STORIES FROM THE HAND BASKET

A sequel offers recollections from a Gen Xer on life in and out of a small New England town.

Gorman follows up his previous memoir, Until We’re Strangers Again (2014), about life in professional wrestling, with a look at his adventures both before and after that career. The author grew up in Medfield, Massachusetts. As a youngster, he felt a lot of rage about the place. In the opening pages he explains that at the age of 13 he hated not only his stepfather, but most authority figures in the area as well. He had a loathing for the police who harassed him and his friends and a strong dislike for many of his teachers. His tastes skewed toward heavy metal, Beavis and Butt-Head, and people on the rougher side of town. As he explains in these pages, he and his friends were “far from poor, but by the standards of nouveau Medfield, we were practically homeless, and we all probably looked it from the way we dressed.” Still, unlike some of his acquaintances, he graduated from high school and went to college. He decided to study creative writing at Emerson College in Boston. Although he saw himself not so much as a student as a college “customer,” his experiences were not all bad. Some of his professors may have lacked inspiration, but he got to see firsthand what writing for a living was like. After graduating, he landed a job with an alternative publication called The Boston Phoenix. He had some escapades in Boston, not the least of which involved a fling with a co-worker. A personal tragedy eventually brought him back to Medfield, compelling him to examine the town he left behind.

Honest from the get-go, the book is most striking when exploring Medfield and the people who lived there. It was a place whose population included a public works employee with religious convictions so strong (and strange) he would not allow knickknacks in his home. It was a town with girls who wore “Adidas windbreakers and reeked of Kool cigarettes and Aqua Net hairspray” and where someone put a diagram on how to build a bomb in the school yearbook (an action that included plenty of repercussions). Readers learn much about the fine details of the town from such sketches. By contrast, anecdotes about college, like the undoing of a pitiful, frenzied theater major, are not all that enlightening. Nor are scenes from the life of a young professional, such as a night out with co-workers in Boston where the author learned what a mojito was. Still, the volume’s diverse strands give readers a vivid, three-dimensional picture of Gorman and the things he experienced. All of these elements that constitute a life make the later portions, which include a very personal look at death, quite moving. As someone points out on the final page, “When you’re dead, you’re fucked. And you don’t get to do cool shit anymore.”

This meandering memoir delivers a surprisingly touching account of one man’s experiences.