LET ME COUNT THE WAYS

An impressionistic memoir in essays of a childhood shaped by an addicted parent and a complex set of coping behaviors.

Morín takes his title from the sonnet by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, excerpted through the text as part of an ongoing reflection on the experience of love as well as the author's obsessive-compulsive disorder. At a very young age, Morín began to count things ("books, forks, carpets, shadows, chairs, even people’s feet”), blink his eyes excessively, pick at his skin, suck his shirt collar, and spit. More recently, he's been troubled by intrusive thoughts (his beloved cat's head getting smashed in a door, on loop) and has felt "assaulted by invisible lines that extended from the ends of utensils when they were pointed at me." Though Morín dedicates the book to his mother and grandmother, it is dominated by the men in his life: his alternately gentle and abusive grandfather; his father, whose heroin addiction was an open fact and a family priority; and Jackie, a neighbor, also addicted, whose kindness and affection made him a second father. Though there are many strong passages, the gaps in the storytelling and erratic chronology can be confusing. An extended meditation on childhood in the first half of the book culminates in a vignette in which the author "became one of 8,988 minors arrested for a violent crime in Texas that year….Each of us was between the ages of ten and seventeen. Each of us would answer to the charge of murder or non-negligent manslaughter or forcible rape or robbery or aggravated assault." What did he do? What were the consequences? We never find out. The author's concerns are generally more aesthetic than narrative: "I close my eyes and I am back in that room, watching the dance outside the window, my eyelids, the red of my grandfather’s cigarette. My shallow breath is the first note of a song about heartbreak, the soul, and a dove’s lonely cry.”

Sometimes scattershot but also evocative, lyrical, and brave.