True Names Pdf Summary
It was the 1950’s, a time of calm, a time when all things were new and everything seemed possible. A few years before, a noble war had been won, and now life had returned to normal.
For one little boy, however, life had become anything but “normal.”
To all appearances, he and his family lived an almost idyllic life. the father was a respected professor, the mother a witty and elegant lady, someone everyone loved. They were parents to three bright, smiling children:two boys, and a girl. To all appearances, their life seemed ideal. But it was, in fact, all appearances.
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The End of the World as We Know It Review
5.0 out of 5 stars “I grow old, I grow old. I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.”
Reviewed in the United States on June 21, 2012
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Robert Goolrick’s memoir is heart rending, but more importantly it is so blatantly honest that it simply cannot be dismissed. After all, what makes a memoir succeed is total honesty. If the author is lucky, the unburdening of his soul will engender the passion and even the literary skills necessary to convey the truth with artistry and power. In my opinion, Goolrick wrestled hard to grasp the elusive realities of his life; once realized, those truths demanded expression. He must have known when he sat down at his computer to write a memoir, that the terror of his past would reveal itself to him incrementally. The ensuing process would explain why seemingly good people — the people we love and need — do bad things. In the end, he came to realize, not only how comprehensive was the damage done to him, but also how hard it is for one to acknowledge man’s inhumanity, when the human psyche itself is naturally so conflicted.
More than anything man wants to love and be loved, and he depends upon his parents for the satisfaction of that need. Yet man is also driven by a desire to understand the world he lives in or “truth,” as most of us would label that need. An intelligent, compassionate, caring young person, Robert earnestly tried to understand what could possibly drive a human being to perversity and cruelty, but at the same time he also wanted to be loved by the perpetrators of the despicable acts he didn’t understand. For most of his life, he attempted to balance his need for love from his parents with his corresponding desire for truth. Finally, for the purpose of healing or cleansing or freedom, or whatever one wants to call it, he needed to grapple with the past, for his own understanding more than anything. In the process he had to face the devastating effect of “soul murder” on the human psyche in general and on himself. This is a complex story of one man’s journey to individuation and his unabashed admission that given his fate, wholeness like the entire truth, is in the final analysis elusive. All man can hope for is that the truths he uncovers in his own journey will help others and thus spare victims the anguish he was unable to overcome.
Due to the complexity of his life led in a household where the truths of family life were concealed by elaborate facades so that the entire community fell prey to the fabrications of his parents for whom image was more important than understanding, young Robert was confused as to who his parents really were or what he was about. Goolrick attributes their lives of alcoholism and theatrical displays to their insecurities and personal failures. His mother was not employed, as was the pattern for young southern women of her time; the father was a mediocre professor of third rate courses. After failing at writing novels or poetry, both parents, although intelligent, possessed little in the way of inner resources to buttress the anxiety and disillusionment of their provincial lives. They simply didn’t measure up to the goals they both had set and thus retreated into alcoholism and despair.
Robert notes that his parents were much admired for their sophistication, beauty and intelligence. Early on, his siblings and he regarded them as admirable. However there are clues to domestic turmoil when his brother is expelled from Williams College, has a nervous breakdown at 35, and when Robert, too, has a psychotic break at 35 and attempts suicide. Goolrick describes a southern culture of the fifties and sixties that emulated the frenetic lives of Zelda and F.Scott Fizgerald. People fall down drunk; people throw up on each other and on each other’s floors, people drink fashionable drinks, and good hosts know how to mix them. People dress for the cocktail hour in satin and silk, gloves and dark suits. People are elegant, turned out like debutantes for others to admire and listen to their entertaining anecdotes. This was social success, this achievement of desultory sophistication. People liked that; they sought that.
As intangible as the entire truth of his personal history was to Goolrick, he strived throughout his life to understand, not only what the essence of his parents’ personalities were, but also what his own deeper substance was. He fastens on a key incident in his parents’ past where the mother returns home under ambiguous circumstances to change a party dress that has been destroyed by cigarette ashes. Although the boy does not understand the significance of the burned spot on his mother’s dress, he intuitively knows that the truth behind the incident is dark, another clue to the depravity behind his parents’ masks of dignity and grace. Thus, in writing his memoir, he recalls their emotional and verbal abuse, their cruelties of omission and commission. He recounts how he purchased the ancestral home for his parents but never received so much as an acknowledgement of his gift. He recognizes that eventually “we become the burden of ourselves.” Eventually man must accept what he is, without excuses and without euphemisms. Just as his mother was never satisfied with her lot, he has his own despair to contend with on a daily basis, and there is no respite from it. After being in the “bin” (mental hospital), he recognizes, “you feel the need to justify yourself,” something he has spent his life doing to no avail, but which perhaps his memoir will achieve, when he and others examine his life on a deeper level. His grasp that “life goes in bad directions when your heart is asleep” acknowledges how important love is and why betrayal by those you love renders one incapable of love. When Robert Goolrick accepts that he is so damaged he cannot love others or, more poignantly, himself, he no longer “shops to buy things that will complete him.” He reveals that he has never found happiness, nor does he expect to. His life has been miserable and without fulfillment. He has figuratively “measured out his life with coffee spoons.” He realizes that when he set his grandmother’s curtains on fire or when he sought pleasure in one night stands or drugging or drinking, that he was just trying to divert himself from the pain of his own failure to live life with any hope of happiness.
