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Overview
In 1984, the eleventh year of his life, Jeremy Jackson experiences his first love, the loss of his grandmother, and his sister’s departure for college—seemingly ordinary events that erode his innocence in a way that will never be fully repaired. Through tenderhearted, steadfast prose—redolent of the glories of outdoor life on the family farm—Jackson recalls the deeply sensual wonders of his rural Midwestern childhood: thunderstorms roaring off the prairie, fresh milk in bottles, bicycle rides in September sunlight, and the horizon vanishing behind tall grasses. At once elegiac and startlingly direct, these fluid and powerful missives evoke the pain and beauty that mingle within even a happy childhood.
With storytelling informed by a profound sense of place and an emotional memory startlingly vivid, readers young and old will be transported and transformed by this coming-of-age tale.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781571313430 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Milkweed Editions |
| Publication date: | 07/30/2013 |
| Pages: | 240 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.70(d) |
| Age Range: | 12 - 17 Years |
About the Author
In His Own Words. . .
Though I was born in Ohio, I grew up with my family on a farm in the Ozark borderlands of Missouri. We raised cattle and hay and had a garden the size of Texas. At various times we had horses, cattle, a pig, sheep, chickens, ducks, and a pony. We ate a lot of these animals, but not the pony. We also had wild blackberries and persimmons and walnuts on our farm. And a pear tree. And we caught fish in our ponds. We ate some of them, too.
For some crazy reason, I headed off to Vassar College, thinking that I would become a writer. Unfortunately, I did. It was all downhill from there, though the sex was good. From Vassar I went straight into the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where I wrote brilliant stories about bunnies, marbles, and a talking mailbox named Ruth. Then I spent a year writing a novel and a screenplay. Then I went and taught English back at Vassar for two years. Being a professor was a mind-numbing experience, though the sex was good. I quit that job and started being a writer full time, which was very much like being a writer part time except that it took a lot more time and I felt much more guilty when I didn't write anything. I moved from Poughkeepsie back to Iowa, which is kind of like moving from the outer circles of hell to the Garden of Eden.
Not Your Average Memoirist: Six Questions with Jeremy Jackson
by Will Wlizlo
Jeremy Jackson isn’t your typical memoirist. He grew up in rural Missouri and had a mostly happy childhood, unspoiled by the drug addictions, abuse, or financial hardship we’ve come to expect from the genre. His focus, instead, is on the ordinary hard times we’ve almost all faced—the death of a loved one, the fade of a fledgling romance. And yet he evokes the events with a bittersweet clarity, expansive tenderness, and uncommon wisdom that transforms the everyday into the sacred and the personal into the universal. In I Will Not Leave You Comfortless, Jackson chronicles his unforgettable eleventh year, when he lost more than a girlfriend and a Pinewood Derby race. He lost his innocence.
Here, Jackson talks about unboxing his childhood memories, not seeing the weather, and almost getting married in fourth grade.
Milkweed Editions: In the memoir, you take the freshman composition maxim “write what you know” to a whole new level. How did you remember the past with such clarity?
Jeremy Jackson: I wrote Comfortless in part as a way to discover and understand a fuller version of the family’s story than I understood at the time, as a boy. Sort of a “write what you know” plus “write toward what you want to know.”
My memory of my childhood is good, but the book creates an illusion that I remember it spectacularly well. Luckily, I had access to a trove of family documents from the time I was writing about. My most important sources included items like my family’s daily calendars, my grandmother’s journals, and dozens of dated and labeled photographs. But I had many, many more things, like a tape recording of my grandmother’s funeral, my sister’s journal, notes girls at school had written to me, and the notepad that sat at my grandmother’s hospital bedside for months. Additionally, my parents were excellent sources, because they recalled many events that I wasn’t even present for.
So my research helped immensely in recreating a fuller version of the family story than I remember.
While writing Comfortless, what was a once-lost childhood memory you unearthed that was especially pleasurable to remember?
There’s hardly a page of the book (at least the ones where I am present) that doesn’t have some tidbit that I retrieved from the deep reaches of memory. The time our little black cat rode on top of the car to town, for example. Or how I built my Pinewood Derby car backwards that year, and didn’t realize it until the night of the races. Buying earrings for the girl I had a crush on. The way my grandmother would give me cut-up brown paper bags to draw or paint on. Pick a page and I’ll point out something that I had semi-forgotten but recovered during the writing of the book.
