San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Author’s spiral fuels powerful memoir
It’s easy now to forget that there was a time when San Francisco’s nightlife felt alive, when you could go to a dive bar and buy a cheap drink and chat up the bartender, and be entertained all evening by stories. Pockets of San Francisco, here and there, still feel like home, but they hang by a thread. And then comes Joshua Mohr’s heartbreaking memoir “Model Citizen” to remind us. It’s his story of addiction, parenthood, strokes and storytelling itself.
The memoir is similar to Mohr’s fiction in its concrete particulars — as with his novels “Some Things That Meant the World To Me” and “Damascus,” there are dive bars, bartenders, the Mission of yesteryear. Unlike his fiction, in which there are narrative arcs, his memoir captures the recursive nature of relapses and close calls, the way they can be triggered by nothing in particular. It moves nonlinearly between scenes from his life because other scenes emotionally evoke them. He notes that he spent his first night of graduate school “Alcoholic Quantum Leaping,” and the same type of time travel occurs in this memoir.
In meta excursions, Mohr explores his desire for narrative cause and effect, his desire for an audience to understand and maybe even validate how his addiction came about. And there are potential causes. There is clear grief and trauma in Mohr’s childhood. His father, a minister, abandoned him and his mother, who was also alcoholic, when Mohr was young.
Although it remains softfocus, an element of dual diagnosis may lurk here, too. As with all good memoirs, however, the author’s selfskepticism cuts. As he puts it, “If I zero in on my life, if I scour and skewer and stew on any aspect, I’ll always locate some benign reason to give up . ... Do I want to end up alone and alcoholic? No, of course not. Yes, of course.”
More than a search for explanations within his personal history, the book probes shame’s role in addiction, the stories told to shore up the self.
Be aware that “Model Citizen” is harrowing. This is not a memoir that will hand you redemption in a neat package. It has a disquieting degree of honesty around addiction and parenting. I found this exhilarating. In the opening pages Mohr admits that when he experienced his first stroke, he began crying, thinking “if this is the end of my life, I wish I had ended sooner. Wish I had died before meeting Lelo, before ever seeing Ava on the ultrasound, the size of an orange seed.” However, intensely emotional sentences rub up against a painfully funny detail. It elucidates the contradictions within lived experience. As his hand went numb, his daughter climbed onto his back and began shouting, “Hop on Pop! Hop on Pop!”
Lively surrealist moments erupt within Mohr’s consciousness. In the hospital, Mohr finds himself talking to Werner Forssmann, the Nazi doctor who invented the lifesaving heart repair he’s undergoing by performing the procedure on himself. Forssmann tells him, “Living with
By Joshua Mohr (MCD; 336 pages; $27)
yourself is the brutal aspect of being human.” In these interludes are shades of the Beats and Denis Johnson. You can feel Mohr reaching toward the outer limits of his psyche, but he’s also asking the reader: Am I getting this right? Are you feeling this pain and strangeness of living, too?
Mohr begins to suffer strokes while in recovery. His heart is missing a wall and requires repair, an interesting metaphor because there is no wall, no selfprotectiveness, in his language. Its honesty is motivated by the fear that accompanies parenting, a fear made sharper by the sense of mortality his strokes bring:
“I won’t make Ava ache to know me, the real me,” he writes. “No, I’ll overcorrect, overshare. I’ll write these books that confess all sorts of crimes, literal felonies and those of the heart. I’ll scream myself hoarse so Ava can know exactly who I am.”
One of the many gifts of Joshua Mohr’s writing is that because it’s so unflinchingly specific, so in search of life, you realize that perhaps, regardless of your own particulars, you might not be alone.
The memoir’s complex, mottled epiphanies are hardwon. “Model Citizen” wrecked me and then, somehow, put me back together. San Francisco was lucky to have a chronicler this generous.
Anita Felicelli is the author of “Chimerica: A Novel” and the short story collection “Love Songs for a Lost Continent.” She lives in the Bay Area with her family.