Sean Gorman

The author portrays his childhood and adult life in this smooth-reading memoir with a convincing voice, though rarely comfortable, revealing youth’s anger with neither angst nor shame, and letting the reader slide beside the child to see through different eyes.

But worldviews morph and change. “Sh*t had gone down and worlds had collided.” Chapters, headed by quotes from Sophocles, Sir Walter Scott, the Bible, dead metal groups and more, lead the reader through high school, college, romance, success, failure and folly.

One brief chapter records how the author, now an adult, wrote a book and got it published. I’ve read and enjoyed that book. But how might it feel to be a memoirist, a famous name in your old home town among the people you wrote about? And how will that play on the stage of a life still young, still unfinished, with guilts and angers yet to come?

Stories from the Handbasket (so different from America's breadbasket) is built on easily read chapters, each complete in themselves, and each leading onward to the next. It’s filled with the music and attitudes of a small-town working-class upbringing, vibrantly contrasted with an increasingly different world. Self-consciousness stands side by side with survivor’s guilt, private life with public reading, and denial with hope. The end result is an enticing, thought-provoking tale of real life, real people and real issues, an enjoyable read that leaves you pondering life and death and more.

Disclosure: I was given an ecopy and I offer my honest review.… (altro)

Author Sean Gorman was introduced to wrestling on TV at age 7, but understood straightaway that it’s not real—a fairytale for growing boys perhaps (though as time goes on, it becomes as much a fairytale world for girls). Blurring the line between fantasy and reality, the author/journalist embarks on an extra pseudo-career of contradictions. Pain for entertainment value or social advancement contrasts with and provides a retreat from the pains of real life. Fractured interests, broken relationships... where do they stand against the siren call of performance art?

Until We’re Strangers Again brings to life the backstage of a world that never quite existed, where matches were choreographed and the audience pretended not to know; where watchers wept for their favorite character’s pain, just as they might in a movie theater; and where the psychology of insult reigned supreme. Gorman plays his audience well, then and now, and the writing has an immediacy and level of detail that draws readers in, even while holding them safely at arm’s length.

Drink, sex and drugs; plenty of emotion both real and artificial; plus those curious dichotomies of a man who looking at wrestling chat boards and remembers Ernest Hemmingway quotes. It makes for a heady (and lengthy - 400+ pages) mix of real life, myth and magic where “Our narratives were a script. The drama was our lives,” and the characters behind those stage personas are strangers, even to themselves.

Disclosure: I was given a free ecopy and I offer my honest review.… (altro)