A-Bomb–otherwise known as Mr. Pink.

Kennedy gets a good start.

Aaron “flipping out.”

Chin up, girl. Yo. “Not as the giant of their dreams, nor the dwarfs of their fears.”

Thirty painted toes.

Momma.

More swim pictures from the entire 2010 season.

I’m fascinated with coming-of-age stories but the big problem that I’ve had with my own is finding how to engage the reader and keep the piece moving, yet still convey the story I set out to tell from the start. I recently read Alison Smith’s fine coming-of-age memoir, Name All The Animals, mainly on the merits of a favorable review by essayist and journalist Richard Gilbert. I was particular enticed by Gilbert’s saying her narrative moved “like a freight train.” I have to agree. Smith is a master at organizing her material to provoke interest.

At fifteen, Ms. Smith loses her eighteen-year-old brother in a car crash, and her staunchly Catholic family shudders in the grief and loss that follow. Her brother dies almost immediately in the narrative, possibly as early as the second chapter. She then has to describe not only losing her faith as a result of her grief, but also falling victim to an eating disorder and then discovering she is a lesbian. She sets up a reveal about her brother’s death to heighten narrative tension (as will happen any time you purposely hide information from your reader), but this reveal does more than just build suspense.

I found myself immersed  in an experience similar to that of a fifteen-year-old struggling to wrap her mind around an awful truth while a well-meaning community actively suppress certain information. When I finally did learn the truth of the reveal, I found myself all too willing to identify with Alison, quietly lulled into accepting her peculiar eating habits, which aren’t initially presented as eating disorder, but something more like ritual. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that I resigned myself to them, knowing that it isn’t a particularly healthy alternative for a girl to shun her food, but allowing it as normal for young Alison Smith, this poor child struggling to cope.

Establishing this strong sense of empathy allows Smith to offer another surprise in her narrative. In the scene where she unintentionally reveals her eating habits to her friend and budding love interest, we readers already know Smith’s secret, but because we have been brought in so close to her emotionally, we feel shocked to see Smith’s grief from the perspective of her lover, someone on the outside looking in. I even felt a little chastised as I read the scene, almost as if between the three of us who were there (the childhood incarnation of Ms. Smith, her girlfriend, and me) the girlfriend was really the only healthy emotional person available. This perverse twist was the highlight of the book for me.

I also want to point out something about how Smith presents the characters. This is a story about a religious family, in an equally conservative and religious community, written by a girl who is about to take a huge U-turn away from all of those conventions. Clearly there are going to be some hard feelings, but this is where Smith’s work really shines. She has a tenderness, a certain light touch.

Take, for example, the scene where she loses her faith. Smith renders this scene literally: Jesus sits on the lip of her bathtub, meekly shrugging his shoulders in response to her questions about how her brother could have died such a horrible death. Regardless of how you feel about religion, or big questions like, “Why do the innocent suffer?,” you must acknowledge the warmth and reverence with which she treats this loss. In fact, all her characters get this treatment. When her mother launches into a homophobic rant, the narrator remains quiet, as she should. Smith understands that her character’s behavior is indictment enough. Attending Catholic school at Our Lady of Mercy High School, Smith could well offer the Catholic Church her descriptions of the religious community she found there for use as promotional material: these Nuns are constantly busy either making us readers laugh, or saving Alison Smith’s life, time and time again.

God bless my wife and best friend Holly Huckeba, who yesterday did convince me to manhandle and operate a rented drain auger to open up our clogged laundry drain, even though I was initially very much opposed to this plan, and did complain loudly, and with much bitterness and consternation, and did say that I thought it would never work (though not in an Eeyore voice, nor with any little rain clouds floating over my head).

Indeed, this course of action was MUCH LESS EXPENSIVE than any previous course of action and as a direct result of this drain clearing success, I am feeling VERY BUTCH today.

Huzzah!

The weather was great (once we got used to the suffocating Texas heat and humidity), Aaron and Kennedy managed to form great gender and age constellations with their cousins (some reunions include much bitterness and gnashing of teeth over who will get to hang out with the cool older cousins, but this year all the cousins seemed to be tipping the cool scales), and Texas holds just the right mix of unhealthy but tasty foods (TexMex and BBQ) and exciting but dangerous familial activities (Aaron and I fired a variety of weapons at a shooting range, including an M4, and you can buy inexpensive bottle rockets and packages of exploding mortars called “The 10 Banditos” which includes a warning in the package that reads: FLAMING BALLS OF FIRE WITH REPORT).

