THE PERIL OF REMEMBERING NICE THINGS

Debut author Gibbs blends family history and memoir in this nonfiction exploration of the legacy of Southern racism.

“So, why did your daddy kill himself?” a family member asks the author in the opening lines of the book. This jarring question sets the stage for a Southern Gothic memoir in which Gibbs seeks to understand his father’s death by piecing together his own childhood in the South and his family’s connection to the lynching of John Henry Williams in 1921. The author’s devious grandmother, Memaw, emerges as the book’s unsympathetic antagonist, along with her father and brothers, who, she alleges, took part in the lynching. While the book’s narrative of racial violence and generational trauma provides some of its most engrossing passages, Gibbs also excels at analyzing his family’s internal psychology. For instance, his often-homeless father, who struggled for years with alcoholism and an “utter lack of purpose,” is not a stereotypically compelling figure; the author’s depiction, however, limns a tortured, brilliant man who could not escape his family’s history and the place they called home. His “big brain,” the author speculates, “had nothing to do but grind itself to death in the benighted ignorance of backwoods Florida.” As for Gibbs, he left the United States after graduating college, spending his adulthood in Tokyo, India, and, currently, Turkey. With a graduate degree in creative writing from the University of Arizona, and as the author of more than a dozen published stories, essays, and poems, Gibbs is a talented writer who effectively evokes the Old South through his compelling storytelling. The text doubles as a fascinating interrogation of autobiography as Gibbs questions “well-crafted” memoirs in which the author’s memory is “cleansed of chaos and uncertainty”—just as white Southerners have often misremembered history to fit their own internalized narratives. The author also introduces readers to the Japanese practice of zuihitsu(translated as “follow the pen”), which explores the power of memory and history through free association. While at times scattered due to the author’s stream-of-consciousness approach, this family history is a tour de force.

A gripping, insightful reckoning with America’s original sin.