Rick Bragg had a tough childhood, growing up poor and with an abusive, mostly absent, father who died young.  His mother’s life was no cakewalk either.  So Rick set out to wrassle some beauty and joy out of the pain and humiliation of growing up in the foothills of the Appalachians in Alabama.  He takes his readers on a big ride, leaves them begging for more, creating a thirst he later slakes by writing two more memoirs.

The Kalamazoo Public Library chose this book and those two later memoirs, Ava’s Man, and The Prince of Frog Town. for their Reading Together series (see pictures of Bragg here)  this year.  I love the fact that a city of 70,000 and a county of 256,000 supports readers and writers in this annual series.  The auditorium of Kalamazoo Central High School holds 800 people.  About 750 of those seats were full last Tuesday night after people streamed in from miles around to hear the author speak.

I used my 30 seconds with the author at the back of the room to ask what he thinks of memoir as a genre (after writing three of these, he will next try a novel).  He had a quick reply, “It all depends on the writing.”  He explained, “You can have a great story, and if you don’t tell it well, the story doesn’t matter.  You can take an ordinary life and make it sing.  You got to write the hell out of it.  Tell it with drama, color, and detail.”

I would love to take a writing class with Rick Bragg (he teaches writing at the University of Alabama now, having left the New York Times reporting job in 2003).  But reading his books carefully might be just as good as sitting in his classroom.

Here are a few things I noticed about Shoutin’. The book is divided into three sections:  The Widow’s Mite, Lies to My Mother, and Getting Even With Life. The few photos become mesmerizing as we get to know the the mother and her three sons.  The story consists of many vignettes, often only a few pages, which could stand on their own.  Each has a beginning, middle, and end.

Bragg wants to brag about his people, his foothills, his culture.  With a kind of barbaric yawp he celebrates the likker-makin’, likker-drinkin’ men of the old South, never romanticizing them and, in fact, when it comes to his father, he shows the cruelty that results from the lethal combination of war and moonshine.

This is memoir the way a journalist writes it–and Bragg’s kind of journalism is the best there is.  Gritty, detailed, and full of last-sentence zinger punchlines and also full of country-flavored metaphor and analogies between the people, the foothill topography, and the birds and animals that inhabit the same territory.  The preface, for example, begins this way:  “I used to stand amazed and watch the redbirds fight. They would flash and flutter like scraps of burning rags through a sky unbelievably blue, swirling, soaring plummeting.  On the ground they were a blur of feathers, stabbing for each other’s eyes.”  Bragg recited those lines by memory when he spoke in Kalamazoo last Tuesday night, explaining that redbirds are Cardinals in our northern jargon, and teaching by example how to love the way words dart and hover and suggest more than they can literally mean.

When he signed the copy of my book, he noticed how many underlinings I had made in the text.  I told him I read with a pen. Here are a few more of my favorite lines:

About himself while a young reporter without academic credentials working at the Anniston Star:  “I did not even try not to be bitter. I had long talks with the sage senior editor, Cody Hall, who made it plain that I should be proud of who I was. ‘Life is too short to dance with an ugly woman,’ and my ugly woman was my own envy.”

“All I knew how to do was tell stories on paper, and didn’t even have one dollop of what one respected editor, Basil Penny, called ‘jelly.’ Basil explained ‘jelly’ as a concoction of a lot of things, but the main ingredient was pretension. Me and him, we were just plain biscuit.”

These two sentence go straight to the heart of the subtext of this memoir.  Underneath the focus on momma’s sacrifice and the American Dream story of rags to (relative) riches, a fight is going on inside the soul of the author.  The impulse is revenge, and this man hails from a long line of what he himself described as “haters.”  Every snub encountered along the way, every subtle condescension from the “trust-fund babies” he worked with in New York and in various newspapers along the way, these he would avenge by winning prizes and writing bestsellers.  Not only could his momma now hold her head up, but he could rub the faces of his rivals in some good ole red Alabama dirt.

Fortunately, the better angels of his nature have a voice also.  He acknowledges some Yankee journalists with long pedigrees genuinely wanted to understand and help the southerners and blue collar workers.  But most importantly, he sees through his own desire for revenge.  His brilliant solution to this problem of tone is to make the envy itself part of the story. The cheap shot would have been to make all Yankees fools and all college graduates snobs–and coincidentally to cut out more than half of the book-buying public.  By showing us enough of his own self-doubt, judgment, insecurity, he makes us root for him to learn and grow.  I cheered more for him when he acknowledged envy and fear than when he won the Pulitzer.

