MY SECOND TWENTY YEARS: An Unexpected Life

by Richard P. Brickner ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 17, 1976

Beginning again is the strategy of my independence,"" writes author/critic Brickner at the close of this fastidiously candid scrutiny of his life's ""double history."" At twenty a car accident broke his neck to leave him ""on the farthest rim of existence."" He was redeemed from a ""second infancy"" of helplessness--steel traction bars in the skull, tubes, weakly flailing arms--by passing those first ""critical tests."" During his early rehabilitation he gained a ""child's violent will""; so he returned to college where his writing inclined toward satire (""My anger like an organ had to be enlarged"") and he became involved with women whom he needed to feel he could attract. But in spite of his gains--a job, living alone, women who were attracted--he still had the urge to maintain his reputation for drama and catastrophe. Maturity approaches with one true love, the end to impotence (but also to all physical progress), and the ""luxury of appropriate dependence."" Now at forty he confronts his life's ""permanent conditions."" As a writer he has shaken significance out of a twenty-year physical imprisonment which becomes naggingly like our own various entrapments as we too plot to outsmart peril. Admittedly tetchy, somtimes difficult, Brickner allows that others as well as he are at the center of things. From one life he has fashioned an Everyman's journey.

Pub Date: Sept. 17, 1976

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Basic Books

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1976

Categories: NONFICTION