I Wouldn't Normally Do This Kind of Thing: A Memoir

What do you get when you mix a father with severe PTSD after barely surviving the Vietnam War, a self-proclaimed clairvoyant mother with anger issues and no filter whatsoever, rivers of booze, an awkward but academically gifted son, and a daughter with a hidden disability and a mile-wide rebellious streak? This is going to get messy. Then throw in a generous helping of domestic violence, some good old-fashioned small-town Southern homophobia, and the kind of dark family secret that makes headlines. You’ve got all the makings of a complete, blazing disaster. Literally: Marshall Moore got into the groundbreaking North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics, the nation’s first residential STEM-focused magnet school, as a means of escaping a hometown and a childhood he otherwise might not have survived. He then set it on fire. And then the story gets really complicated. I Wouldn’t Normally Do This Kind of Thing is a memoir about a family cosplaying normalcy in Southern suburbia in the seventies and eighties: shocking, hilarious, appalling, bizarre, and… actually true.

Marshall Moore is the author of four novels (Inhospitable, Bitter Orange, An Ideal for Living, and The Concrete Sky) and three short-fiction collections (A Garden Fed by Lightning, The Infernal Republic, and Black Shapes in a Darkened Room). His work has appeared in The Southern Review, Litro, Storgy, Passengers Journal, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Asia Literary Review, The Barcelona Review, and many other journals and anthologies. He is also the co-editor of three academic books on the pedagogy of creative writing and publishing. He holds a PhD in creative writing from Aberystwyth University. A native of eastern North Carolina, he lives in Cornwall, England, and teaches creative writing and publishing at Falmouth University.