Oversharing
Glen David Gold’s recollection of his early years is exhaustive and exhausting.
In his debut novel, the historical mystery-thriller Carter Beats the Devil, Glen David Gold created a fictional biography of the real-life 1920s American stage magician Charles Joseph Carter. In Gold’s vivid imagining of this curious life, the performer’s most storied trick – chopping President Warren G Harding into little pieces, feeding them to a lion, then restoring the president to full corporeal life – has unforeseen consequences when, days later, Harding drops dead.
Unforeseen consequences are at the heart of Gold’s ambitious new book as well. This time, however, they don’t befall strangers either real or imagined. The victim of those unforeseen consequences is Gold himself. And here, Gold’s lengthy memoir (which takes us only to his early 30s), just about all of the unanticipated ramifications emanate from his complex, mysterious and manipulative mother. As his father warns Gold later in life: “Your mother is a black widow. She’ll drain you. To her, it’s her survival or yours.”
Gold came of age in a prosperous Los Angeles suburb in the 1960s, the only child of a suave, Porschedriving, can-do engineer father who made a fortune on cassette tapes, and a mother who was raised in Second World War England. It was a family awash in sunny So-cal abundance, optimism and wealth – until it wasn’t. When his father’s fortune topples because of the tapes’ poor quality, his parents split and his mother moves the two of them to San Francisco, fully embracing her me-ness in ground zero of the Me Decade. Soon the 12-year-old Gold is living alone, temporarily, when Mom meets a man and runs off to New York to live with him. It is just one of the countless times this irresponsibly fanciful mother puts her own unfocused quest for happiness ahead of her son’s stability and well-being. In retrospect Gold attempts to explain his neo-dickensian upbringing by summarising his “mom’s need to manoeuvre her way past some obstacles toward the bright and confusing future she wanted. The immediate obstacle in her path? That would be me.”
His mother cycles through a series of lovers and eventually falls under the spell of Daniel, a bottom-feeding, drug-addicted drifter-grifter who threatens her with violence and vibrates menace toward Gold. By now out of college, Gold finds himself wrestling with how to break free from the gravitational pull of this dark star: “There is allegedly an unpayable debt of having been born, but I was wondering how that worked. What were my real responsibilities to someone who was my mother?”
Yet as much as Gold seethes against his mother, and struggles to forge an identity apart from her lifesucking neediness, he reveals he’s like her in at least one way. Early on in this sweeping story he notes: “My mother talked a lot. She narrated what she was doing, why she was doing it, what she was going to do next.” It’s also how Gold spins his life story. As he searches through the attic of his memory, there’s no artefact too minor, no detail too small for Gold to hold up and ask us to ponder with him. His showand-tell style at times reads like a decades-long diary – whole and unexpurgated. We learn that he hated his signature and named his three favourite stuffed lions after characters in Born Free. Gold clearly has an encyclopaedic memory, and, as he tells us, he’s something of a genius. Has been since childhood, when he scored north of 170 on an IQ test. But it was also a mind that led
his parents, who “regarded my brain like the control centre of a nuclear reactor,” to send their precocious son to psychotherapy: “At 6 and 7 and 8 years old, I talked to adults about the conflict I had between id and superego in a way that was disturbing but a little cute.”
For writers, having an exhaustive memory is a blessing, but for their readers it can be a curse, leaving them feeling as if they’re in the presence of a hoarder determined to clean out his home. Each time Gold picks up an object, a whole world unfolds. It’s not detail Gold leaves us longing for; it’s sentimental resonance – and he knows it. “I don’t have emotions so much as I describe them,” he confides. “That is how I was made.”
When he began writing these pages as a graduate student, his thengirlfriend, the writer Alice Sebold (now his ex-wife), asked him how the nascent memoir made him feel. “It annoyed me that I didn’t know the answer,” he recalls, and it may annoy you too.