Bestselling author celebrates Danbury childhood in new book
DANBURY – Eric Metaxas is the best-selling author who’s taken readers to the worlds of the Protestant reformer Martin Luther, the British abolitionist William Wilberforce and the anti-Nazi martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
As such, it may surprise fans to learn that Metaxas has chosen a comparatively pedestrian setting for his latest history book – 1970s Danbury, where the author as his own subject recounts the seminal events of his childhood in “the only home I ever really had.”
But to those who follow the nonfiction of the 57year-old Metaxas, or know him by the other hats he wears – the author of 30 children’s books, or the host of the nationally syndicated radio show bearing his name – it’s no surprise that Metaxas once again finds in the ordinary moments of life the extraordinary intervention of divine inspiration.
“My story shows that our normal ideas about finding the meaning of life are more complicated than we think,” Metaxas said during a mid-morning interview last week from his Manhattan home. “I was raised in a faith envi
ronment, and as I tell in the book, I had numerous moments where God entered the picture but for some mysterious reason everything did not become completely clear to me until that moment at the end of the book where I have the dream on the frozen surface of Candlewood Lake.”
The goal, he says, is for people to identify their own experiences in his story.
“My story is typical of
faith journeys in that it is atypical – in other words, a lot of us have ideas about how these stories are supposed to go, but my story definitely did not follow any of those formulas,” Metaxas told The NewsTimes.” It is my earnest hope that people who are puzzling out the meaning of their own lives will get some help from this story.”
Readers interested in Metaxas’ “Fish Out of Water: A Search for the Meaning of Life” should beware of some of the advance publicity. Metaxas’ memoir is not, as Kirkus Reviews has suggested, “reminiscent
of St. Augustine’s ‘Confessions.’” – either in the intensity or the intimacy of its dialogue with God.
“What I really set out to do as much as anything is tell the many seriously hilarious stories that I have been telling my whole life,” Metaxas told Hearst Connecticut Media. “I wanted it to be a fun and often humorous read so it would be an enjoyable journey for the reader, but I knew in telling those funny stories it would help the reader to really understand who I was and what I was going through on this journey.”
As Metaxas notes, the
400-page memoir is saturated with the minutia of Danbury life in the 1970s, when everything was an event. If the grass grows two feet tall, off the reader goes with Metaxas to buy a lawnmower. If his parents decide to move the carpeting from their bedroom to the boy’s bedroom upstairs, the reader goes on that journey, too.
The payoff is that by considering no detail too small, Metaxas will sometimes wow the reader with his humorous powers, such as when the family cat, Rudy, entered the house after being sprayed by a skunk.
“It was outstandingly horrific, like something you would associate with a demonic presence or with the torrid belches of Beelzebub or a giant’s vomit, containing gobbets of halfdigested peasants and oxen,” Metaxas writes.
In another moment, it’s hard not to smile when the pre-pubescent narrator, who was already younger than everyone in his class because he was bumped-up a grade, describes the horror of being bused to Broadview Junior High School.
“In sixth grade, I had been among the older kids in a relatively small school, whose windows were decorated with construction paper pumpkins or turkeys or snowflakes or hearts, while now I was suddenly one of the youngest and smallest kids in a roiling ocean of acne and peer pressure, with nary a hallway lacking magic-markered genitalia.”
Here and throughout the memoir, Metaxas doesn’t shy from telling the truth of his experience in Danbury. In fact, in a footnote
about Broadview, Metaxas doubles down, writing: “And to those rare alumni who do not share this sentiment, may I on behalf of the rest of us send along our heartiest best wishes to you in your life of crime?”
To be sure, readers looking for a piece of themselves from Danbury in the 1970s are bound to find the nostalgia they seek in the middle chapters of the memoir, where Metaxas lovingly chronicles his journey from a New York City kid who never quite fit in, to being the 1980 valedictorian of Danbury High School, and later graduating from Yale.
The vision from God on Candlewood Lake he saves for the end of the memoir.
“It is not so much a story about conversion as it is about what happens on the way to conversion,” Metaxas said from his Manhattan home last week.
The Danbury heartland
Much of why Metaxas credits Danbury with giving him “an official introduction to America” is that the Hat City 50 years ago was such a contrast from the Big Apple.
“In 1972 Danbury, Connecticut, was a sleepy town of fifty thousand working and middle-class families four-score miles from Manhattan, magically just beyond commuting reach,” Metaxas writes. “So living there was like being in the heartland of the country, smack dab in the middle of America. Which was why leaving the multi-ethnic stew of urban Queens and our Greek parochial school for “the country” felt like we were finally really becoming fully American—and weren’t we?”
Punctuating the mundane days of Metaxas’ Danbury childhood are deep reservoirs of meaning and pain – especially when the young narrator navigates a string of unpopular priests at his church. In one scene, he recalls watching a priest beat his screaming son with a ruler.
“In a way this book is a cautionary tale for people in some faith environments that, like my own church in Danbury, might be genuinely wonderful, but at the same time might not adequately prepare them for the aggressively secular environment of college or the world beyond that community,” Metaxas said last week.
This is where the Candlewood Lake dream comes in – an event Metaxas describes in the book where “Eternity broke into my life while I was sleeping and worked its ways backwards and forwards, making sense of the past and the future.”
The short version of the memoir’s climactic dream scene is that God gave Metaxas in a dream precisely what 25-year-old Yale graduate needed to make sense of life’s contractions.
“It is obvious that God knew how to reach me in a way we would describe as miraculous or mystical, because I was intellectually very gummed up and in some sense paralyzed into inaction, and could never have gotten myself out of all the bramble of my intellectual objections,” Metaxas said during last week’s interview. “This vision was God’s way of blowing my mind so that I would know without any doubt that it was he.”