Gonville: A Memoir Audiobook

Quotes

• “By turns hilarious and heartbreaking, Peter Birkenhead’s Gonville is a son’s-eye view of growing up with an emotional terrorist: his father. The memoir is a deft and cunning performance, told in jaunty prose which elegantly maps the geography of fear and of a child’s sad little wish to be loved.”

  — New Yorker

• “Powerful and spirited…Combining the terror and wit of Running with Scissors, the poignancy and sense of place of The Tender Bar, with the sparkling prose of Oh the Glory of It All, Gonville is light on its feet even as it deals in the darkest of family tales. A harrowing and often humorous story of a son coming to terms with his alternately charming, cruel, generous, and violent father.”

  — Amazon.com, editorial review

• “Fraught and funny…Birkenhead’s memoir is is intensely detailed, thus the feelings magnified, and full of the blistering ambivalence of a loving son who wondered whether it would have been easier to have a dad who was ‘all bad instead of almost good.’”

  — Publisher Weekly

• “Peter Birkenhead’s candor, humor, and insight about his father and ultimately himself combine to make this a highly enjoyable page-turner. It’s Birkenhead’s gift as a writer that the book is as laugh-out-loud funny as it is kick-you-in-the-chest brutal, and you’ll be ready for the second volume as soon as you finish this one.”

  — Elizabeth Crane, author of You Must Be This Happy to Enter

• “Birkenhead’s navigation of his budding masculinity—even through ominous stretches where he adopts his father’s mood swings—is poignant and often tears-in-the-eyes hilarious.”

  — Booklist

• “Few books I’ve ever read succeed like Gonville at capturing the crazed inventiveness of which the unhappy family is capable. Given the character of Peter Birkenhead’s father, it’s unsurprising that his son’s terrific memoir is full of sadness, humor, and high absurdity. More remarkable is the tolerance, sanity, and good humor that Birkenhead has won from experiences hardly conducive to those traits.” 

  — Benjamin Kunkel, author of Indecision and coeditor of n + 1