy. People here knew San Francisco wasn’t what it had been. If only you’d been here a little while ago, that era when things were more festive. The attitude was, We’ll play, we’ll make life a game, but that other time we can’t quite put our finger on, that’s when you should have been here. Every boutique owner, every bearded street artisan with a booth of hammered silver rings, every cab driver loved it here, but the love came with sadness. San Francisco forgave that feeling. I know you’re sad, let’s all be sad together.
He fails, however, to assemble these well-crafted parts into a coherent, book-length statement. Other favorite authors fall short in the same way; I’m thinking of Armistead Maupin and Edmund White, who place immortal sentences in forgettable books.
Synopsis: Glen’s parents lived an opulent life in Southern California, then divorced. After the divorce, he went with his mother to live in San Francisco. She abandoned him for extended periods, while she attempted to “save” one worthless, parasitic boyfriend after another. Glen went to prep school, college, graduate school. He wrote with passion and lived with several girlfriends. Through it all, Glen’s mother continued to deteriorate, and for many years she barely survived. Glen attempts to catalog his parents’ influence and his own experiences, and use them to understand himself. He needs a working attitude toward life.
Major points of interest for me: Glen and I are close in age, and while we never met, I lived a few miles away from him at one time. How did he perceive our shared formative events and environment? How did he play with the toys available to us? This shared history riveted my attention through the first half of the book. I couldn’t get back to reading soon enough.
In the second half, the book’s flaws produce catastrophic results. He does not build a strong structure or timeline. He flips from future to past to present, and delivers no compensation for the resulting confusion. He writes long detours, ending nowhere, exhausting me. These include excruciatingly detailed accounts of an embarrassing punk rock concert, his dreams and his drug experiences.
The last two subjects are especially problematic, as they are often impossible to communicate to another person. When we dream or take mind-altering drugs, we may experience profound feelings. Unable to reproduce the feelings themselves, we can only recount the images and stories associated with them. Those images and stories tend toward the nonsensical or ridiculous, thus rarely produce any similar feeling in our readers. The strong feelings occur in altered states of consciousness. When fully aware brains read our descriptions, they fall flat, to wit:
Astronauts struggled on the banks of rivers while flowers tried to strangle them. The court of a fairy-tale king backstabbed each other and conspired to insert needles under their skin in order to feel life more intensely.
Glen, can’t you see the futility of this? He wastes pages on other detours that go nowhere:
Noelle changed her hair color from purple to blue to violet every few weeks. I was trying to assess whether she might try blond next, and that now seemed more important, in the sense that it fully filled my brain, than having an argument.
She sounded like she was saying she was in a terrible place and didn’t want to be rescued. Only a man who saw her twice would wonder whether he should rescue her anyway.
At last we reach the final chapter. Summary: “My mother, my mother, my mother, my mother, my mother, The End.”
Verdict: This could have been a great book. Great books begin with an idea, a design. They can’t discover their purpose on the way. I close with more skillful quotes:
[Daniel] had in common with [my mother’s] previous boyfriends a desire to explain how the world worked, but unlike Anton or Trevor or Peter, he had never succeeded in anything. He had observed rich people for his entire life, long enough that he looked down on them. I tried to say one or two things, but it wasn’t necessary. Daniel had already learned what he was going to learn, and nothing like me was going to affect him.
That’s when I realized, not for the first time, my mother believed everything she said, until the next thing she said.
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