PRETEND THEY ARE DEAD

Eichenblatt’s memoir recounts the author’s experiences as both a son and a father.

In his nonfiction debut, the author, a lawyer, tells the story of his childhood, which was full of abandonment and betrayal, and his experience parenting his own five children. “We all collect certain landmark moments in our memory’s personal trophy case,” he writes. “These signal moments, both great and terrible, are the ones we can’t shake.” Framed by chapters set in the present, in which Eichenblatt talks with his children or his therapist, the narrative expands to encompass some of those landmark moments in his personal story. While in session with his therapist, for instance, he recalls Richard, the angry, insulting man who married the author’s mother and added the quiet, shy teenage Eichenblatt to his own family in the 1970s after the author’s biological father disappeared and Richard moved them all to Florida. As his therapist gently prodded him, Eichenblatt gradually remembered knocking Richard down, beating him, and choking him until one of his stepbrothers pulled him away (his therapist asked, “Would you have killed him?”). He recalls flunking out of Florida State and living on a kibbutz in Israel in his 20s (“driving a tractor, picking fruit, pulling weeds, working six days a week, gave me time to think”); being fired from a menial job on his birthday and wanting to fight the boss who fired him; the time his school caught fire and all the students had to be bussed back home; and his love for his rescue beagle, Sam. These and other memories are illustrated with black-and-white photos throughout.

Eichenblatt’s storytelling voice is characterized by an oddly effective combination of urgency and morbid humor; he narrates his story almost entirely in the present tense, and his voice keeps the pages turning. This is not a stiff or dispassionate memoir—quite the opposite. The author mentions that his friends tell him his stories from his crazy childhood make him interesting, but they, he points out, didn’t have to live through it. Eichenblatt vividly conveys the drug-addled aimlessness of his boyhood, fueled by the feelings of anger and betrayal that permeate almost all of the narrative. The dark themes of abandonment and pent-up rage are well-realized, though their power is undercut by the author’s penchant for including the kinds of irrelevant trivialities that so often lumber personal memoirs. “I like the Filet-O-Fish but ask if they can make it without onions and tartar sauce,” he writes in a passage that will interest no one on Earth except himself. “Grandma Annie loves to watch us eat and is always cooking something, usually pot roast with carrots and potatoes,” reads another, and the book has far too many such meandering digressions; they blunt the personal elements that are the book’s driving force. There are heartwarming family moments in which the author finds love and bonding despite all the negativity in his background, and these are rewarding and well-orchestrated. Readers who can stomach the Filet-O-Fish moments will find a genuinely touching tale of fragile hope.

A passionate but uneven memoir of a fractured childhood.