Barefoot to Avalon

May 18, 2015
A writer ponders his family's legacy of abusive marriage, sibling rivalry, madness and death in this bleakly moving memoir. Novelist Payne (Ruin Creek) arranges the narrative around his brother George's repeated episodes of manic-depression and psychosis, which blighted his promising life before he died in a car crash in front of Payne. Powering their often close but sometimes jealous relationship are the fraught dynamics of their parents' troubled marriage; their father's manipulation of his sons into competing for his affection; and the bad blood of their mother's well-to-do North Carolina family, with their background of insanity and suicide. And spreading out from all this is the author's own life story as he tries to escape the family drama yet finds himself recapitulating it in his own alcoholism and rocky relationships. There's a novelistic intensity to the story, with Payne dwelling on vivid recollected scenes, recreating their atmospherics and teasing out every buried emotional tremor and element of foreshadowing, but his prose also has the rawness of a confessional and a self-lacerating impulse to expose his own guilt and unmet neediness. Writing with a mixture of clear-eyed realism and lyrical elegy, Payne shows how a family's pain, resentment, and loss get transmuted into love. Photos.