Hi bloggers, well as you all should know by now I have an unrelenting addiction for memoir, so I have ceased the opportunity to showcase Ron Rhody's latest piece of work titled Our Own Little Fictions (ironically).
Ron's book received a 4 star rating review from San Francisco Book Review, which is available to read below, and available for purchase at the following link Amazon, happy reading.
Our Own Little Fictions by Ron Rhody
San Francisco Book Review – 4 Stars
Book Summary
This is a story about a slice of time, and a place, and cluster of people worth remembering. It begins in a small river town in the Bluegrass of Kentucky and concerns itself with beginnings and becomings, with home places and who you can count on, and where untaken roads lead. A few early readers comments “A beautifully written remembrance of a young man lifted and loved through the sheer ordinariness of family and coming of age. Well worth the read.” - Cynthia Kasabian, CKB Consultants, San Francisco. "An unconventional book but strangely engaging. Not a 'must read.' But definitely a 'glad I did read.'" - Annette Bowen, Inside/Outside, Atlanta. “Fascinating! This book is like a conversation on paper.” - Charlie Baglan, Kentucky Afield radio, Frankfort, Ky. “Deeply personal, often moving.” - Bob Irelan, author, Rancho Murrieta. Ca. "Thought provoking. It causes readers, especially in today's all-consuming digital world, to reflect on how memories have shaped their lives." - Joseph Piedmont, Gallatin Public Affairs (Ret.) Portland, Or. Each life is a story. Each story is unique. If we don’t tell each other our stories, how will we know what life is all about? Pretend you’re listening.
According to Ron Rhody’s wife, he is not eligible for authoring a memoir. He hasn’t won an Oscar or an MVP or a Nobel prize. And yet Rhody has a story he wants, needs, to tell. His story. And so that’s how he will tell it to us: as one of Our Own Little Fictions.
Reminiscent of Sarah Polley’s documentary Stories We Tell, Rhody meanders through his memory and down the real roads he’s traveled all over the U.S., from his beloved Frankfort, Kentucky, to California and back (via Florida and Alabama) and then back out to California. Along this circuitous route through his youth, manhood, and ancestry, we encounter all sorts of colorful characters, historical events, family triumphs, and tragedies, which in large part amount to the man whose story we’re being told.
The place closest to Rhody’s heart is clearly Frankfort, Kentucky. It is there his father, a newspaperman, fought for civil rights and to put down roots for his forward-thinking family. Though a wanderlust would uproot the Rhodys and send them all over the U.S., Kentucky kept calling them back to the heart of the heart of their country. In Our Little Fictions, Frankfort is origin and refuge, and it serves as the Ithaca of the author’s Odyssey.
These chronicles of Rhody contain all the joy and pain of an American life that spans the Cold War to the present. We meet his parents, grandparents, wife and children, friends and mentors. From animated anecdotes of a hard-nosed football coach doling out life lessons to the memorial for a dear friend and author of “sixteen erudite books,” we witness a life pass in time-lapse frames of laconic, Hemingwayesque prose.
Hemingway and his suicide haunt the narrative beginning to end. On a road trip from California to Kentucky, Rhody and his son make a scheduled detour to Hemingway’s home in Idaho (where he’d put the shotgun in his mouth).
“It seemed wrong that Hemingway had killed himself.
Nature should have gotten him.
Or chance.”
Later in the
narrative and earlier in time, news of Hemingway’s suicide reaches Rhody, and
he reflects on the premature tragedy, as well as his own (missed?) calling.
These two time periods intermingle, and Rhody leaves Idaho with “an answer to a
question I hadn’t known I’d asked.” Authorship was an alternative path he’d
bypassed only to embark upon late in life.
Late in life,
indeed. The long road approaches its end and the loss of loved ones is an
inevitability. Each story has the same conclusion, alas, and many of the
characters we encounter in this Appalachian saga pass on in heartrending
deathbed scenes and austere funerals. The depiction of these tragedies is
sentimental, even cliched, but anything less/more would not be true to life. It
is the commonality of these cliches that arise in endless variations, like
updates of Shakespeare.
No, Ron Rhody
is no Prince Hamlet, nor was he meant to be, but his story of “becoming,” with
its conduplicatio, terse punch-lines, and homespun wisdom, is one that will
always be in need of telling and retelling.
Reviewed By:
Steven Felicelli
Author Bio:
Ron Rhody has been a reporter, a sportswriter, and a broadcast journalist before morphing into a career as a corporate public relations executive. He's done four novels. This is his first stab at a "sort-of-memoir." Find more info at http://www.outerbankspublishing.com
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