Buy What We Lost: Based on a True Story

What We Lost: Based on a True Story

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Synopsis

"Peck often borrows moments and memories from his own life for his unconventional fiction, most particularly in the 1996 novel, The Law of Enclosures. To astonishing effect, he inverts that process in this stark memoir of his own father's life. What We Lost invokes the facts of Dale Peck Sr.'s grim early years with the fierce, clear-eyed detachment of a gifted fabricator of fiction. The Dale who tells the story is a Manhattan homosexual slightly famed in the 1990s for his novels. The Dale whose story he tells lived, mid-1950s, in a squalid hovel with seven siblings, a stepmother who beat him, and a wreck of a father who one drunken night spirited his son away from the misery. Dale Sr., then 14, stayed a year with his uncle, milking cows, excelling at school sports, and growing strong. But, bowing inexplicably to the power of blood ties, he returned home. Peck honors that power with this aggressively unsentimental portrait of an often-distant father who mastered life and its harsh misery with stubborn resilience."
Richard Labonte -- Books to Watch Out For

Review

In the haunting new book by the acclaimed author of Now It's Time to Say Goodbye, a young man must choose between his troubled family and the new home he loves. Dale Peck, Sr., grew up poor in rural Long Island in the 1950s, sharing a one-room house with seven brothers and sisters, an abusive mother, and an alcoholic father haunted by his past. When, at fourteen, Dale is more or less kidnapped by his father and taken to his uncle's farm in upstate New York, the change wrought by the move is remarkable. Thriving on the farm, Dale develops a loving relationship with his uncle Wallace, and for the first time he knows contentment. But when Dale's mother demands that he return, he is forced to choose between his broken family and the land and uncle he has come to love. It is a decision that will determine his future and the legacy he will pass on to his own son. What We Lost is a coming-of-age story that startles in its immediacy and lack of sentimentality. Refracting his father's past through the prism of his own vivid imagination, the author Dale Peck forges a bridge between generations and reveals the dark secrets at the heart of family.