Will Boast (Power Ballads) was seven when his family moved from England to small-town Wisconsin. He grew up straddling two worlds in a comfortable--if not happy--family, the straight-arrow older brother to popular, party-loving Rory. Then, during Will's first year at college, their mother died of cancer. Rory, lost in grief, was killed in a car accident on his way to a party the following year. Boast's father died of alcoholism a few years later. Preparing to review his father's will with his lawyer, Boast found divorce papers for a first marriage he never knew his father had, and thus learned of his two half-brothers in England.
Was his father the devoted but difficult man who worked 12-hour days and came home to cook elaborate family dinners or the hard-partying playboy who cared so little for his first children that he abandoned them? That question anchors the memoir and makes it much more than an account of family secrets. Epilogue starts with Boast's father's death, then cuts back and forth through time as Boast revisits childhood memories in search of the answer and forges tentative connections with his newfound brothers. In an effort to make his losses less painful, he even tries writing alternative drafts of past events, like Rory's last day.
In his raw, lyrical memoir, Boast is less concerned with shaping loss and new beginnings into a neatly resolved story than he is with finding the space to hold the contradictions in his life, allowing him to love his father despite all the unanswered questions and begin to see his own way forward. --Jeanette Zwart, freelance writer and reviewer