Memoir. Place, desire, compulsion, shame, relationships ending and beginning, abuse, family history, faith. And especially place. The place that it is, especially, is Epping Forest, a 2400 hectare former royal forest in the UK that straddles the border between London and Essex. It is other places too, but particularly there. The author broods and reflects. He is deeply introspective, quite clever, depressive, prone to crisis. I really liked the writing. It was, perhaps, a bit over the top in a few spots towards the end in its efforts to refract everything through the lens of his musings about Epping, but those jolts out of the flow were few and mostly I was delighted to be carried along by it. I don’t have any analogous obsession with a particular place myself, but I enjoyed his, and it sparked some quite interesting reflections on place and belonging that I may turn into a piece of writing of my own at some other time. I appreciated his interest in family history, though I’m not sure I seek quite the same kind of meaning from it as he does. His journey with respect to the faith he grew up in was an interesting contrast to the more common (and often almost stereotyped) story of Christian parental rejection of queerness and consequent queer rejection of Christianity – rather, his journey involved a long, painful process of sorting out the evangelical and far-from-radical but emphatically compassionate socialist Methodism of his parents from the harsher fundamentalisms lurking not far distant that (with certain other experiences) informed his shame, while never feeling particularly drawn to reject either parents or God. And his journey with shame, bisexuality, and relationships is a powerful part of the book. I have some mixed feelings about how it is resolved, mind you – not, to be clear, with the facts of his path to healing, which is of course his and deserves nothing but celebration, but the way it was handled as an element of story, which did far too little to counter the strong narrative pull towards a sense that wellness equates with normative ways of living. Anyway, for the most part a delightfully written and thoughtful memoir, and I’m keen to see what he does next.
Originally posted by Scott on Goodreads.