There is no shortage of
the memoir-as-Bildungsroman, the
coming-of-age of the writer in the world.
Works Cited: An Alphabetical Odyssey of Mayhem and Misbehavior (University of Nebraska Press, $16.95) by Brandon R. Schrand
contains all the familiar tropes: copious
drinking and drugging, college hijinks, fraternity debauchery, sexual
promiscuity, rebellion against authority, classroom failure and embarrassment, all
repeated ad nauseam. What sets this book
apart is some beautiful writing. That
Schrand is gifted and that he survived his best attempts to remain a child in a
man’s body are never in question.
Willingly, we go on his journey with him, riding the twists and turns of
the story like passengers on a train snaking through the difficult terrain of a
challenging country, a symbolism the writer, himself, uses in the book.
What really sets this
memoir apart is its organizational structure.
Schrand eschews chronological order and instead, compiles his story as a
bibliography of the books that changed, or didn’t change, or changed only years
later, his life. For the most part, this
works, but occasionally, the cited book gets slighted for the drinking and
debauchery. In other words, straighten
out the narrative and it becomes like all memoirs of youthful indiscretion,
even with the beautiful writing. Still,
I found the unique organization a welcome change-up from the
just-another-memoir-of-my-bad-boy days.
One of the lines that resonates comes right at the start of the book,
and explains the reason for the bibliographic organization: “…I acknowledge that books themselves cannot
save your life. Not in any literal sense.
But if I misread my ways into mayhem and misbehavior for so many years,
I was able, finally, to read my way to some kind of safety. That journey is this story.” Those of us addicted to reading and writing
love when books save lives, if only because we all have our own version of the
book that saved us. That makes Schrand’s
transition from royal screw-up to upstanding member of the writing world
compelling.
He begins at the
beginning, with his eccentric family life:
stepfather and mother get stoned; grandparents run a hotel; and Schrand
grows up in the wilds of Idaho, Utah and the arid deserts of the northwest
United States with occasional trips to Arizona and other places with often
dangerous and funny adventures.
“Everything felt big to me,” he writes, “epic almost, and I matched the
changing world I saw outside to the pictures in The Children’s Bible—pictures of flaming chariots racing through
the skies, of Samson breaking the pillars, of Jesus walking on water.” Connecting to the Bible makes Schrand believe
the world would eventually “go crazy like that.”
A central internal
conflict for Schrand in the book is his desire to grow up while remaining stuck
in the quicksand of his own immaturity.
In the chapter connected to Mark Twain’s, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, he writes: “Caught in that heartbreaking paradox of both
wanting to be a man and never wanting to leave childhood, Huck was a boy like
me who yearned to be a man unlike his father.”
This introduces a number of false starts, dead ends, and misadventures
on his road to being a successful husband, father and writer, and that feels
real. Life is not a straight line; we
all fall back many times before setting ourselves free. We see that clearly in Schrand’s writing in
this book. The examination of these
events, his failures, his betrayals of others, must have been difficult for him
to write, and must be excruciating to read for those who were witnesses or
suffered those betrayals. He takes pains
to recognize the sacrifices of his wife, Kelli, who at one point in the story
forces him to return to college and graduate while she rises at five a.m. to go
clean toilets to make extra dollars to keep the family afloat.
Schrand’s writing
contains the necessary healthy dose of self-deprecation. He lets the reader feel his shame and laugh
at him and his antics. Yet, there is
also a bit of a mirror reflection going on because his trials and tribulations,
funny as some of them are, remain painfully recognizable. There is not a lot that is new here in his
memoir, but he does tell the story with grace, humor, and beauty, organized in
a Works Cited listing of the books that inspired him. In short, we can relate to his immaturity,
his youthful blindness, his falling down.
We wait for the promised redemption, and like most of these kinds of books,
he delivers in the end. His journey is
one of twists and turns, hills and valleys, all through the dark night of his
misbehaved youth on out into the daylight of his maturity.