Though textbooks, teachers, and editors
tell writers to hook readers from the start, few books grab me with their
opening pages.
I might expect to struggle with one that begins
by detailing the process of digging a hole in the ground.
But I knew almost immediately that I would
enjoy the 2019 Leacock Medal winner Boy Wonders, a memoir by Globe and
Mail sports columnist Cathal Kelly. Its
hole-digging introduction and the chapters that follow blend thoughtfulness with humour in a way that makes
it both fun and worthy of literary award recognition.
In recent years, the Leacock Medal has
favoured narratives that tell one long, continuous story, and I had come to
believe that this might be the award’s niche in the CanLit landscape. Boy
Wonders seems to break with this inclination. It is a disparate collection
of reminiscences set in 1970s and 80s Toronto and presented under topics
running from Star Wars and Michael Jackson’s Jacket to Porno and Fights.
Each story could stand alone.
But together they describe a life
experience as well as any long chronicle. In fact, Kelly suggests that reliance
on vignettes may be the best approach to autobiography because our memories are
just a bunch of fuzzy screenshots, Freud's “screen memories,” augmented by what we think transpired
around them. Afterall he says, “at our core, what are we but an agglomeration
of the things we believe happened to us?”
In a big way, the book is not about the events
of the author’s boyhood, but more of an effort to find meaning in his memories
and to tie them to the man he is today.
He believes, for example, his enduring
cynicism began in the lineup to see The Empire Strikes Back when a van
soared by, announcing “Darth Vader is Luke’s father! Darth Vader is Luke’s
father!”
The digging of the hole that opened the
book marked him similarly and became memorable because the trench grew too deep
to escape. He stayed there for what may
have been hours before his mother calmly rescued him. As she does, you learn of her stoic Irishness
and single-parent influence. In these initial
pages, you also glimpse the author’s skill in vocabulary, metaphors, and pacing;
and you start to understand how minor events can assume significance both in
shaping our adult selves and in illuminating the wonders of everyone’s early
years.
We are reminded that childhood is the time
when humans can “have purpose without an end,” play with “no objectives or
goals,” and just “do in order to do.”
As I hoped, this bemused musing flowed
throughout Boy Wonders.
Yet in reading these stories, I recalled
parallel personal experiences often thinking that my own were richer, more
dramatic and interesting, at least to baby-boomer me. Kelly’s recollection of the Space Shuttle
Challenger disaster resonates with my day around JFK’s assassination, the
connection he feels for post-disco, glam-metal music surprised me with its similarity
to my attachment to the sounds of the sixties, and his reactions to Orwell were
much the same as what I witnessed in my kids at even earlier ages. This all made me reflect.
But unlike my random screen memories, Cathal
Kelly’s stories make for a good book because of the craft applied to their
recounting. This, in turn, induces that introspection, which is the effect of a
memoir that may lack technical information and historical detail, but brims
with personality, candor, and wit.
Of course, when we examine our own
experience, try to find meaning, and search for perspective, it helps to do so
with a mollifying sense of humour: the practice that the Leacock Medal
celebrates and that this year’s winner seems to do with ease.
Do yourself a favour
Cost me $4.99 for the book on Kindle
Do yourself a favour
Cost me $4.99 for the book on Kindle