Praise for Cures for Hunger
“You haven’t read a story like this one, even if your father was the kind of magnificent scoundrel you only find in Russian novels. Béchard is the rare writer who knows the secret to telling the true story. Just because the end is clear doesn’t mean the bets are off.”—Marlon James, author of A Brief History of Seven Killings
“Béchard writes that prison taught his father ‘the nature of the self, the way it can be shaped and hardened.’ As in a great novel, this darkly comic and lyrical memoir demonstrates the shaping of its author, who suffers the wreckage of his father’s life, yet manages to salvage all the beauty of its desperate freedoms. Béchard’s poetic gifts give voice to the outsiders of society, and make them glow with humanity and love.”—Elizabeth McKenzie, author of The Portable Veblen
“Béchard has created a moving story of rootlessness, rebellion, lost love, criminal daring, regret, and restless searching. Driven above all by the need to grasp his father’s secrets, he has written his narrative in skillful, resonant prose graced with a subtle tone of obsession and longing.”—Leonard Gardner, author of Fat City
“This powerful and haunting memoir is a must-read for anyone who has ever struggled to uncover their identity within the shadow of a parent. Written in exquisitely sharp prose, Béchard combs through his attempt to understand his father’s mysterious existence with inspiring precision. This book is huge and achingly true.”—Claire Bidwell Smith, author of The Rules of Inheritance
“A coming of age story with rare and loving insights into the vulnerable hearts of men and boys—and the women that help shape them.”—Huffington Post
“Cures for Hunger is a poignant adventure story with a mystery. . . . But it is also, perhaps even more so, the story of an artist coming of age. Readers will be reminded of James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.”—Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Béchard’s sad and moving memoir is all about secrets and regret and, ultimately, finding peace.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune
“A poignant but rigorously unsentimental account of hard-won maturity.”—Kirkus
“A coming-of-age story of lost innocence, violence, and tenderness by a writer obsessed with the man who influenced him the most but was there the least.”—Booklist
“Béchard’s story is one of personal discovery, and a teasing out of the function of memory: what it keeps, what it loses, and what it saves.”—Publishers Weekly
“Cures for Hunger is flush with tenderness. . . . Much more than a memoir of youthful misadventure, though it contains plenty of that. It’s also an exploration of the oppression of lineage, of familial duty, wanderlust, and perennial dissatisfaction, and the most American theme of them all: personal reinvention.”—Iowa Review
In the opening pages of Béchard's memoir, we learn that his duplicitous, bank-robbing father, André—to whom the bulk of the book is devoted—committed suicide "in a house empty but for a single chair…on the outskirts of Vancouver." Begun just three months after his father's death, Béchard's story is the result of "seventeen years of rewriting," and the process shows in the prose, which vacillates between that of a pretentious, if talented, young writer, and an adult whose understanding of his troubled youth has been refined by years of reflection and searching. Nevertheless, Béchard powerfully evokes the ever-present tension between the author and his parents ("Our family always seemed on the verge of disaster, and then the danger passed, and very little changed."), as well as his own struggle to emulate and escape his father. At once a quest to uncover the details of André's life—including his real name (Edwin), the town in Quebec from whence he came and the family he left there, and a criminal record that led one of André's sisters to remark, "‘Il ne faisait rien à moitié.'—He didn't do anything halfway."—Béchard's story is also one of personal discovery, and a teasing out of the function of memory: what it keeps, what it loses, and what it saves. (May)
Béchard (Vandal Love, 2006) comes to terms with the painful legacy of his father, a suicide at 56. At first, the author's portrait of his childhood in British Columbia seems yet another snapshot of a dysfunctional family. Dad, reckless and macho, was always beating people up and getting visits from the police; he fought constantly with Mom, who eventually took the kids and returned to her native Virginia. By that time the author was 10, torn between admiration for his father's swaggering and fear of its consequences, André, as his wife and children called him, had assumed many names since leaving his French-Canadian family in provincial Quebec and embarking on a criminal career that included bank robbing and jail time. He went straight after he married but remained angry and conflicted, often telling Deni "you're like me" and seeming to half-want his son to take up his old lawless life. Béchard, who initially hated school but loved to read and yearned to write novels, didn't know what to make of his father's mixed signals or his own mixed feelings. His memoir gains power and clarity from the author's searching, scrupulously honest chronicle of a lengthy process of alternating alienation and reconciliation. Against considerable financial and emotional odds, Béchard entered college in Virginia. This act of defiance won him André's grudging respect and launched a series of late-night, long-distance conversations in which the elder Béchard mused over his turbulent life while the younger took notes and promised to write his father's stories. After years of refusing to discuss his origins, in their last phone call André gave his son his birth name and the names of his mother and hometown. Two years after his death, the author went to Quebec and confronted the roots of his father's malaise, in some ways preordained by family dynamics and yet fundamentally self-chosen. A poignant but rigorously unsentimental account of hard-won maturity.
