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In the Goolrick home there was a law: Never talk about the family in the outside world, never reveal the slightest crack in the facade. To all appearances, they lived an almost idyllic life. Two respected, charming parents everyone loved. Three bright, smiling children. A lovely home on a quiet street nestled in a small college town. But behind the facade this family had created lurked secrets so dark, so painful for one little boy, that his life would never be the same.
With devastating honesty and razor-sharp wit, Goolrick looks back at this seemingly serene time and at the parents who gave him life and then robbed him of it, who created his world and then destroyed it.
Goolrick begins his debut work with a moment he hopes will bring him closure-returning to his Southern home to bury his abusive father. Peeling away the family's carefully constructed facade like the layers of an onion, this brave memoir tells of a childhood marred by alcoholism and an adulthood mired in loneliness, substance abuse and self-mutilation. The son of an indolent college professor and an unfulfilled, Valium-placated housewife, Goolrick grows up in a 1950s home where lavish cocktail parties and false bourgeois airs are sacred, and disclosing the family's slightest imperfection is sinful. Goolrick is never forgiven for his own minor trespasses, despite showering his struggling, status-hungry parents with extravagant gifts (he even resorts to buying them the family home they could never afford to own). Eventually it is revealed that their unhealthy dynamic and Goolrick's attempted suicide stem largely from a single, life-altering incident: his rape by his drunken father at the age of four. In the end, Goolrick has written a moving, unflinchingly rendered story of how the past can haunt a life. (Mar.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
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William Harmon
reviewed The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life on April 29, 2011 The End of the World as We Know It
Whenever I have the possibly perverse desire to be wrong, I only have to use a superlative. Sooner -- perhaps immediately -- or later, I can see that I was wrong. I mention this because of my tendency to think that the last disturbing memoir that I've read is the MOST disturbing of all -- all that preceded it, all that will follow it. Give me a memoir co-starring incompetent, selfish, negligent, and/or abusive parents; and upon finishing it, I'm ready to say: "Off with their heads -- but only after they've endured the most horrible torture imaginable." (Granted, I get a little carried away with envisioning retribution.) I read Angela's Ashes , and I wrapped Frank McCourt's father in the Worst Father banner; I read The Liars' Club , and I wrapped Mary Karr's parents in the Worst Parents banner; I read The Glass Castle , and the banner went from Mary Karr's parents to Jeannette Walls's parents. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. I just read The End of the World as We Know It ; and Robert Goolrick's parents are, for now, wearing the banner that I had thought others deserved. But I know I'm wrong again. At some point in time, a superlative seems to apply to a person, an achievement, a natural disaster, "a whatever"; then we encounter better than "the best" and, unfortunately, worse than "the worst."
There is little in Goolrick's life to be wished for; nevertheless, his writing style is enviable; and to call the arrangement of the "scenes from a life" (the book's subtitle) "brilliant" might be insufficient praise. In other words, his is a life I would hate to have lived; his is a book that I would love to be capable of writing -- excluding the generous allowances that Goolrick sometimes makes for parents who merit few, if any. Still, I understand the resistance to entirely ending the love of the people who made him, however miserable they have made him. Goolrick somehow locates and can embrace "a loveliness to life that does not fade. . . . a tendency toward grace that does not fail us. . ."(206).
At the end of this memoir, Goolrick offers various explanations for choosing to write the book. But the last one, which may actually be two, is perhaps the most compelling; in the spacing, I find justification for both possibilities. But I prefer to see the last two sentences [Spoiler? I don't think so.] as linked:
I tell it because I try to believe, because I do believe with all my heart, that there is a persistence of song.(213)
I TELL IT for all the boys, for the life they never had. (213)
There are titles that we can ignore, and there are titles that demand attention. Goolrick's is the latter: The End of the World as We Know It . I won't examine each of the words in it though doing so could add to our understanding of its meanings. The author's use of a first-person plural pronoun implies a connection, not necessarily a specific one, between his experiences and his audience's. And his use of a present-tense verb declares that what has happened to us never stops existing (in this world). There MAY be a tomorrow that is not today, but today is definitely not just today -- today is also the day before it and the day before that one and the day before that one and the day before. . . .
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