Some people find a good old-fashioned unburdening of their past therapeutic. In Public Apology, David Bry takes this process a step further by writing letters to all those he has ever slighted--and the results are as funny as they are poignant.
Bry arranges his letters chronologically, from his childhood and college years and eventually into marriage and young parenthood. The early letters reveals Bry's finesse at evoking the particular intensities of childhood and adolescence. One long letter to a camp counselor recounts two summers Bry spent at camp; the romance, longing and alienation he describes are as evocative and descriptive as many novels with loftier literary ambitions. Bry also cleverly depicts specific humiliations of high school and college, floating so effortlessly from humor to searing self-observations about his previous incarnations that the book becomes an unexpectedly emotional reading experience.
One of Bry's funniest, most revealing letters describes playing hooky from school to attend a Sting concert. His lines about Sting's persona are some of the pithiest, most precise criticism ever written about the man; Bry, who's made his bacon as a record reviewer, knows how to describe the way we can latch on to three minutes of sound to cement our fluid identities.
Public Apology is a brilliant slice of memoir: funny, awkward and painful, but capable of making a person misty-eyed now and again. --Donald Powell, freelance writer