The Consequence of Stars

The Consequence of Stars is not a traditional memoir. Its center is not about dysfunction or overwhelming grief, but rather the story of searching. It is a memoir-in-essays about the longing for home, in all its meanings, an examination of a modern life that has forever been attempting to find balance and its place in the world.

In The Consequence of Stars, the author revisits his parents' lifelong love affair with their hometown and one another despite life-threatening odds. He recalls a solo and revealing cross-country train ride and a spiritual awakening in the Navajo Nation, journeys representing his search. He plays guitar with Jack Kerouac groupies at the writer's former Florida home, hunts for the ghost of Hemingway in the attic of his birthplace home, and sets out to build a Thoreau-like writer’s shed where he hopes to discover an artistic space, an artist's home.

He did not always live in the usual mold, forever longing for more than what was expected of the typical modern American man—the next big job and the house in the suburbs—and instead yearned for something deeper. A few months before his 60th birthday and after the tragic death of his sister to drugs and alcohol, David decided to consider this lifelong longing and retrace the steps of his past to understand why he has always been, in so many ways, a dreamer and why, like so many of us, he has been forever searching for home.