Decadence

"The genre of memoir is b******t (as I humbly posit). No one actually lives like they are moving along some grand Freytag’s triangle. Rather, we live within isolated instances, specific struggles and victories, which, when compiled, form a narrative."—Richard Kelly Kemick

In Decadence, Richard Kelly Kemick’s “accidental memoir of a sort,” the author ranges widely through his myriad preoccupations and obsessions—volleyball, municipal landfills, dogs, high-school plays, Christmas villages, love—out of which the shape of a unique sensibility is revealed. Reminding the reader of the three Davids—Rakoff, Sedaris, and Wallace—these essays accrete into a portrait of a man trying to make sense of a world in which there are no goddamn rules; and yet one in which every action has sometimes profound consequences. A book of intelligence and care and kindness and humour and yearning and the occasional epiphany, Decadence gathers up from the odds and ends of living what makes a modern life, quiet and desperate as it may at times be, worth celebrating and living.