Congratulations Who Are You Again a Memoir Where Was Key a Professor at First
I cannot overstate the importance of the humor in our lives, reading and otherwise. Sometimes one just badly needs to choice up a funny book. Fortunstely, Harrison Scott Cardinal agrees with me and has written a very humorous ane, a glimpse into the life of a author who finds himself on the cusp of being a recognized author. Not afraid to poke fun at himself, his dreams, his aspirations, his quest to take information technology all. As a child he loved to be the joker, loved to make people laugh, a part that often got him in trouble at school and with his parents, or others in potency. "On Saturday nights I listened to A Prairie Home Companion in my bedroom and tried to imitate Tom Keith'due south sound furnishings, while my mother stood at the locked door and prayed for me." Thought I was reading about my husband who often finds himself and his jokes more agreeable than practise I. In fact I'k giving him this book to him next to read. But equally nosotros know life is not all humor, and in an honest style the volume also explores some lessons learned, fiddling detours, a mine field. Ones pursuit of Fame and glory, no matter how agreeable ane is, always has a price, and sometimes it is more than than one wants to pay. ARC from Harper and Library matter.
Schoolhouse is back, which ways our nation's motivational speakers are polishing their presentations to enthrall and inspire students across the state. These earnest TED Talker types — educators, athletes, activists — have touching and triumphant stories to share with young people, usually trafficking in beautiful abstractions about Hard Piece of work and Assertive In Yourself and other tropes of this tattered merely durable thing nosotros phone call the American Dream. I think many such visitors to my public loftier school, long agone in Mississippi. One had been a Chicago Carry, another in the U.Southward. Navy. I fondly remember one who seemed a petty angry — a progressive option, we thought, for an inspirational speaker. The human wore a haunted visage. He had seen some ugly business. 'Nam? Smack? He explained why information technology was bad to drib out of school and how our lives would exist ruined forever considering we'd be poor and distressing and stupid. He then pulled from his duffel bag a xanthous novelty key as long as his arm, which he called "The Cardinal to Success." "Does anybody know what the key to success is?" he said. We leaned forward in our bleacher seats, for nosotros did non wish to be poor and sad and stupid. "A rich daddy!" somebody yelled out. "You got to have skills!" said another. "Like if yous can weld!" someone antiseptic. The Key to Success is Welding, no that didn't sound right. The reply, he explained, was on the dorsum of his magical homemade wooden key. If only he would tell the states! All would be known! Finally, he turned the object around, on which he'd painted, in all-caps, "Self-DISCIPLINE." We'd been hoping for something more like "WIZARDS" or "KARATE." Those were at least things you could become your head around. Eventually, after a few historical anecdotes about the virtue of self-field of study, we acceded, yes, this rare quality would save u.s. from a lifetime of sad stupid non-success. I couldn't speak for my classmates, but I didn't desire a normal life. I wanted Greatness, Fame, Medals, the End of the Rainbow. Who can say why? This foreign fire was inside me, that's all I knew. No man in my family had e'er even finished college. A quarter-century later on, my own American Dream came true. I became an author and the starting time member of my family to have his name said aloud on National Public Radio, which felt amazing, and would have felt fifty-fifty more than amazing if anyone in my family knew what that was. I won a crystal plaque that'south so heavy and beautiful I'yard embarrassed to display it. I have an amanuensis. I write books. It really is amazing to me, what my life is now. Occasionally, I get invited to high schools and colleges to inspire students, and I feel an overwhelming compulsion not to mask the truth with inspiring abstractions. The offset hard truth: In that location is no single Key — information technology's more of an Unwieldy Keyring of Success, the jangling hoop your assistant main wore like a medieval weapon. Which central does one use offset? What if you don't even know what to be successful at? Medicine, or music? Concern, or boxing? Practice you follow the certain thing, or the passion? What if 1 is very passionate about sure things? How to cull? This is America, the greatest nation in the history of the world, alongside Rome and perhaps Iceland, and in this great land, your dream can take many forms. You can do something wholesome and productive, similar practice medicine in a identify where they ride llamas, or build mattresses that never habiliment out, or you can do something evil, similar make another Spider-Man movie. I was nearly thirty before I finally eliminated all my options, which included forensic psychologist (thanks, Silence of the Lambs!), weatherman (Groundhog Twenty-four hour period), and disc jockey (Good Morning time, Vietnam). The vocation of writing was a dark horse, emerging much after, after a nervous breakdown. Nobody warned me that I might be a husband and a father before finally learning what I was supposed to do with my life. I can be overwhelmed by all the