What more could you ask for in a reunion?

More pictures at flickr.

I’ve got a piece up in Together, a new recovery oriented newspaper for the New York area. I’m revisiting the James Frey boondoggle, but looking at it from a new (I hope) perspective. Check it out: The Millionth Word on “A Million Little Pieces.”

Together appears online and in print. I just got my print copy, and it looks like a gas, not just for people in the recovering community but for anyone interested in a more healthful, contemplative life.

Today is our wedding anniversary, but Holly and I skipped off to Portland for an early celebration a few days ago.

This lovely bud is from the International Rose Test Garden, which is a fun place to stomp around in the City of Roses, especially if it’s June and everything is in bloom and smelling good.

More pictures of the fun.

Jasmine’s party was last week, but she is officially one today. Happy birthday, nieta!

If the pictures on Facebook are any indication, Mom and Dad had a real barn burner of a birthday celebration. I saw miniature horses and pigs, goats and all kinds of fun stuff. I snagged these pictures to post here. Look how happy Tim looks! Carry has the most beautiful smile. Jassy is giving us the peace sign.

Many thanks for sharing the pictures, Carry.

12-16-2005 018, originally uploaded by tim_elhajj.

At Present Tense (past imperfect), we like to honor the veterans.

This is a picture of my son in the engine room of the USCGC Bayberry, from when he was stationed at Port Seattle. I like to think he’s giving the thumbs up to past and present veterans everywhere, especially his wife Carry, who I have heard Tim affectionately refer to as the CO.*

*That’s CO as in Commanding Officer, for all you non-miliatry types out there.

The circumstances of Nick Flynn’s life are grim: abandoned by his father as an infant, haunted by an addiction and the aftermath of a mother who took her own life. But The Ticking is the Bomb isn’t a misery memoir. It’s not a heartwarming tale of redemption. Flynn never casts himself as the victim. Many of the most shocking details about his life are only mentioned in passing. This is a memoir about Flynn’s fears of fatherhood and intimacy, and—somehow—his growing obsession with torture and pain. Under Flynn’s deft hand, the connections between his own personal fears, American fears of terrorist attack, and the fears of torturer and tortured alike seem plain enough, but each is made all the more urgent by the immediacy of the Abu Ghraib scandal, or the infant growing in its mother’s womb.

This is the way to tell a memoir.

He won me as a fan with, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, his first memoir, a meditation on his father and homelessness. Both that book and this one are organized in the same nonlinear fashion. You find little parenthetical dates at the start of some chapters to help you orient the chapter into the overall timeline. It sounds confusing, but he does a good job of establishing and then returning to certain characters and situations, so it works. It feels like an organic approximation of the act of reflection, or maybe what it feels like to sort through a lifetime of memories and try to make sense of it all. As far as narrative goes, this book seems like a series of failed relationships and one lingering, seemingly fragile success. He expresses his growing outrage over American torture, which eventually gives way to a slightly crazed, imploring tenacity. During the months that preceded the invasion of Iraq, I can remember arguing for peace with the same sort of growing intensity. In the end—watching the shock and awe on the network news—I remember feeling angry and powerless, totally wrung out. I remember thinking that I had to stop arguing, that I risked turning into some sort of irrational crank. 

Maybe that’s what it takes.

Brevity is another good venue for nonfiction writers.

Essays published on Brevity are 750 words or less. Flash nonfiction, a twist on flash fiction, which Wikipedia tells me has been popular for about twenty or more years, meaning it’s a form that’s really come into its own with the advent of the Web and (presumably) online journals. You won’t find too many journals devoted entirely to nonfiction, and fewer still are nonfiction journals that impose a word count on essays. I can think of only Brevity.

Brevity also has a blog, which is a good place to read about publishing opportunities for nonfiction writers, the latest nonfiction furor or book, and—best of all—brief blog posts from authors who appear in the latest issue of Brevity magazine. These author posts are my favorites, offering insight or commentary on some aspect of the published story—think of it as an author reading in print.

Dinty Moore (Between Panic and Desire and The Accidental Buddhist) is Brevity’s editor. Warm, generous, smart, Dinty has published some of my pieces, turned some other pieces down, and even helped me with my childhood memoir project, which I’m still hammering away on. He’s a great guy.