David Payne. (2015). Barefoot to Avalon: A Brother's Story. Grove Atlantic.

David Payne. 2015. Barefoot to Avalon: A Brother's Story. Grove Atlantic.

David Payne, Barefoot to Avalon: A Brother's Story. Grove Atlantic, 2015.

David Payne. Barefoot to Avalon: A Brother's Story. Grove Atlantic, 2015.

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   • bioText: David Payne is the author of five novels, including Confessions of a Taoist on Wall Street, winner of the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship Award, Ruin Creek, a New York Times Notable Book, and Back to Wando Passo. Payne has taught at Bennington, Duke, Hollins and is a founding faculty member in the Queens University MFA Program.
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Barefoot to Avalon

fullDescription

From a New York Times Notable author comes a “fiercely honest . . . and utterly heartbreaking” memoir of brotherhood, grief, and mental illness (Jay McInerney).
 
In 2000, while moving his household from Vermont to North Carolina, author David Payne watched from his rearview mirror as his younger brother, George A., driving behind him in a two-man convoy of rental trucks, lost control of his vehicle, fishtailed, flipped over in the road, and died instantly. Soon thereafter, David’s life entered a downward spiral that lasted several years. His career came to a standstill, his marriage disintegrated, and his drinking went from a cocktail hour indulgence to a full-blown addiction. He found himself haunted not only by George A.’s death, but also by his brother’s manic depression, a hereditary illness that overlaid a dark and violent family history whose roots now gripped David, threatening both his and his children’s futures. The only way out, he found, was to write about his brother.
 
This is the “piercing . . . tour de force” account of David and George A.’s boyhood footrace that lasted long into their adulthood, defining their relationship and their lives (Los Angeles Times). As universal as it is intimate, this is an exceptional memoir of sibling rivalry and sibling love, and of the torments a family can hold silent and carry across generations. A story not only of survival in the face of adversity but of hard-won wisdom, Barefoot to Avalon is “an elegy to a brother that plumbs depths beyond depths—a fever-dream of a memoir, a blazing map of familial love and loss, headlong and heartbreaking and gorgeously written” (James Kaplan, national bestselling author of Frank: The Voice and Sinatra: The Chairman).

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Carmela Ciuraru, The New York Times
   • content: “This is a brave book with beautiful sentences on every page, but there's nothing showy about it. Mr. Payne writes with the intensity and urgency of a man trying to save his own life."
2. • premium: False
   • source: Lucas Mann, San Francisco Chronicle
   • content: "Burns starkly and powerfully...a book that is, as much as anything, a study in the power of inexhaustible candor...like the best memoirs, it's about something far harder to pin down, something unspecific and ineffable in the way time moves and lives fade, the moments that none of us can get back....Payne's writing is loose, confident and snappy, and he has a rare ability to distill enormous scope into a single sentence, sometimes a single image...[Payne] gives us the ambiguities of real life, a story that is sometimes hard to take, but always worth it."
3. • premium: False
   • source: David Ulin,Los Angeles Times
   • content: "Piercing...a tour de force."
4. • premium: False
   • source: Patricia Ann McNair, Washington Independent Review of Books
   • content: "Intense, painful, and beautifully rendered...The story is built like a labyrinth. Memories and experiences are pathways leading into and out of others, deftly moving the reader forward and back in time...That David cuts himself no slack, and boldly, unflinchingly tells his own faulty story is remarkable."
5. • premium: False
   • source: Linda C. Brinson, Greensboro News & Record
   • content: “... [a] masterpiece of nonfiction... From the first page, Payne's evocative, often poetic prose will put you under its spell... it will be the rare reader who does not see something of his or her own experiences in this perceptive, beautiful and passionate memoir."
6. • premium: False
   • source: John Murawski, News & Observer
   • content: “... stylistic bravura... what gives these biographical particulars their existential wallop is Payne's raw, sustained intensity. Reading Payne can feel like a near-physical experience, of being swept along by sinister forces that in different ages have gone by such names as original sin, melancholia, madness, and most recently, brain chemistry."
7. • premium: False
   • source: Gina Webb, Atlanta Journal-Constitution
   • content: “A memoir as raw, intimate and courageous as a series of midnight confessions fueled by a bottle of vodka... [Payne's] barefoot journey, every brave and bloody step over broken glass, shows how even the darkest emotions and deepest wounds can yield to love."
8. • premium: False
   • source: The Winston-Salem Journal
   • content: “Payne explores his family and all its troubled relationships and history, striking universal notes that will hit you where you live... Not since William Styron's 1951 debut novel “Lie Down in Darkness" has there been a more eloquent, courageous depiction."
9. • premium: False
   • source: The News & Observer
   • content: “Powerful, gripping, raw and tender."
10. • premium: False
    • source: Elissa Schappell, Vanity Fair
    • content: “David Payne goes to the bone in his deeply felt Barefoot to Avalon"
11. • premium: False
    • source: Kirkus Reviews
    • content: “Riveting family history [asks] complex questions about social prestige, mental health, and the ties that bind...powerful."
12. • premium: False
    • source: Publishers Weekly
    • content: "Moving...there's a novelistic intensity to the story, with Payne dwelling on vivid recollected scenes, recreating their atmospherics and teasing out every buried emotional tremor and element of foreshadowing, but his prose also has the rawness of a confessional...Writing with a mixture of clear-eyed realism and lyrical elegy, Payne shows how a family's pain, resentment, and loss get transmuted into love."
13. • premium: False
    • source: Suzannah Lessard
    • content: “Barefoot to Avalon is simply magnificent. The book has the feeling of nothing at all reserved, a kind of go for broke passion. In this complete commitment it steps across a normal threshold between reader and book. It has because of this a powerful healing effect of a very strange, unusual kind. Reading it has been a huge experience."
14. • premium: False
    • source: Jay McInerney
    • content: “Barefoot to Avalon is one of the most powerful and penetrating memoirs I've ever read; it is fiercely honest, deeply engaging, and utterly heartbreaking."
15. • premium: False
    • source: Jenny Offil
    • content: “The tangled ties of adult siblings are one of the most underexplored themes in literature. In Barefoot to Avalon, David Payne transforms the story of a brother's death into a potent and heartbreaking meditation on love and loss and the long climb out of grief."
16. • premium: False
    • source: James Kaplan
    • content: “An elegy to a brother that plumbs depths beyond depths -- a fever-dream of a memoir, a blazing map of familial love and loss, headlong and...
17. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      May 18, 2015
      A writer ponders his family's legacy of abusive marriage, sibling rivalry, madness and death in this bleakly moving memoir. Novelist Payne (Ruin Creek) arranges the narrative around his brother George's repeated episodes of manic-depression and psychosis, which blighted his promising life before he died in a car crash in front of Payne. Powering their often close but sometimes jealous relationship are the fraught dynamics of their parents' troubled marriage; their father's manipulation of his sons into competing for his affection; and the bad blood of their mother's well-to-do North Carolina family, with their background of insanity and suicide. And spreading out from all this is the author's own life story as he tries to escape the family drama yet finds himself recapitulating it in his own alcoholism and rocky relationships. There's a novelistic intensity to the story, with Payne dwelling on vivid recollected scenes, recreating their atmospherics and teasing out every buried emotional tremor and element of foreshadowing, but his prose also has the rawness of a confessional and a self-lacerating impulse to expose his own guilt and unmet neediness. Writing with a mixture of clear-eyed realism and lyrical elegy, Payne shows how a family's pain, resentment, and loss get transmuted into love. Photos.

18. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      May 15, 2015
      Ruminations on family and success, in the context of a fraternal tragedy. Novelist Payne (Back to Wando Passo, 2006, etc.), a founding faculty member of the Queens University MFA Program, builds his memoir around an unbearable burden. In 2000, George A., his charismatic yet bipolar brother, died in a crash while helping the author move long-distance. In the past, they shared a charmed but dark Southern childhood, their genteel mother overwhelmed by their manipulative, alcoholic father. "My oldest competitor and ally," writes Payne, "he was the only one who knew or ever would know what that time and place had been for me." Although George had suffered manic episodes before, he'd always recovered sufficiently to resume a career as a broker-until 1991, when he was fired and moved in with their mother. In the face of George's deterioration, writes the author, "my certainties and resentments seemed suddenly small and brittle." Payne narrates his own story as a series of improbable ups and downs, from attending Exeter as his parents' marriage disintegrated to early success followed by penury as a novelist. The author's ambition and determination to flee-he impulsively bought land with a book advance, a decision that would haunt him as leading to George's death-kept him from seeing how he and his brother seemed fated to repeat their father's self-destruction. Both brothers entered optimistic marriages that produced children, then imploded. "Our father's actions," he writes, "were those you'd take against your enemies when you burn their houses to the ground...and in a way George's actions are terminal like Bill's were." Payne's prose is lyrical, allowing him to convey intense meaning in mundane interactions and distantly recalled family crises as well as a clear sense of a variety of settings. His dense, sprawling sentences may demand patience, but they illuminate a riveting family history and ask complex questions about social prestige, mental health, and the ties that bind. A powerful, above-average literary memoir.

      COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

popularity

114

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From a New York Times Notable author comes a “fiercely honest . . . and utterly heartbreaking” memoir of brotherhood, grief, and mental illness (Jay McInerney).
 
In 2000, while moving his household from Vermont to North Carolina, author David Payne watched from his rearview mirror as his younger brother, George A., driving behind him in a two-man convoy of rental trucks, lost control of his vehicle, fishtailed, flipped over in the road, and died instantly. Soon thereafter, David’s life entered a downward spiral that lasted several years. His career came to a standstill, his marriage disintegrated, and his drinking went from a cocktail hour indulgence to a full-blown addiction. He found himself haunted not only by George A.’s death, but also by his brother’s manic depression, a hereditary illness that overlaid a dark and violent family history whose roots now gripped David, threatening both his and his...

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   • description: Family & Relationships / Siblings