career options, or one can embrace their dizzying innumerableness. That's why our commencement Key to Success is GRATITUDE AT HOW MANY CAREER OPTIONS YOU Have COMPARED TO YOUR PEASANT FORBEARS, by which I mean an awareness that for most of human history, your options would have been much simpler, back when you did whatever your parents did, which was usually to dice of typhoid. If your mother was a subjugated washerwoman, then maybe, with difficult work, y'all became a subjugated washerwoman-slash-leech-gatherer. Today, thanks to the Magna Carta, penicillin, and LinkedIn, there exist many kinds of subjugation to aspire to. Plagues no longer plague. Today, we are plagued with dreams. That'south a blessing. You're probably adept at lots. I must as well possess A GENERAL TOLERANCE FOR LOWER BACK PAIN, because whatever you finally decide to be — even if you're smart and talented, according to your mother and/or your test scores — the actual manifestation of your dream volition very probable not occur until you are at an age more associated with high claret pressure level than youthful ambition. Every now and again, they do requite Oscars to actual homo babies, only these rare instances can harm the dreamer's sense of fourth dimension and justice. How long would it accept me to write a book? (I figured two years, three, tops. Stephen King said information technology should take about three months, which is how you lot know his real proper noun is the Dark Lord Baphomet.) It took me ten years. I wrote that book. It'south chosen The World's Largest Man. This is not that volume. This is the book nearly that book, sort of, just not actually? Nobody tells you that there'south this affair called the Great American Dream Value Menu, and you pretty much only go to option three items: Family (marriage, children, lawn care), Nearly of us are lucky to get 3 of the above, and if yous're a single parent, yous pretty much just get to choice two, and if you're beneath the poverty line, you'll probable take to work very hard for only i, which means that every dreamer needs A WILLINGNESS TO FORGO WHAT MANY AMERICANS FEEL THEY DESERVE As A HUMAN RIGHT, because you won't take it all. Nobody does, at least not until they're very old, at which signal you lose your wellness and all your friends die. While you lot're busy neglecting friends and family in pursuit of your dream, you're going to crave A Clear-EYED RECOGNITION OF YOUR CAPACITY FOR HURTING OTHERS. Nobody tells you that your dream will plough you into a vampire, even when information technology's a perfectly honorable dream. (Talk to a missionary child.) Your ambition, noble though it be, will compel you lot to care for your loved ones as means or ciphers via manipulation or fail. The capacity for evil exists in every human being breast, specially in the hearts of dreamers. Guard confronting it at every turn. The dreamer also badly needs a venue for the celebration of small victories on the fashion to the big victory, which will never come, considering dreams don't so much come up true every bit evolve and reproduce, birthing new and more complicated fantasies. Information technology's hard to know when to finish and celebrate with that beer. Accordingly, i of the most overlooked Keys to Success is FRIENDS WITH A POOL. Y'all need a mode to indulge in minor healthy pleasures on the regular, because joy now is well-nigh always better than joy afterward. Pools, porches, boats, beaches, riding bikes with your daughters with a stereo strapped to the handlebars, these are as essential to the American Dream as hard work. Don't forgo them. Easily the most necessary particular on our clattering keyring is READINESS TO Exist WHOLLY TRANSFORMED INTO A NEW Animate being. Ambition led me down many night roads and into sloughs of despond. Dreaming is dangerous business organization. My illusions — regarding talent, coin, how much the world would dear me, and how good a husband and father I was — were pried from my white-knuckled hands past time and truth. The dream broke me. You can fight the breaking, or allow information technology happen and be remade, kinder, gentler, less vampire-like. I could go along. One also needs MENTORS, Health INSURANCE, and PEOPLE WHO WON'T LIE TO YOU Nearly HOW BAD You ARE AT THE Thing Yous WANT TO Be GOOD AT, but how tin i say all this to anxious and eager young students? Information technology might brand them sad and stifle their dreaming. When I climb the stage and take in the exquisite hunger of all those faces, I think of the aroused man with the yellow key — aroused, I recall, because he knew how impossible it was to illumine the multifarious unknowability of the American Dream to any kid. The dream is a cute creature, magical and miraculous, with many faces and eyes and tentacles, and I am grateful that it has generated reasonable financial security for my family and provided me something useful and beautiful to practice in my short time on this planet. With hard work and even harder lessons and the indelible beloved of people who kept me from going full-vampire, I've found a way to tame the dream-monster and live a relatively normal and happy life, which is exactly the thing I always thought I didn't want. Funny how that happens. So this volume, Congratulations, Who Are You Again?, is about all that. If you liked this review, you probably won't hate the book, just you lot nevertheless might. I promise you don't. I beloved you guys!