He ponders why he drinks so much, does drugs, has promiscuous sex with both genders, removes himself from opportunities at self-disclosure or intimacy or vulnerability. He undergoes therapy, he asks others about their impressions of him, he endures the advanced psychoanalysis of a mental hospital, all in an effort to understand what happened to him to make him unable to experience pleasure, to regard his body with disgust and shame, to remove himself from others and enjoy the isolation of being in a foreign place without anyone knowing where he is, and of defiling his body with a razor for the purpose of an emotional high he doesn’t even understand. A pariah, he seeks to know why and how he has become the kind of man who would do the things he does. Although Goolrick knows the explicit cause of his isolation, despair and shame, he carefully maneuvers the story line by alternating past and present chronology until it is the appropriate time to reveal the cause of his alienation. This he does masterfully.
The central question of the book is how does one go on and try to live when the horror of a pivotal experience derails him. How does one continue the banal steps of an ordinary life that require will and energy in the face of terrible confusion and despair? He marvels that people manage to make their lives work for them. As for him, he has no illusions. He suffers every day and goes to great efforts to calm his body into submission with a gargantuan medical cocktail to treat his various neuroses. In beautifully worded, moving passages of stream-of-consciousness, poetic, rhetorical questions, he asks what it takes to live, to go on, to survive unspeakable emotional betrayal.
Goolrick claims that people are sensual, sexual; they desire pleasure. He is unable to experience those pleasures. For this deprivation, he is still angry and rightfully so. Because he can remember when he, too, had those normal yearnings and the hope that he would be able to express them, he asserts the truth of his past in the hopes that no young man of promise will ever experience the same, so that no young father will violate those for whom he is responsible. In this respect, Goolrick achieves a triumph over darkness in addressing a problem too often shrouded in secrecy. He is an advocate, and his words ring true, even if sometimes the truth is almost impossible to accept because it is so terrible.
The language in this book is raw but powerful. Sometimes it is poetic. Sometimes the syntax is off a bit, almost amateurish, but not very often. Most of the time the books is original in scope, fiery in passion, solid in its observations about life, and compassionate in its descriptions of those doomed or hurt by the selfishness or depravity of others.
Marjorie Meyerle
Colorado Writer
Author of “Hungry Heart”
About Robert Goolrick Author Of The End of the World as We Know It pdf Book
Robert Goolrick Author Of The End of the World as We Know It pdf Book was born in a small university town in Virginia, a town in which, besides teaching, the chief preoccupations were drinking bourbon and telling complex anecdotes, stories about people who lived down the road, stories about ancestors who had died a hundred years before. For southerners, the past is as real as the present; it is not even past, as Faulkner said.
I went to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and then lived in Europe for several years, thinking that I would be an actor or a painter, two things for which I had a passion that outran my talent. I wrote an early novel, and then my parents disinherited me, so I moved to New York, which is where small-town people move to do and say the things they can’t do or say at home, and I ended up working in advertising, a profession that feeds on young people who have an amorphous talent and no particular focus.
Fired in my early fifties, the way people are in advertising, I tried to figure out what to do with the rest of my life, and I came back around to the pastime that had filled the days and nights of my childhood: telling complex anecdotes about the living and the dead. I think, when we read, we relish and devour remarkable voices, but these are, in the end, stories we remember.
I live in a tiny town in Virginia in a great old farmhouse on a wide and serene river with my dog, whose name is Preacher. Since he has other interests besides listening to my stories, I tell them to you.
The End of the World as We Know It pdf, Paperback, Hardcover Book Information
- Publisher : Algonquin Books (March 23, 2007)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 224 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1565124812
- ISBN-13 : 978-1565124813
- Item Weight : 14.4 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.6 x 0.88 x 8.81 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,436,865 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2,642 in Abusive Family Relationships
- #43,589 in Memoirs (Books)
- Customer Reviews: 4.1 out of 5 stars 153 ratings
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