I've just finished Charles Mee's memoir. I bought it ten years ago to research something I was writing, but never used it for that reason. This week I picked it up and could not put it down.
Mee creates, or re-creates, the world of America The Normative, our mid-20th-century America, full of paternal wise men and nurturing women and children who would do better than their parents. The spectre of polio over all this - I remember it well. My mother was terrified of it. We were Polio Pioneers (and I learned, in the book, just how pioneering we were! She had utter trust in the medical profession to bring us to get that vaccine the minute it was available.)
Mee's description of what a great, crashing blow it was to him, at fourteen, to be utterly incapacitated for weeks, an object of fear and pity, is terrifyingly evocative to me - this is the feared fate I and everyone I knew escaped because of that vaccine. The blow seems to have opened his mind and soul in a way that, from my vantage point, reading in 2010, seems mystical and fated. His reach into his fourteen-year-old mind might be bringing so much of the adult man that he seems, at fourteen, to be wise beyond his years. But I think in the solitude of his incapacity he was in touch with something eternal. At any rate, the boy he presents us with speaks well of the sheltered upbringing he'd had - one that had not given him previous reason to be fearful of life.
The detailed way he noticed his environment on his first visit home from the hospital - his fingerprints on a leather couch, tracking the course of a breeze around the corner of his porch - suggest an almost pschedelic state of consciousness, and I wonder if adolescent growth (sped-up) coupled with the intense mental activity of his immobility did not create a permanently altered state.
At any rate, Mee's gifts are lavish. I loved his voice. I loved his honesty and his attempt to re-create the past around and within him. Thank you, Charles Mee.
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Charles Mee believed in God, family, and his future. But when he collapsed one night at a school dance, his dreams began to vanish. In a narrative at once funny and profound, Mee brilliantly captures the era in which polio, not communism, was every North American parents nightmare. A story both of a child with a potentially fatal disease and to the man whose recognition of himself as a disabled outsider has heightened his gifts as a storyteller.
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Customer Review
This could have made a very interesting memoir - B. Flatt -
I think if the author hadn't written his memoir in such a vain way--it would have been better??
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