Friends (beers, craven wings on the grill),
Health (exercise, apparel that don't brand you aroused),
Status (money, cars that smell good),
Avocations (volunteerism, the cello), and
The Dream (to write books, finish whaling, build a motorcar that runs on garbage)
I am the tertiary of three start time writer friends to read this book the week our first books came out in 2020. "Wait to read information technology then," 1 said. "You lot will need it so," the other chimed. They were right. This book spoke into the silence of the long, unglamorous road that is publishing your first book. It named the low-cal that beckons me to birth something beautiful, the calling I can't resist. Information technology voiced the vulnerability of making, trusting it might matter to someone, and finding no corporeality of success will satiate. While Key'south story isn't the *same* as mine (hello, Christian not-fiction books like This Too Shall Last don't exactly earn 300k advances, and I did die inside for approximately xx minutes afterward reading that particular role...), his words articulated a role of my story and then few empathize. I felt seen, from checking my Amazon ranking similar I'm ardently waiting for the 2nd coming of Christ, to the way I often had to apply gorilla glue to my ass to stay in my writing chair to get a pitiful 500 words written in a day to somehow meet 60k past my deadline. Here we are—writers, night and full of desire, compelled to create past a lite we sometimes cannot run into...Except Key'southward words punctuate that darkness and desire with the light of laughter. And after releasing my first volume into the wild, I needed to weep-laugh my way back to the steady light that started this marathon in the outset identify. This book is not *just* for other authors. It's for everyone with a dream. Just, damn, this kickoff time author is glad she could read this the week her dream baby monster started seeing the scary light of 24-hour interval.
Nobody tells you that someday someone will recommend this book to you and you'll read it to see what all the fuss is nigh and you'll be hooked by the first page and you'll laugh and you'll weep and your brain volition cook with the wonder of it all and it might just change your life forever.
Nobody tells you this.
But it happens.
Harrison Scott Key wants to spare you none of the gory details of writing a book. Consider him a sarcastic tour guide who takes you behind the scenes of Walt Disney World, showing you the plumbing and wires it takes to brand the magic appear, who makes you consider the sheer quantity of trash someone has to have out. As he talks about writing his beginning volume (wildly funny, moderately successful), he lays out the toll, in almost excruciating detail, to both himself and his family. He doesn't shy away from sharing his own ambitions and insecurities, at every step of the procedure from writing all the way through his volume tour. Most importantly, he's just patently funny. I've really wished someone would write a book about being an unsuccessful author, or a memoir about quitting on their dream of writing a book and existence really happy that they quit. Congratulations, Who Are You lot Once again? basically satisfies that longing: information technology makes me feel better for questioning whether I really desire to write a book. Information technology lets me off the claw. Watch his TED talk if you want to get a sense of taste of how funny he is well-nigh ambition and disappointment pursuing the American Dream. Most of the books I read about writing (and I've read a off-white number) have an encouraging air about them. "Write what you lot feel chosen to write" is the drumbeat undergirding every one of them, the climax to which each book crescendos. These books all guide y'all, more or less, through the sleeky theme park of their own success. Call me crazy, but I prefer the backside-the-scenes tour whatsoever day.
Incredibly intelligent, and the funniest volume I've always read. Can't form words about how good it is.
This might be interesting if you're a young wannabe author. Or if you've read his earlier book and wondered about how he came to write it. I'm neither so I simply found the book uninteresting.