He reminded me, in these moments of another Southerner, William Faulkner, who did not want to go to Stockholm, Sweden, in 1950 to accept the Nobel Prize in Literature, but nevertheless gave one of the most memorable addresses in the history of the prize. His entire speech is recorded here, but these words, especially, might have been written for Rick Bragg: “the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing.”

Shoutin’ is full of the human heart in conflict with itself–with all we know of heaven and all we need of hell, to borrow also from Emily Dickinson.

Quite simply, Rick Bragg wrote the hell out of it.

The book club meets at 7 p.m. once each month.  The hosting rotates among the six members–Sandy, Kim, Mary, Hope, Karen, and me.  We usually begin with drinks, sit at a dining room table, eat hors d’oeuvres and desserts and tell where we did or did not connect with the book, whether we trust the author’s voice, and what we think we learned from reading the book.

In the past year our group discussed Night by Elie Wiesel, Little Heathens, by Mildred Armstrong Kalish, Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, The Life of Pi by Yann Martel, A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini, The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, One Drop by Bliss Broyard, Boom by Tom Brokaw, Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert, Devil in the White City by Eric Larson. Last night the book club met at my house, and the book under discussion was

.

Baptist minister Don Piper is the “I” of the story, but he freely admits that he needed his co-author, Cecil Murphey, to shape the tale.

Don Piper boils down his story this way:  “I died on January 18, 1989. . . . Immediately after I died, I went straight to heaven.  While I was in heaven, a Baptist preacher came on the accident scene.  Even though he knew I was dead, he rushed to my lifeless body and prayed for me.  Despite the scoffing of the Emergency Medical Technicians (EMTs) , he refused to stop praying.  At least ninety minutes after the EMTs pronounced me dead, God answered that man’s prayers.  I returned to earth.”

None of the members of the book club are Baptists, so I was curious about how such an overtly religious book would be received.  The first responses were positive.  The book got high marks for readability, pacing, and dramatic narrative.  No one questioned the validity of the story.

Overall, however, the assessment of the book came down to the assessment of the voice, the character of Don Piper, the man who tells the story.  Here the group became much more critical.  The book seemed to be written the confirm the truth of theological claims rather than to share the transformation of a life.  Piper goes out of his way to distance himself, for example, from other narratives of death survival  He doesn’t go into the light, he wants us to know, he goes straight to Christian heaven.

When his description follows familiar biblical narratives (yes, he walked on streets of gold and saw the pearly gates), it may be comforting to fellow believers, but it is not compelling reading.   However, when he tries to describe the ineffable without the aid of the Bible, he is much more convincing.   I loved his description of heavenly music:  “I can only describe it as a holy swoosh of wings. But I’d have to magnify that thousands of times to explain the effect of the sound in heaven.  It was the most beautiful and pleasant sound I’ve ever heard, and it didn’t stop.

It was like a song that goes on forever.  I felt awestruck, wanting only to listen.  I didn’t just hear music.  It seemed as if I were a part of the music–and it played in and through my body.  I stood still, and yet I felt embraced by the sounds. . . .My heart filled with the deepest joy I’ve ever experienced.”

We book clubbers wanted to see not only the glories of heaven, but also tenderness, joy, and larger vision as a result of a visit to heaven.  Piper’s pain in his crushed body understandably took precedence over what might have been more of an immediate transformation.  His recovery, especially his ability to walk, is the second miracle in the story, again brought about by the prayers and support of loved ones. One person we wanted to know a lot more about was his wife Eva.  She is a very flat character, and, surely, she must have a story of her own!  Piper continued as a minister and is using this story for evangelical purposes.  The book has sold more than 1.5 million copies!

In the end, we gave this book 2 stars out of 4 and had a wonderful conversation about our own spiritual experiences, heaven, hell, miracles and religious backgrounds.  The book may not have been a great one, but we had a great time talking about it.

Coincidently, most of the members of the book club stayed on to watch Barack Obama accept the nomination of the Democratic party for president.

It occurs to me that evaluating memoir and judging political candidates is a similar kind of process.  How much have you suffered and what have you done with that suffering, is one of the questions we ask the protagonists of any story, including potential president protagonists. The women of the Stratford Woods book club, listening to Barack Obama, were not just listening to one man tell his incredible story.  No, we were listening to the song of  transformed pain of all who have suffered, which is all of us.  And we were inspired to become better people here on earth.   We were part of the music, and, for us, it was a foretaste–90 minutes worth–of heaven.