to startle: “Great grief filled me up,” he tells us, “I seemed to breathe it, but what freed me what this: if my arms never worked again, never dressed myself, or combed my hair, if I depended on others to do these things for the rest of my life, I no longer had to be, or even could be, who I once was. What I once was. I was broken. And new.” New? That’s a shocking and incredible perception for a recently paralyzed young boy. How could this be? Where are the horn-blasts of his anger? of his frustration? We see bits, tiny glimpses of these, but wouldn’t these emotions have pushed hard to make their way to the forefront of this story? Perhaps Guest did not want to relive those feelings, though he had to have done so in writing the book. More likely, he thought his emotions weren’t the point; so, perhaps he gave us a taste and figured we would extrapolate the rest. But, undeniably, I have internalized his calmly written account so deeply that I’ve become hysterical for him, and I’m projecting—how can this have happened to a child? It’s so unfair! Of course, we do see him struggle, both physically and psychologically—the path to adaptation is littered with painful and disappointing setbacks. And you can’t help but fall in love with the young man who wrote this book, with its wry title and what, in my own mind, must be its quelling of raw, unbowdlerized grief and anger in addition to his physical pain. But he apparently really is the good boy our mothers told us to keep a lookout for. He doesn’t make waves, at least not in this memoir. His choices are considered and deployed. His style tells me: It’s done now. This is the story. He does not assign blame. (There’s no mention, however, of whether his parents were as generous.) And I can’t help but wonder how much of the knowledge and maturity he attributes to his young self is a product of a writer’s confluence of memory with the gifts of adulthood. And it may not matter in the end. Guest’s good heart and sense of humor—along with his impressive writing—deliver the story as he wanted his reader, finally, to know it. And it’s a good, horrible story. And in the end he finds poetry—and his is fabulous poetry, funny, full of thought, and intense—and he finds love. He’s become the young man we hope moves in next door, and he has given us this surprising and big-hearted book through which we can get to know him. And then, of course, there’s the boy our mothers told us to stay away from. The one who not only makes waves, but is, himself, a sea full of roiling whitecaps and undertow, of unharnessed energies and misdirection. It is no surprise that Alex Lemon chose a hyper, present-tense novelistic approach for his memoir, Happy. His life had been one of extremes even before his first stroke; what other mode could have captured the desperation of such a bitter and manic story of self-destruction and genuine psychological and physical pain? TLR
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