Barefoot to Avalon
A Brother's Story
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
From a New York Times Notable author comes a “fiercely honest . . . and utterly heartbreaking” memoir of brotherhood, grief, and mental illness (Jay McInerney).
In 2000, while moving his household from Vermont to North Carolina, author David Payne watched from his rearview mirror as his younger brother, George A., driving behind him in a two-man convoy of rental trucks, lost control of his vehicle, fishtailed, flipped over in the road, and died instantly. Soon thereafter, David’s life entered a downward spiral that lasted several years. His career came to a standstill, his marriage disintegrated, and his drinking went from a cocktail hour indulgence to a full-blown addiction. He found himself haunted not only by George A.’s death, but also by his brother’s manic depression, a hereditary illness that overlaid a dark and violent family history whose roots now gripped David, threatening both his and his children’s futures. The only way out, he found, was to write about his brother.
This is the “piercing . . . tour de force” account of David and George A.’s boyhood footrace that lasted long into their adulthood, defining their relationship and their lives (Los Angeles Times). As universal as it is intimate, this is an exceptional memoir of sibling rivalry and sibling love, and of the torments a family can hold silent and carry across generations. A story not only of survival in the face of adversity but of hard-won wisdom, Barefoot to Avalon is “an elegy to a brother that plumbs depths beyond depths—a fever-dream of a memoir, a blazing map of familial love and loss, headlong and heartbreaking and gorgeously written” (James Kaplan, national bestselling author of Frank: The Voice and Sinatra: The Chairman).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A writer ponders his family's legacy of abusive marriage, sibling rivalry, madness and death in this bleakly moving memoir. Novelist Payne (Ruin Creek) arranges the narrative around his brother George's repeated episodes of manic-depression and psychosis, which blighted his promising life before he died in a car crash in front of Payne. Powering their often close but sometimes jealous relationship are the fraught dynamics of their parents' troubled marriage; their father's manipulation of his sons into competing for his affection; and the bad blood of their mother's well-to-do North Carolina family, with their background of insanity and suicide. And spreading out from all this is the author's own life story as he tries to escape the family drama yet finds himself recapitulating it in his own alcoholism and rocky relationships. There's a novelistic intensity to the story, with Payne dwelling on vivid recollected scenes, recreating their atmospherics and teasing out every buried emotional tremor and element of foreshadowing, but his prose also has the rawness of a confessional and a self-lacerating impulse to expose his own guilt and unmet neediness. Writing with a mixture of clear-eyed realism and lyrical elegy, Payne shows how a family's pain, resentment, and loss get transmuted into love. Photos.
