AN ACCIDENT OF BIRTH

An extensive memoir chronicling one man’s American life.

Blum was born in 1955 and grew up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. He was adopted at the age of four months, and his adoptive parents were well-to-do people about town: “It seemed like they were always dressing up in black tie to go somewhere, to a play, to Lincoln Center, or to a party, or a dinner”; they were not ones to “stay home and watch TV or play games with the kids.” He attended prestigious educational institutions like Choate and Pomfret. Times were changing, even at elite East Coast boarding schools, and the author had experiences with drugs—including an incident at Pomfret in which a good portion of the student population got sick from low-quality LSD. In 1970, when John Froines (one of the Chicago Seven) came to speak on campus, Blum describes the occasion as an expression of “inspiring, full-on left-wing radicalism.” The author went on to college in Wisconsin, a place where he engaged in “drinking, a fair amount of recreational drug taking, fraternities, football, and hockey.” After college, he embarked on a career in advertising. Advertising led to a foray in Hollywood, where he worked with director John Moore on producing the 2001 film Behind Enemy Lines. The author was 60 when he discovered that he had three biological brothers. Throughout the memoir, these siblings describe what was going on in their own lives at different periods, noting that their mother was an alcoholic who had difficulties with money. She had told them that their eldest brother had died in childbirth; she proved to be “a classic unreliable narrator, constantly telling made up stories and half-truths.”

As Blum charts his life story, he includes many detours. For instance, he notes that while he didn’t initially like the band the Eagles, they “did start to get interesting when success started to eat them up inside and their milieu became regret and loss of innocence and moral bankruptcy.” Discussing movie stars in modern cinema, he observes, “[T]he more famous they are, the more they have at stake because usually a movie is described in terms of the lead actors that are attached.” While such insights contribute to a full image of the author, they have a meandering quality—an extensive list of places that Blum has traveled to for work (“Milan, Rome, Barcelona, Beijing, Tokyo”) is later followed by a list of movies directed by Howard Zieff. Many of these tangents, such as descriptions of the author’s forays into learning jazz guitar, are not particularly thrilling; nevertheless, Blum has a distinctive sardonic tone and a compelling, often humorous personal story to share. The adoption material packs an emotional punch: Writing of his adoptive parents, he reflects, “‘We just wanted so much to have kids, and we couldn’t, so we decided to adopt, and that’s how we got you boys, and we were so happy, etc.’ was the kind of narrative you never heard from my parents.”

An entertaining, honest, sprawling account of growing up in the second half of the 20th century.