Audiobook4 hours
Somehow Form a Family: Stories That Are Mostly True
Written by Tony Earley
Narrated by Tony Earley
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
4/5
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About this audiobook
In Somehow Form a Family, Earley writes about finding a place in a world without losing sight of where you came from.
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Reviews for Somehow Form a Family
Rating: 4.173076788461538 out of 5 stars
4/5
26 ratings3 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I recently discovered this author via The New Yorker podcast where he read his short story, The Backpack which was truly incredible - the kind of prose I live to read/listen to. The only thing keeping this book from being 5 stars is the story about the cat which made me physically ill.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5SOMEHOW FORM A FAMILY, by Tony Earley.Having read Tony Earley's sweet and nostalgic novel, JIM THE BOY, I was not prepared for the darker content of these autobiographical essays about his less than happy childhood and the bouts of clinical depression that have plagued him periodically as a teen and adult. The title of this 2001 collection of "Stories that Are Mostly True" is an ironic nod to a line from THE BRADY BUNCH theme song. Growing up in the 60s and 70s in a small town in North Carolina, Earley remembers not just the pervasive influence of television and shows like The Brady Bunch, Gomer Pyle and Gilligan's Island, but also shares bitter and confused memories of the discord between his parents and his father's absences when he would move out, sometimes for months at a time. But another event which continues to haunt him is the death of his younger sister in a grisly auto accident when he was a freshman in college and she a senior in high school.Much of this is revealed in the title essay, which is perhaps the best and most affecting of the bunch. Reading it, I often found myself chuckling and wincing simultaneously But I found all of the pieces here to be provocative food for thought, as Earley examines his life - the importance of extended family and forebears ("Hallway"), the oddities of southern dialects and word usage ("The Quare Gene"), and his exposure and changing attitudes toward religion ("A Worn Path" Earley was raised Baptist, but married an Episcopalian). "The Courting Garden" offers a glimpse of that transition and how he and his wife met. The two weakest stories here were, I thought, "Ghost Stories" and "Tour de Fax." Well, actually, they are well-written and interesting enough, but didn't seem to really fit into the collection as smoothly as the other pieces did. That said, I was, for the most part, charmed by the wry, self-deprecating sense of humor that infused these 'stories,' from a young man who was/is, in many ways, "from" the country, but not "of" the country.Tony Earley is, no question, a fine writer. I enjoyed this book tremendously. Very highly recommended. (four and a half stars)
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Tony Earley is a marvelous writer. Just marvelous. I love his fiction, and I loved these "personal essays" (he called them that because he couldn't think of anything better to call them). Rather than write a review, I think I'll just post a few quotes I marked. See if they don't make you want to read his stuff.From Hallway:p. 49 - I wish that with these words I could turn the hallway into perfect metaphor, an incantation that would restore everyone who ever walked its length to the person they wanted most in their best heart to be, but the fact is that the hallway is simply a space forty-one feet long, nine feet, two inches high, and just over six feet wide, through which my family has traveled for eighty-four years. Of all the facts we have gathered and stored in the hallway, this one troubles me most: stories in real life rarely end the way we want them to. They simply end.From The Quare Gene:p. 75 - And of course, no language is a static property; the life cycle of words mirrors the life cycles of the individuals who speak them. For specific words to fall out of favor and be replaced by new ones is the natural order of things; every language, given enough time, will replace each of its words, just as every population replaces the old with the young, just as every seven years the human body replaces each of its cells.From The Courting Garden:pp. 84, 85 - The unexamined life may not be worth living, but sometimes it allows you to live momentarily on planets more romantic and interesting than your own.p. 86 - Weddings, of course, have less to do with being married than with the simple fact that it is best to begin the most arduous journeys surrounded by friends and wearing nice clothes.p. 86 - At those moments we smile like spies from the same small country, on spotting the other in a foreign airport, each bearing half the secret we need for survival.From Ghost Stories:p. 111 - We are looking for ghosts, but, I think, a good story will do.And from Tour de Fax, this fascinating tidbit about racecar driver, Kyle Petty:p. 146 - Petty had read most of Elmore Leonard's Riding the Rap on the way over from New York. He was worried because he had brought along only two books for the trip. "I'm gonna have to find a store," he said. "I'm afraid I'm going to run out of stuff." He doesn't like to sit still without something to do. He collects first editions--Graham Greene, Hemingway, Eudora Welty--and reads them on airplanes.I really hope Earley writes more soon. I'm out of his books now.