Feverland: A Memoir in Shards
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“Alex Lemon is a brave, headlong writer, and he captures the life of the body with vivid and memorable intensity.”—Mark Doty
Brain surgery. Assault weapons in the bed of a pickup truck. Sophia Loren at the Oscars. Rilke, Rodin, and the craters of the moon. Recovery and disintegration. Monkeys stealing an egg outside a temple in Kathmandu. Brushing teeth bloody on long car rides under blue skies. Pain, ours and what we bring to others. Wildfires in southern California. Rats in Texas. Childhood abuse. Dreams of tigers and blackout nights. The sweetness of mangoes. A son born into a shadowy hospital room. Love. Joy.
In Feverland, Alex Lemon has created a fragmented exploration of what it means to be a man in the tumult of twenty-first-century America—and a harrowing, associative memoir about how we live with the beauties and horrors of our pasts. How to move forward, Lemon asks, when trapped between the demons of one’s history and the angels of one’s better nature? How to live in kindness—to become a caring partner and parent—when one can muster very little such tenderness for oneself? How to be here, now? How to be here, good?
Immersed in darkness but shot through with light, Feverland is a thrillingly experimental memoir from one of our most heartfelt and inventive writers.
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“Shards” imply something shattered, and indeed, you do understand reading this memoir that something was shattered in this narrator's life. The book starts out with a narrative of severe illness and fragility–a brain tumor–but you soon learn of physical abuse and mental illness as well. The narrator has traveled all over the world and read a great deal too, but there is darkness overshadowing much of his experience. I had a difficult time figuring out when was the right time to read this book, because next to his beautiful reflections would be a description of torture or animal suffering. I couldn't read it at mealtimes or bedtime. I would have put the book down for good, but the beauty of his writing and the quality of wonder in it drew me back over and over again. Proceed with caution.