In the memoir, life-changing events like your grandmother’s death are presented alongside less weighty memories like losing the Pinewood Derby. As inconsequential as the latter may seem, the experience can be just as memorable as the former. Why do you think everyday experiences loom so large in childhood?
Oh, the world is fresher when you’re a kid, isn’t it? Or, really, you’re fresher, and the things that are happening to you—big and small—are being etched right into your brain.
Your parents were forced to take care of both their young children and their aging parents. What did you learn about caregiving and family resilience during this time?
I think one of the things the book does is show how the generations—of any family—move forward inexorably and simultaneously. One of the structural tensions in the book is the contrast between my grandmother’s story (the older generation passing on) and my sister’s story (the younger generation coming into maturity). The stories in a family can be both sad and triumphant at the same time. During the writing and publication of the book, I also got married and became a father, so I entered a new life stage, and this made me appreciate and understand my parents’ roles as the middle generation taking care of both the younger generation and the older generation.
Comfortless is as much a story of your family as it is of everything in your environment—volatile summer storms, fresh cow’s milk, wild pink mulberries, the smell of Missouri soil. How does place influence you as a writer and as a Midwesterner?
For me, setting is one of the most important and dynamic parts of a story. I love the Midwestern landscape and weather. I lived on the East coast for six years, and I was constantly frustrated that I couldn’t get a good view of the sky or horizon through all the trees and buildings. I couldn’t see the weather! I couldn’t see storm clouds coming, which was upsetting a) because you needed to see them coming so you could be prepared and b) they are beautiful.
In one particularly comic scene, you’re standing in the schoolyard, waiting to get “married” to Toni Renken, a girl in your class. In retrospect, if you could live the crush all over again, what would you do differently?
I still find the concept of our semi-arranged playground marriage to be hilarious. A few years ago I talked with one of the girls who helped organize the “wedding,” and she recalled that she and some of the other girls got into a little bit of trouble over the whole thing. I think the teachers didn’t like them playing at being grown ups so literally.
But really, it just wasn’t meant to be. You can’t force a thing like that.
Read an Excerpt
A Storm
On the last Wednesday of April, 1983, my grandmother went to a funeral. She drove from the farm to Windsor through the early afternoon sunlight, past pastures where the grass was shin high and rising, past full creeks, past newly plowed fields. In town, the last tulips bloomed in front yards and side yards, the sidewalks were swept, and the streets were shaded by leaves that as of a week ago hadn’t even been born. This was spring in Missouri.
She had heard on the radio about the thunderstorms, but there was no sign of them yet. The day was quiet. She walked from the parking lot to the church through a breeze with no hint of threat to it. She was not a nervous woman, nor unfamiliar with the storms of her part of the country. She had lived in western Missouri her whole life, and she didn’t consider changing the course of her day just because storms were near.
That said, when the funeral was over and she had played the last sustained chord on the organ, she headed straight home. Within the course of an hour, the sky had changed. The sun had slipped behind a veil of high clouds so that the day was still bright, but there were no shadows anymore. She drove west, and once she le! the trees and houses of town she could see the storm clouds in front of her. They were close.
Really, it was a race. She was on a collision course with the storms, and it was simply a master of who would reach the farm first. The clouds that were approaching were not pleasant clouds. They were black and moving fast, like the flagships of night.
Table of Contents
The First Part
A Storm 3
Food, Animals 10
See Farther 24
Stay 32
A Good Party 38
The Second Part
In the Dark 45
Stop 56
We Had Some Lights 63
Coming Home 70
So, Christmas 78
So, Christmas: Part Two 87
Such Hope 100
Once 105
Distance 111
Deep 117
Pray 123
Plans 131
Deep: Part Two 140
Go Back Tomorrow 150
Backward 155
Guard 162
We Are Weak 164
Her Existing Sixteen Journal Entries from April 30 Turned into One Journal Entry 170
Houston's Creek 172
The God of Mildred Jackson 175
Then 187
The Last Part
Normally, We Got Normal Milk 191
You Will Lose More 199
Under the Summer Sun 209
A Day Made for Grape Juice 213
East 217
Epilogue 223