My Two-Faced Luck

by Brett Josef Grubisic

1990. Transferred to Horsetail Institution and mortally ill, an inmate devotes his remaining weeks to a project—recording his history on cassette tape. The account describes a curious queer journey that began in rural New England in 1927. Meditating on ruined family, illicit lovers, drunken parties, a tragic marriage, and strange terms of employment, the American inmate strives to wring sense—meaning—from a life now winding down in River Bend City, British Columbia... a few years after a jury found him guilty of murdering his boss, a geriatric San Francisco socialite. Decades later, the recipient of those forgotten cassettes faces the dissolution of her long marriage. Seeking respite from wintry thoughts, the former prison nurse listens to the inmate’s words, eventually shaping the jumbled reminiscences into a memoir. Speculation based on a cruise ship murder in 1985 and the final volume of the “River Bend Trilogy” (The Age of Cities; From Up River and For One Night Only), My Two-Faced Luck captures a singular voice as it divulges startling facts behind a rough passage through the upheavals of the twentieth century.

415 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 7, 2021

About the author

Brett Josef Grubisic teaches contemporary literature at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. He is the author of Understanding Beryl Bainbridge as well as the novel The Age of Cities. He is the co-author (with David L. Chapman) of American Hunks: The Muscular Male Body in Popular Culture, 1860–1970 and co-editor (with Andrea Cabajsky) of National Plots: Historical Fiction and Changing Ideas of Canada (WLU Press, 2010).

Reviews

[AC in BC · Rating 5 out of 5]

This one's a slow-burning tragedy.
I picked it up after I read a newspaper review that ended with "Highly recommended."
Basically, it tells about a retired, freshly divorced nurse who was bequeathed a bunch of cassette tapes at her old job (at a small prison in Canada). The cassettes are all that remains of an American inmate who dictated his memoir before he died. She puts the cassettes into the attic of her house and discovers them decades later when she's moving. She then spends a winter nursing her grieving self with a project of busywork--to transcribe and organize the tapes into a life story.
The inmate remembers his life from the 1930s (in New England) to the prison in Canada, with much of his time spent in San Francisco. He was effeminate and gay, and those two traits together determined a lot of his life's directions. The novel aims to show what life was like for one gay man during a big chunk of the 20th century. The narrator, who is assigned no name (but is modelled after a known murderer) is miserable and imprisoned but tells of a life where at least a little lemonade was made from the lemons the guy was handed. Until the night of the murder, that is...

[J Mettuch · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's an immersive tale about a small and obscure gay guy from California who's convicted of a murder in Canada and sentenced to imprisonment, but to me it's more about how big historical forces, like entrenched discrimination, can shape one's life and their eventual fate.
The convict who speaks through the pages shows us how his choices were limited by all kinds of things, from poverty to his parents, and how his limited options in the 1940s-1980s played out in a disastrous way.
It's the kind of book that makes you very glad to have missed a historical era that likely would have caused more harm than good if you happened to have some kind of identity (as detriment by gender, sexuality, or skin colour) that was regarded as a handicap or offence.