DO SOMETHING

A New York Times style reporter and critic recounts his colorful upbringing.

Trebay opens with an account of a visit to his Long Island childhood home, where he lived when it caught fire in 1975. Although ostensibly in search of a suitcase of salvaged pictures, he writes, “What exactly I was looking for was not altogether clear.” The same might be said of his memoir, driven not by narrative but searching emotion, namely, the desires to reckon with his youth and family and to record them, with photographs. His sentences are long and often languid, rife not with verbiage but the voice of a skilled and patient storyteller. He offers nuanced personal recollections, such as these about his mother, who died the same year as the fire: “I sometimes think perhaps she was less brave than indifferent to danger”; “What did she sound like? I strain to recall.” By virtue of the fact that Trebay filters everything through his introspective gaze, it’s occasionally difficult to feel present in the scenes he describes; that distance sometimes results in a formality heavier on facts than immediacy. While his father struck gold in the fragrance business, the author portrays him as untrustworthy, and the lack of steadiness had seismic, character-determining effects on the family. Writing about the time he spent as a teenager doing drugs with his sister, now estranged and in prison, he notes, “If no memory of transformed consciousness survives from those brief hallucinogenic years…it is clear at least that we were going to some lengths to attract the attention and, by inference, love of our self-absorbed and otherwise distracted parents.” The most affecting part of this quest to piece the past together is the author’s longing—and literal search through the ashes—for proof of love.

A generous and deeply felt memoir.