San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Mommie dearest
If you’re familiar with Glen David Gold’s past novels — the enormously entertaining “Carter Beats the Devil” (2001) and the equally so “Sunnyside” (2009) — you might feel one of two ways about his writing. It’s wickedly intelligent and wildly imaginative. His books are ripe with larger-than-life scenes you can really sink your teeth into and enjoy a good munching. That Gold is a darn gifted yarn spinner!
Or there’s the other end of the spectrum. Gold’s works are impeccably researched, seamless blends of fact and fiction. But they’re also overstuffed with characters and quite a bit denser than they need to be. Gold’s latest book, a memoir, is decidedly the former. From the beginning, it’s clear his approach to laying down his life’s story is nothing if not thorough. Yes, this means certain sections are bloated or unnecessarily repetitive. But Gold’s intentions are so sincere and his scenes so well articulated and raw that it’s easy to immerse yourself and go with whatever he throws at you. Luckily, “I Will Be Complete” is one helluva ride.
Unlike “Sunnyside,” which opens with a bang, “I Will Be Complete” offers up a deceptively ordinary entree into Gold’s existence. It’s the 1980s. He’s 22 and schmoozing with a novelist at a party. The name Peter Charming comes up in conversation, a name Gold recognizes from his past. By way of introduction, Gold writes: “Peter Charming is part of the story, but really, I’m looking for my mother, or what remains of her. There is not going to be redemption here; nor am I going to indict her as a monster. There is another way to
go for those of us who can no longer love our mothers.”
It’s a pretty telling summation — and one that resonates throughout the book. Much like Jeannette Walls’ relationship with her mother in “The Glass Castle” or Augusten Burroughs’ accounts in “Running With Scissors,” Gold’s mother’s twisted antics and Gold’s increasingly muted reactions to them are not just fuel for evocative storytelling; they’re also the throughlines that propel the memoir forward.
Not surprisingly, Gold’s adolescence was anything but normal. He grew up a precocious and anxiety-ridden only child with insomnia and allergies in a 5,000-square-foot ranch house in Corona del Mar, in Orange County. Think plush, pristine carpets; strategically placed contemporary art on the walls; a swimming pool and Jacuzzi; and a “living room conversation pit with hidden television cabinet, executed by contractors who’d worked on the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland.”
When Gold was 10, his parents separated. His father moved in with and eventually married an attractive and helpfully wealthy 27-year-old in Chicago named Ann, while his mother started hanging around with Peter Charming, whom she met at a bar in San Francisco. Apparently Gold handled the divorce so stoically that his mother started referring to him as a “thirty-six-year-old midget.”
After he and his mother’s subsequent move to San Francisco, things started to go sideways. Peter Charming threw parties — epic evenings of ‘70s-style decadence and debauchery. Pierre Cardin polyester shirts, glitter and bell-bottoms. Designer drugs, swinger sex and biofeedback machines. For young Gold, it was simultaneously glamorous and perfectly terrifying. But for Gold’s mother, it meant something else entirely: promise. “Everything she knew suggested that with a little effort, luck, élan, a prosperous life would be ours. Which is of course the crux of a good con game.”
And what a con game it was. Over the next decade, Gold’s mother cycled through men, jobs and increasingly dilapidated homes. After Peter Charming, there was fashion designer Trevor and meth addict Daniel (who couldn’t read or write and, at times, tried to kill her). After a failed investment in 35 tabletop Pong machines, there was a short-lived “business” typing up resumes and a stint managing some shoddy storage units. A few apartments in San Francisco, then a move to New York (without 12-year-old Gold, who lived alone for nearly five months), San Diego, Oregon, a women’s shelter and maybe a trailer park in Las Vegas.
While his mother was preoccupied with mucking up her life (but perpetually believing that her ship was about to come in), Gold was busy growing up and becoming cynical. He attended Thacher, a cushy boarding school in rural Ojai, in Ventura County, and discovered girls and punk rock. For undergrad, he tried out Wesleyan, “where feminism was cutting-edge in a humorless denim skort kind of way,” and took a year off to go work in a charmingly snooty independent bookstore in Los Angeles, before transferring to Berkeley. He fell in and out of relationships with strikingly strongwilled women, wrote three novels and collected “almostbut-not-quites” from literary agents, and survived on little to no money.
If that’s a poor description of the milestones that shaped Gold’s early life, it’s that way for a reason. In fact, outside his mother’s train-wreck trajectory, nothing that happens in “I Will Be Complete” is really all that out of the ordinary. After all, he writes, “Life, it turns out, is most often a series of mundane, unlikely events.”
But to Gold’s credit, in his capable hands even the smallest events seem revelatory. Each dimwitted move his mother makes reads as more bonkers (and undeniably sad) than the last. Each time Gold throws himself into love, it’s like Orpheus trying to win back Eurydice. When combined with his deadpan delivery and wry sense of humor, each obstacle to overcome or hoop to jump through takes on a life of its own.
If there’s a fault in “I Will Be Complete,” it’s that Gold obsesses over his inability to feel anything about his mother’s behavior. While that may be true in his mind, what he’s produced is anything but hardhearted or unsympathetic. Instead, Gold’s memoir is once again wickedly intelligent, wildly imaginative (well, in some ways) and everything in between. Happy munching.