Down from Troy: A Doctor Comes of Age

by Richard Selzer

Overview

This beautifully crafted memoir by one of America's finest storytellers generally is considered Richard Selzer's most moving and personal work. The story is set in Troy, New York, during the Great Depression of the 1930s and is a classic rite-of-passage tale. Selzer was the son of two strong-willed parents, both of whom tried to shape their son to their own desires and ends. His father, the doctor, wanted his son to be a physician and to follow in his footsteps. His mother, a singer, wanted her son to become a writer. Richard struggled to choose as his emotions were buffeted by his parents and their persuasive and subtle argumentation. "Had I loved one more than the other," Selzer declared, "my choice would have been easier." In the end, he excelled both as a surgeon and as a writer, fulfilling his parents' wishes and discovering himself in the process.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780870136030
Publisher:	Michigan State University Press
Publication date:	11/30/2001
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	300
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Richard Selzer is the author of numerous books and articles. He is a former surgeon and professor of surgery. Selzer taught writing at Yale University and is the recipient of dozens of awards and honors, including a Pushcart Prize, National Magazine Award (for his essays), an American Medical Writer's Award, and a Guggenheim fellowship. His work has been published in New American Review, Esquire, Harper's, and other periodicals.

Table of Contents

Down from Troy

Photographs of Troy
by Peter Josyph

Afterword: The Frayed Rope Bridge of Memory
by Peter Josyph

Editorial Reviews

Surgeon and writer Richard Selzer looks back upon his upbringing in Troy, New York during the Great Depression. The memoir deals largely with Selzer's struggle to please his physician father, who wanted him to be a doctor and his mother (a singer) who wanted him to write. His sometimes grim tale also describes the abysmal conditions endured by his father's poor and working-class patients. This is a reprint of a 1992 book originally published by Morrow. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Superbly skilled writer/surgeon Selzer (Imagine a Woman, 1990, etc.) cracks open his psyche's sternum, showing us his heart repairs, then goes about sewing up the wounds while they are still dotted with blood. Now 64, Selzer didn't start writing seriously until he was 40, then retired at 58 to write full time. He finds many likenesses between surgery and writing: "Writing, like doctoring, has nothing to do with cleverness. It is all diagnosis and feeling...." His father and mother dominate this memoir, and he's greatly happy that he has fulfilled both their dreams. His mother, a singer forever bursting into arias around the house (even as Selzer here bursts into warblings and subtly shaded songs about yellow meadows of fat and maroon- and salmon-colored inner organs), wanted him to be an artist; his father, a general practitioner, took young Selzer around with him on his house calls and inducted him into the healing art. Much of what Selzer remembers here takes place in his hometown of Troy, N.Y., where prostitution flourished as a leading business during the Depression. Selzer's father doctored to the whores at the Selzer home, and after his death Selzer heard from an aunt that his father was a great womanizer with these clients. In fact, only after his parents' deaths has Selzer faced many family skeletons. His mother's death at 88 and burial in the rain is movingly told: "There was the trench, like a socket from which the tooth had been pulled. Then the ancient spectacle, full of murmuring and slow gestures. The village of black umbrellas." It's his widower mother's attractiveness to suitors that frees Selzer to show us her history as a teenage waterfront songstress, withhints of darker, more reckless days. A marvel as Selzer gives every pain its name—though his nonreading mother called his books all lies.

Kirkus Reviews

He recounts the lives of the poor and working-class patients who made up the bulk of his father's practice with a sense of the dignity of the human spirit under the most trying conditions.

The Toronto Star

Richard Selzer is a writer who cares more about truth than consequences. Ignoring the treasured Anglo-Saxon myth of the golden childhood and shunning the America of sugary Norman Rockwell towheads, he tells a grimmer, truer story, a tale teeming with dreadful images from the America of Poe and Hawthorne. Gesturing corpses and dying prostitutes, sudden deaths and acts of incestuous violence, lives dominated by horror and misunderstanding populate his powerful, moving memoir.
— New York Times Book Review

Susan Cheever