GONE THE HARD ROAD

Recollections of a childhood beset by pain.

An award-winning fiction writer, essayist, and memoirist, Martin (b. 1955) creates an affecting portrait of his troubled childhood in a small Illinois farming town. “My house, when I was young, was a house of sorrow,” he writes. As the author recounted in a previous memoir, his father was the source of that sorrow. After losing both hands in a farming accident, he became a man consumed with anger, “whose intense love often got swallowed up inside his rage.” Martin’s mother, a schoolteacher, was a gentle, soft-spoken woman who nurtured her son’s love of reading and writing and tried, as well as she could, to temper her husband’s abusive rages. Martin recalls his loneliness as an only child, teachers who encouraged him, and his envy of other families who seemed far happier than his own. “It would take me years and years to escape the anger of that house,” he writes, “and even now, when I live a more gentle life, I still feel like I’m fighting the rage my father left inside me, always trying to tamp it down, always on guard against its return.” As a teenager, Martin became increasingly rebellious, exacerbating conflicts with his father. By his second year of high school, he describes himself as a “juvenile delinquent,” shoplifting, engaging in petty crime, and roaming the streets at night with a rough crowd. But he turned himself around and left his small town to make a life for himself elsewhere. “If anyone left the area—either to visit family in some far-off place or to move away for good—folks said they’d gone the hard road,” he writes. Martin’s hard road involved recognizing his emotional legacy: inheriting from his father a constant feeling of wariness against forces that were “waiting to hurt me” and from his mother, a desire to believe in a God who will keep him “safe and free from harm.”

Candid memories placidly told.