Memoir revolves around a mommy not so dearest
Glen David Gold prefaces his memoir with a page on which two lines are written:
“A NOTE ON THE ACCURACY OF THE TEXT My mother assures me none of this happened.”
And so begins “I Will Be Complete” (Knopf, $29.95, 477 pages), a rollicking memoir that is admittedly vying for shelf space with dozens of other mother-centric memoirs, but boy, is this one a page-turner.
Part of the appeal might be the time and place. Much of the book takes place in 1970s San Francisco, when hippies no longer were seen as freaks and pretty much everyone was lighting up. At age 10, Gold was swept up to the city by his newly divorced mother on a whim; a man Gold calls Peter Charming called her and said, “Hey, we’re having a party, you should come.” They caught the next plane and stayed.
“I was specific about the geography and the time, because it really does inform the character and how they made choices and what was in the air at the time. San Francisco really is a city for
dreamers. At that point, the dream was you can do anything, and you can be anything,” Gold says, sipping a latte in North Beach the day his book was published. “But it turns out there are limitations they didn’t take into account. Like gravity.”
Gold’s first foray into literary prominence was his 2001 historical thriller, “Carter Beats the Devil.”
He followed that with 2009’s “Sunnyside,” based on Charlie Chaplin. After that came out, he sent his agent the first chapter of his next book, a post-apocalyptic novel with animals as characters.
“She said, ‘Good news, bad news. It’s a great first chapter, but I’ll never sell it, because every writer in America is writing postapocalyptic animal novels right now.’ ”
Gold, 54, had been toying with the idea of writing about his relationship with his mother “and my search for autonomy,” which he describes as having control over your destiny. He did two drafts he says were “terrible. Then I understood I had to make myself a character. What were the things that would happen to a character in a novel? It made it a lot easier.”
The beginning of the memoir gives a nod to his early years living in Corona del Mar, where his father became a millionaire working for a company that invented cassette tapes, until the cassette tapes started breaking, and he lost money. His mother was anti-establishment, in a constant quest to reinvent herself. Glen, an only child, describes himself at that time as “a mouthy kid, not that pleasant,” without many friends. He was smart; gifted schools were considered. His mother described him as a 36-year-old midget.
Then his parents divorced, and Gold was spending summers in Chicago with his father and his new wife and half-siblings. His mom moved with him to San Francisco, and he became her plus one at parties, where he’d serve drinks. Peter Charming — with whom his mother maybe or maybe not was having an affair (there were many women, and later rumors of white slavery) — inserted himself into Glen’s life as a father figure.
When his mother followed a boyfriend to New York, leaving 12-year-old Glen alone in their apartment for months, it was Charming Glen called when the ghost in the basement became too insistent. He was mostly alone, skipping school, buying comic books, eating candy, roaming the city at 4:30 a.m.
Ultimately, he went to boarding school for high school, Wesleyan University and then UC Berkeley for college and UC Irvine for graduate school, where he realized he wanted to be a writer. In between, there were jobs in bookstores, girlfriends and calls from his mother, who was always in some sort of trouble. Actually, trouble isn’t the word. His mother kept putting herself in danger. She had the power to change, Gold writes, but chose not to.
“I did therapy. I read ‘The Power of Now’ (by Eckhart Tolle), and that helped a lot. I did EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), a type of trauma therapy that’s almost like magic.”
Now Gold, sitting in North Beach with his latte, is at peace. He has left San Francisco for Los Angeles’ Silver Lake neighborhood, following his girlfriend Sara Shay (to whom the book is dedicated), who moved south to teach Pilates to Cirque du Soleil members. She now has her own studio and participates in competitive pole dancing.
Gold’s father, on his fourth wife, lives nearby. He liked “I Will Be Complete.” “He said he comes across as a benign putz,” Gold says. He doesn’t know if his mother has read the book. Despite his tonguein-cheek forward to the book, he hasn’t spoken to her in eight years.
“She chose to stop speaking to me,” he says. He jokes about future memoirs, then shakes his head. “I have no need to go further. This is enough.”