Harrison Scott Key, Congratulations, Who Are Y'all Again? A Memoir (New York: Harpers, 2018) , 347 pages including five appendices and no illustrations except an ink figure of a canis familiaris drawn by Protrude, the author's daughter, while I waited for him to sign my volume. Over the years I accept enjoyed reading memoirs by authors every bit I learn how they approach the craft and gleam advice for myself. Annie Dillard'southward The Writing Life, Eudora Welty,'s One's Writer'south Start, Robert Laxalt's, Travels with My Royal: A Memoir of the Writing Life, and Dee Brown's When the Century was Immature are books that come to mind. I've also read many "how-to" books by authors who tell us how to approach the craft. Without looking at my shelf, I can recollect Stephen King, On Writing; William Zinsser, On Writing Well; Ray Bradbury, Zen and the Art of Writing; and John McPhee, Typhoon #four. All these authors of memoirs and how-to books take an impressive listing of publications under their belt when they sat down to give advice on writing. Harrison Scott Key decided he'd write his how-to memoir immediately post-obit the publication of his first book. But and so, his beginning book won the Thurber Prize. The real question is "why, after having read then many books on the topic, I haven't published a best seller?" I'm not going to reply that and will stick to critiquing Mr. Cardinal's book. I enjoyed Congratulations, Who Are You lot Again? even though I am not sure I would have called this a memoir. I'm not sure what it is. Part of the book reads similar a "how-to" transmission for becoming famous and having a best seller. Part of the volume is the author's quest to find his life'south purpose as he charges through much of his 20s and 30s like Don Quixote. Part of this books appears to be a sure-fire way to receive a summons to divorce court. Another part of this book is Mr. Key'due south depository for lists. And just in case you didn't have your fill of lists within the text, Key fills his appendices with lists. What is it nigh all these lists? I was wondering why he didn't include a grocery list, but ended that maybe his married woman, out of gratitude for now having more than than one toilet in the house, has volunteered to shop for the family unit. But my hunch is that Mr Key'south lists are actually passwords. What a better fashion to keep them close at mitt than to have a book he tin pull off his shelf and quickly recall his password for Facebook or Twitter or peradventure fifty-fifty First Chatham Bank. And, one final "what is it…" What is it virtually depressed people and pelicans? Key speaks of his interest in these "freakish and ungainly" birds while depressed. Personally, I find pelicans graceful. A one-time professor of mine, Donald McCullough, while dealing with depression, actually published a book titled The Wisdom of Pelicans. Like my one-time professor, I observe pelicans graceful, not freakish. I'm not sure what'south wrong with Mr. Cardinal. If pelicans are then depressing, maybe I should surrender watching the birds fish. Merely that sounds too depressing. That said, this is a funny volume. And writing a funny book is one of Mr. Cardinal's life goals. He'south at present achieved this goal twice, start with The World's Largest Man, and now with Congratulations. Although Central acknowledges his indebtedness to a host of authors, he never mentioned the fabulous 1940 movie, "Sullivan's Travels," staring Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake. In "Sullivan's Travels," McCrea plays a movie producer who wants to brand a motion picture nigh the seriousness of the Great Low in club to move people to reply in compassion. Only after a misfortune, he has an epiphany and realizes people as well demand to laugh. Sullivan learns this wisdom after at the end of the picture show. Fundamental comes this conclusion on page 49. My 3rd complaint about Key's writing (In example you lot weren't keeping count: #1 complaint: Lists. #2 complaint: Rude remarks well-nigh pelicans) is his overuse of misdirects. Key will begin describing the great things that follow his things such as being published. Following such good news, Key rambles on nigh all the invitations to TV and radio shows to brand an appearance. He seems to have a healthy shell on NPR's Terry Gross. Others enquire him to requite keynote speeches. He's also mugged past admirers on Savannah'southward streets. Just when the reader is nigh to believe that there is a god who rewards difficult work, the reader is redirected into what really happened. Usually nothing. The exception is an actual mugging on Savannah's streets. Really, Fundamental never wrote about being mugged, but it could happen. These redirects were funny the outset 57 times this reader fell for this comic technique, but the 58th fourth dimension was just also much. Equally I was coming to the end of the book, I idea that if there was one more than redirect, I'd rip the book apart and toss it out the window. Thankfully, beingness about the end, I was reading lists and it's pretty hard to redirect a reader from 1 listing to another. Who knew lists could be funny? Complaints aside, I thoroughly enjoyed this book and laughed a lot. My biggest take-abroad from Mr. Key is that writing is like giving birth. I've heard that before, simply Key attaches his unique twist that refreshes this cliché: "Writing is like giving nativity, and it is, it is just similar giving nascency, in the Middle Ages, when all the babies died." (114). Writing is hard work, and such hard piece of work in this case produces a volume that the reader tin easily read and enjoy. And ane final comment for clarification. I am not the minister who accosted Keys in a restaurant request to be included in his next book. Such a asking is foolish for if Keys says the things he does about his wife and children, whom he obviously adores, what would he say about a coveting minister. Of course, the minister did find himself in the book, only he's non identified. What fun is that?
4.five/5
inspiring, witty, clever; in that location are many words i could employ to describe this book. i think i of the biggest things i appreciated about it was the raw honesty in which it was told.
oh and information technology'due south admittedly hilarious.
a delightfully sincere and hilarious memoir! well-balanced sense of humour and surprisingly poignant, i laughed and cried through this one. its words are for everyone stumbling toward a dream.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 98 reviews
Source: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39889346-congratulations-who-are-you-again
0 Response to "Congratulations Who Are You Again a Memoir Where Was Key a Professor at First"
إرسال تعليق