Cures for Hunger
A Memoir
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- $2.99
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- $2.99
Publisher Description
A “poignant but rigorously unsentimental” memoir of one man’s search for the truth about his father’s dark past, and how it shaped his own life (Kirkus Reviews).
Growing up in rural British Columbia, Deni Béchard had no idea his family was extraordinary. He took pleasure in typical boyish activities: salmon fishing with his father, a daring man with a penchant for brawling, and reading with his mother, who was interested in health food and the otherworldly.
Assigned to complete a family tree in school, Deni begins to wonder why he doesn’t know more about his father’s side of the family. His mother is from Pittsburgh, and there’s a vague sense that his father is from Quebec, but why the mystery? When his mother leaves Deni’s father and decamps with her children to Virginia, his curiosity only grows. Who is this man, why do the police seem so interested in him, and why is his mother so afraid of him? And when his mother begrudgingly tells Deni that his father was once a bank robber, his imagination is set on fire. Boyish rebelliousness soon gives way to fantasies of a life of crime, and a deep drive for experience leads him to a number of adventures: hitching to Memphis and stealing a motorcycle; fighting classmates and kissing girls.
Before long, young Deni is imagining himself as a character in one of his father’s stories, or in the novels he devours. Both attracted and repelled, Deni can’t escape the sense that his father’s life holds the key to understanding himself. Eventually he moves back to Canada, only to find himself snared in the controlling impulses of his mysterious father, and increasingly obsessed by his father’s own muted recollections of the Quebecois childhood he’d fled long ago.
“Powerful and haunting . . . a must-read for anyone who has ever struggled to uncover their identity within the shadow of a parent.” —Claire Bidwell Smith, author of The Rules of Inheritance
“Cures for Hunger is a poignant adventure story with a mystery . . . But it is also, perhaps even more so, the story of an artist coming of age.” —The Plain Dealer
“This darkly comic and lyrical memoir demonstrates the shaping of its author, who suffers the wreckage of his father’s life, yet manages to salvage all the beauty of its desperate freedoms. Béchard’s poetic gifts give voice to the outsiders of society, and make them glow with humanity and love.” —Elizabeth McKenzie, author of The Portable Veblen
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the opening pages of B chard's memoir, we learn that his duplicitous, bank-robbing father, Andr to whom the bulk of the book is devoted committed suicide "in a house empty but for a single chair on the outskirts of Vancouver." Begun just three months after his father's death, B chard's story is the result of "seventeen years of rewriting," and the process shows in the prose, which vacillates between that of a pretentious, if talented, young writer, and an adult whose understanding of his troubled youth has been refined by years of reflection and searching. Nevertheless, B chard powerfully evokes the ever-present tension between the author and his parents ("Our family always seemed on the verge of disaster, and then the danger passed, and very little changed."), as well as his own struggle to emulate and escape his father. At once a quest to uncover the details of Andr 's life including his real name (Edwin), the town in Quebec from whence he came and the family he left there, and a criminal record that led one of Andr 's sisters to remark, " Il ne faisait rien moiti .' He didn't do anything halfway." B chard's story is also one of personal discovery, and a teasing out of the function of memory: what it keeps, what it loses, and what it saves.