His parents were drunk, repressive, and abusive - as many parents are. Without wanting to seem too cynical, I wonder - isn’t it enough for someone to tell the story of their childhood in an engaging way? Must it also “move our hearts”? After all, Goolrick’s childhood was not so different from many others. But while I enjoyed the book and found it engaging, I can’t say my “heart was changed” by it, whatever that means. Such is the nature of the book business, I suppose products have to be advertised. I can’t help finding such over-the-top statements off-putting. For example, Amanda Stern, author of The Long Haul, writes of Goolrick that “Through gorgeous prose, he gradually discloses layer upon layer of deplorable abuse, and as the coating underneath becomes exposed, so too does an exquisitely sensitive soul, whose self-awareness is so uniquely well articulated, it would shock me if the reader’s heart went unchanged.” The End of the World as we Know It has received a lot of publicity critics and reviewers have covered it in superlative praise, and the cover is laden with accolades from fellow memoir-writers. The room smelled like liquor and night sweat.
There were grownups snoring softly in the room. On the morning when Goolrick is first abused by his father, for example, after experiencing a vivid dream, he says: “I woke up and I was in the bed where I had started. Goolrick’s sad story is told in a simple but vivid style full of short, single-clause sentences - an effective way of conveying the immediate details of a closely observed life. Adult memories like these are juxtaposed with scenes recalled from a child’s point of view, when Goolrick’s parents seemed impossibly beautiful and glamorous, despite the fact they were actually drunk and poor. The book opens with Goolrick as an adult, caring for his dying father (his mother, we learn, has died six years earlier).
Each chapter is set at a different time period, so the notion of cause and effect can be confusing, but perhaps that’s part of the point. In this case, it’s not so much that you can’t wait to find out what happened next - it’s clear from pretty early on there’s not going to be any great payoff - but because you get so deeply absorbed in the details of everyday family life. Like most books about unhappy children in dysfunctional families, The End of the World as we Know It is difficult to put down.
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