High Desert

Punk Rock memoirs are, in my experience, beautiful, painful, sad, and necessary. But if you weren't a punk kid yourself (and I was not), a little confounding because the author has trouble seeing his or her way out of the most formative moments of their life. And what you end up with is a "you had to be there" story that makes sense if you were "there" and feels like a confusing pile of images and moments that don't add up to much.

 Michael Patrick MacDonald's memoir ALL SOULS about his childhood in South Boston is simply one of the best memoirs I've ever read. The followup EASTER RISING, about his teenage punk years, is all too often a convoluted mess of characters, flashes of memory and grand statements. It makes no sense because the author doesn't take the extra step to HAVE it make sense. He just falls back on, "well I guess you had to be there" 

Distance gives clarity. And a memoir is a story, despite being autobiographical, told at a degree of remove so it can be told clearly. And when it's not, it loses what makes a story a story at all, namely the reader knows where they are. Doesn't mean it has to be clean and neat. But it does have to cleaned up enough to be a story and not the early page proofs of one. 

All of which is to say HIGH DESERT is a beautiful, painful, sad and necessary story of growing into being a black punk kid in the racist high desert of Southern California in the 1990s. And it has whole sections where, if this wasn't your teenage story (and it wasn't mine) you'll wonder who characters are and why they matter and why they act the way they do and why this moment or that is so important when the author races right past it and doesn't bother to tell you or explain. Maybe HIGH DESERT seeks feeling rather than fact which is a reasonable goal. But it ends up unwittingly excluding the reader who didn't live the same adolescence as the author. And I think for a book all about finding your people, that isn't really the point.