Truth Serum: Memoirs

Rating:
Summary: Cooper's Best
Review: Far and away the strongest material Cooper has written, "Truth Serum" is one of the best memoirs I've ever encountered. It ranks with Theodore Dreiser's "Dawn" as a stunning evocation of early life. His language is fluid and beautiful. He writes about childhood as vividly as if he were watching intimate scenes from his past on a movie screen. Except that he describes feelings and thoughts-- unfilmable-- so freshly. The reader enters into the child Cooper's head and perceptions in astonishing ways. This is exceptional writing and the sense of immediacy (with the exception of the abstract final piece) is wonderful.

Rating:
Summary: Worth reading through to the end.
Review: I almost didn't finish this book. My initial impression was that this guy's life is as dull and as vapid as anyone else's. He visits a department store with his mother and her neighborhood friend -- big deal. His dad finally gives in and buys the big freezer for the kitchen -- so what?

But suddenly, and quite by accident, I realized that the book had me firmly in its grip. It somehow became important to find out what happened at the AIDS clinic. The minutae of which gym he was attending -- and why -- gained a greater significance than I could have anticipated earlier in the book.

Cooper's writing style makes it easy to digest these essays. He writes with a precision that reminds me of Edmund White, or even Buckley, but without the pompous esoteric nature they sometimes employ.

The book ends abruptly. Whatever happened to Bryan, his roommate? What further progress was there in his relationship with his father, if any? But real life isn't conveniently episodic. I ended yesterday with unfinished business; I will leave unfinished business at this day's end. Just as a photograph captures only the briefest millisecond between what-has-gone-before and the unknowable what-will-be, so this book snatches Cooper midway between life's experiences, with stories as-yet unfinished. In the end, it makes his autobiography all the more real.

Rating:
Summary: Intense Focus
Review: I checked this book out of the library and read half of it before I realized that I had to own it, so I bought a copy the next day and picked up where I'd left off in the other copy. It's not a book-length memoir as much as it's a series of shorter memoirs. And what I find the most compelling in this book is his sense of focus. He writes a rather extensive essay about high school called "101 Ways to Cook Hamburger," and it essentially consists of three scenes. But from those scenes, I get a strong sense of his high school experience as a whole.

Also, he covers his entire life in this relatively short book. He has an essay on his mother that centers on the freezer she coveted, and an essay on his father. He talks about joining the gym, and the various gyms of his life, and that leads him to a discussion of AIDS. He has a short essay that categorizes all of the different kinds of sighs.

One of the greatest compliments I can give a book is to say that I wish I'd written it. I'm going through this book again, underlining passages and studying his use of scene, description, and exposition. He's a writer to learn from, in a lot of ways.