Abuelo: A "Memoir"
Dear Reader,
I’m happy to announce that my debut novel will be published later this year with the good folks at Alternative Book Press.
Abuelo: A “Memoir” is a love letter to my grandfather Jose Rivera, and charts our relationship over the years, from innocent pre-adolescence to my rebellious teen years and beyond. Our relationships shape us, and my grandfather played a pivotal role in my development, one I did not recognize until long after he was gone.
Exploring first loves, family trauma, religious doubt, and grief, Abuelo explores what it means to live our lives in light of another and how their shadows loom large over every aspect of who we are.
I’ll have more details shortly as the publishing process moves along, but I wanted to give you, my readers, a heads-up in hopes that your support might get this little book off the ground and into the hands of people who might enjoy it. With that said, I’ve included an excerpt from the book’s introduction for you to enjoy. If you’re interested in reading an advance copy and would like to join our book launch team, please feel free to fill out the form below.
Thank you!
-Ryan
Excerpt from Abuelo: A “Memoir”
No one sets out to write a memoir because they believe their lives are particularly interesting. Most often, they're not, and those that are, are that rare breed of individual whose lives are prepackaged for literary greatness. The rest of us are trying to make sense of our very ordinary stories. We've tried it all—therapy, religion, alcohol, you name it, and when those failed, we turned to literature. We're those foolish individuals who believe that writing things down helps heal those wounded parts of us we've buried under our vices of choice. I can't say it works, but bookstores are still filled with our failed efforts at self-exorcism.
When I began this project, I thought writing a memoir would be simple. Retelling one's life story is undoubtedly easier than conjuring up a fictional world with fictional characters and fictional emotions (though one could argue that all fiction’s fueled by reality, that is, the author's reality, the inner life that seeps through the subconscious and into the characters we create).
At least, that's what I thought.
Unlike fiction, a memoir relies on one's memory, the events we store in the neocortex, in hopes of transferring them to paper. But memory’s a tricky thing. How do we know if our memories are real? Do things really happen as we remember them, or are our memories simply projections, useful fictions we construct to make sense of the world around us, abstractions we build with actual events?
I have this memory of my grandfather so vivid that I can't help but believe it's real. We're sitting on his porch in Puerto Rico, staring out onto the water-soaked street, sheets of summer rain beating against the pavement like a drumline, lightning streaking through the sky; a purple blur of electric fire. As if appearing out of the ether—a horse and a rider shrouded in shadow and rain. The horse and the rider stare back at me. His almond skin is slick with moisture, and, in the darkness, he merges into his horse like a centaur; two creatures becoming one.
I still taste the air on my tongue as the cooling sensation of rain slowly robs my skin of the island's oppressive heat. I still hear my grandfather's heart beating in his chest as I curl up in his arms, the steady thump of his heart rattling against his ribs like a conga player drumming out a beat. It's all there, at the forefront of my mind, as vivid as the computer before me and the clack of the keys as I type these words. But there's something else, a vague impression that none of it is authentic, that my memory of the horse and rider is nothing but an amalgamation of memories, useful scraps pieced together by my subconscious for reasons beyond my conscious mind. Herein lies my issue. How can I write a memoir if I can't tell the difference between what’s true and what’s fiction?
The book you're about to read is a novelization of real events, a faux memoir, if you will. I say that in case the fact-checkers come for me, though the one expert on my life qualified enough to critique this work is also the author and, as stated above, I’ve arrived at the limits of my own self-knowledge. While most things happened as stated, some events and people have merged into an amalgam of memory and self-interest (no one really remembers things as they were, anyways).
In this, I find kinship with those gospel writers who wrote a detailed account about a carpenter from Nazareth while playing fast and loose with dates and times and apparently without losing a grain of truth.
I can't speak for the characterization of the friends and family who might appear in the book. They, too, are victims of the fickle way memories encode people into our brains. We never truly see people for who they are. We see them as reflections of light bouncing back over and through our corneas, interpreted and reinterpreted by firing neurons until our brain registers another life outside our own. In the end, we're left with a portrait, an artist's rendering, and no matter how life-like the portrait we’re ultimately left with the illusion of life. Every person we’ve met and will ever meet exists only as we understand them, the real them, trapped between the plates of their skulls, known only to God and their ten-dollar shrink.
This begs the question, why should you bother reading this book? Surely, you'd be better off reading something real? Like one of those celebrity memoirs—those deep and insightful looks into the lives of the rich and famous, written in their own hand and certainly not by an underpaid ghostwriter lost in the halls of Penguin or HarperCollins.
Although, this course of action assumes that something must be real to be true, and that, dear reader, is often never the case.
Reality belongs to the realm of physics. Physics tells us how and when, what and who, but truth tells us why, and the great question "why" belongs to theology, philosophy, poetry, and art. Truth can't be reduced to what we can observe, it's far larger than that, and while this book plays with reality, I'd like to believe that it's true.
So, yes, cards on the table, I failed to write a memoir. But I like to think that in failing to recall things as they were, I get the opportunity to depict things as they are, that is, the truth. I’ll reserve my judgment as to whether this book says anything true. Ultimately that job falls to you, the reader.
We’re all, in the end, unreliable narrators, writing fiction with our lives in hopes of finding meaning. Writers are the ones foolish enough to write it down and put it into print. Posterity will decide whether this author's truth is worthy of discussion, and if not, I ask that you pass the copy along to someone else. Maybe they'll find this jumbled mess of memories useful.
Who knows, maybe you will too.