Do-Over!: In Which a Forty-Eight-Year-Old Father of Three Returns to Kindergarten, Summer Camp, the Prom, and Other Embarrassments

by Robin Hemley

Overview

Robin Hemley's childhood made a wedgie of his memory, leaving him sore and embarrassed for over forty years. He was the most pitiful kindergartner, the least spirited summer camper, and dateless for prom. In fact, there's nary an event from his youth that couldn't use improvement. If only he could do them all over a few decades later, with an adult's wisdom, perspective, and giant-like height . . .

In the spirit of cult film classics like Billy Madison and Wet Hot American Summer, in Do-Over! Hemley reencounters papier-mâché, revisits his childhood home, and finally attends the prom — bringing readers the thrill of recapturing a misspent youth and discovering what's most important: simple pleasures, second chances, and the forgotten joys of recess.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316020602
Publisher:	Little, Brown and Company
Publication date:	05/11/2009
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Robin Hemley is the winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship for his work on DO-OVER!. He has published seven books, and his stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, Chicago Tribune, and many literary magazines and anthologies.

Robin received his MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop; he currently directs the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa and lives in Iowa City, IA.

Read an Excerpt

I grew up without anyone helping me along. No Echo Values in camp. No I-Care Rules in kindergarten. Positive reinforcement hadn't even been invented when I was growing up! I remember my great-uncle worrying in front of me that I was a sissy. My grandmother told me I'd get leprosy if I didn't take a bath. My mother told me girls wouldn't like me if I didn't gain weight. I remember one kid in fifth grade we called Boomer. He'd make little bombing noises throughout class. Once, he peed out the bathroom window on kids playing kickball. Another time he grabbed our teacher, Miss Cotton, and pulled her across her desk. Boomer was either being yelled at by the principal, ridiculed by the other kids, or manhandled by a teacher or two. Today, Boomer would be medicated and in therapy. Maybe me too. Back then, family, schools, and camp worked hand-in-hand to make us little arts and craft basket cases.

What People are Saying About This

Stuart Dybek

"Robin Hemley is that rare writer who moves through literary genres-nonfiction, memoir, fiction, poetry-with the ease of expertise, and all of his considerable skills are harnessed in his wonderfully entertaining new book, Do-Over!. It's a book that moves with the velocity of a page-turner-by turns, comic, playful, intimate, wise. In its fresh and deeply personal way it is a book not simply about time, but about the the possibility and impossibility of time travel. It is a coming of age story-or, rather, the plural: a coming of age(s) story-told from a perspective so ingenious as to redefine the term."--(Stuart Dybek, author of I Sailed with Magellan)

Robert Olen Butler

"Robin Hemley is on my very short list of writers I not only wish to read, not only need to read, but downright can't wait to read. Do-Over! is quintessential Hemley, full of wit and invention and brilliant language and warm humanity and when you least expect it-mid-bellylaugh, mid-bon mot-he will sneak up on you with a dazzlingly smart, deep-cutting insight into human nature. Do-Over! is an instant classic."--(Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain)

Patricia Hampl

"Robin Hemley has pulled out all the stops and managed to take that familiar wistful longing-the if-only sensation we have in regarding the past-and turned disappointment and chagrin into exhilarating time-travel. This series of reprises from childhood and youth has a charm that goes beyond a backward look, and becomes a touching mid-life memoir in which the heart of a child is soothed and liberated."--(Patricia Hampl, author of The Florist's Daughter)

A.J. Jacobs

"Robin Hemley may not be able to play Greensleeves on the recorder, but he does know how to write a highly entertaining book."--(A.J. Jacobs, author of The Year of Living Biblically)

Phillip Lopate

"While it is frequently laugh-out-loud funny, what makes this book so absolutely endearing is the honesty and tender, humane insight of the author, and his reluctant, hard-won willingness to forgive his former self. A screwball premise winningly pulled off, "Do-Over" should charm readers everywhere."--(Phillip Lopate, author of Portrait of My Body)

Editorial Reviews

"Robin Hemley may not be able to play Greensleeves on the recorder, but he does know how to write a highly entertaining book." —A.J. Jacobs, author of The Year of Living Biblically

"An utterly beguiling attempt to recover the past not by remembering it but by physically occupying it, or at least trying to."—David Shields, author of The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead

"Do-Over! is one of the funniest, wisest, most perfectly observed books I've ever read.  Robin Hemley possesses a keen insight into the all-too-human wish to rectify our past mistakes.  He also knows that we are better for having made them."-Bernard Cooper, author of The Bill From My Father—Bernard Cooper, author of The Bill From My Father

"While it is frequently laugh-out-loud funny, what makes this book so absolutely endearing is the honesty and tender, humane insight of the author, and his reluctant, hard-won willingness to forgive his former self.  A screwball premise winningly pulled off, "Do-Over" should charm readers everywhere." -Phillip Lopate,  author of Portrait of My Body     

"Robin Hemley is on my very short list of writers I not only wish to read, not only need to read, but downright can't wait to read.  Do-Over! is quintessential Hemley, full of wit and invention and brilliant language and warm humanity and when you least expect it-mid-bellylaugh, mid-bon mot-he will sneak up on you with a dazzlingly smart, deep-cutting insight into human nature.  Do-Over! is an instant classic."-Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

From the Publisher

"Do-Over! is one of the funniest, wisest, most perfectly observed books I've ever read.
Robin Hemley possesses a keen insight into the all-too-human wish to rectify our past mistakes. He also knows that we are better for having made them."-Bernard
Cooper, author of The Bill From My Father

Bernard Cooper - author of The Bill From My Father

"An utterly beguiling attempt to recover the past not by remembering it but by physically occupying it, or at least trying to."

David Shields - author of The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead

"Robin Hemley may not be able to play Greensleeves on the recorder, but he does know how to write a highly entertaining book."

A.J. Jacobs - author of The Year of Living Biblically

Do-Over! is one of the funniest, wisest, most perfectly observed books I've ever read.
Robin Hemley possesses a keen insight into the all-too-human wish to rectify our past mistakes. He also knows that we are better for having made them.—Bernard Cooper, author of The Bill From My Father
— author of The Bill From My Father

Bernard Cooper

An utterly beguiling attempt to recover the past not by remembering it but by physically occupying it, or at least trying to.
— author of The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead

David Shields

"Do-Over! is one of the funniest, wisest, most perfectly observed books I've ever read. Robin Hemley possesses a keen insight into the all-too-human wish to rectify our past mistakes. He also knows that we are better for having made them."-Bernard Cooper, author of The Bill From My Father
— author of The Bill From My Father

Bernard Cooper

As a kid, Robin Hemley was a failed summer camper, a kindergarten washout, irresistible live bait for bullies, and a promless wonder. Looking back at his childhood, Hemley decided that he might do it better the second time around. A refreshing do-over that will find many nostalgic takers.

When Hemley, a writing professor at the University of Iowa, decides that he wants to do over some of the experiences he flubbed as a child, he isn't just dreaming. The 48-year-old father of three makes a list of times and places he'd like to revisit, including kindergarten, the prom and summer camp, doggedly pursuing all the contacts and background checks necessary to "storm the walls of childhood" as an adult. Surprisingly, the kids and teachers he meets along the way accept him in his overgrown state; some even express envy. The complex logistics of Hemley's quest-including endless e-mails and phone calls to convince others that he's legit-can be tedious, but Hemley is endearing, funny and more than a bit courageous (the night before his first day of kindergarten, he's too nervous to sleep.) As he tackles his part in the school play or sits with the popular kids at lunch, Hemley philosophically ponders the lessons of the past. While some experiences don't pan out quite the way he hopes (after crashing his car into the ACT center, he ditches the idea of a standardized test repeat), others fall serendipitously into place (a crush from high school now works as the school's alumni director and agrees to be his prom date). A big kid at heart, the author draws readers in with just the right mix of humor and tenderness. 22 b&w photos. (May)

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Publishers Weekly

A 48-year-old writer chronicles his goofball quest to correct the perceived failures of his youth. Hemley (Nonfiction Writing/Univ. of Iowa; Invented Eden: The Elusive, Disputed History of the Tasaday, 2003, etc.) undertakes a dubious immersion-journalism project in the form of "do-overs." These attempts to repair the major emotional traumas of his childhood and adolescence involve revisiting the sites of his worst failures, from kindergarten to high school, summer camp to standardized testing. He couldn't even scrounge up a prom date. But you'd think his privileged adult existence-published author, father of three, university professor-might snuff out memories of botched grade-school plays and junior-high bullies. Hemley, however, insists that he's still bothered by these trivialities. Too bad, then, that the book's conceptual gimmickry yields little more than the occasional entertaining anecdote, the obvious fish-out-of-water comedy inherent in someone pushing 50 trying to pass for a five-year-old, and a fitfully amusing travelogue, as the author lumbers from Sewanee, Tenn., to Osaka, Japan, trying to enlist unfortunate souls from his past in his geeky time-travel fantasies. Of course, Hemley's had real traumas that hang like a mist over this revisionist endeavor: an ugly divorce, his late sister Nola's schizophrenia and his father's death at 51. A few relevant observations cut through the "gee, they sure did things differently in my day!" remarks, as when Hemley contrasts contemporary kids' structured, monitored and medicated lives with the dog-eat-dog anarchism that characterized his own youthful social experiences. But the do-over with the most potential for dramatic tension-going tothe senior prom with his high-school crush-falls flat. Far from generating epiphanies, these "renovations" merely reinforce how nice it is to be an adult.

Kirkus Reviews