Epilogue A Memoir

Finished this book by Will Boast over the Chinese New Year holidays.

Summary of Epilogue A Memoir
Will Boast's parents, Andrew and Nancy, met and married in Southampton, a port city on England's south coast. Fleeing the social and economic malaise that blighted the country in the late '70s — workers on strike, power outages and high inflation — and with ambitions for his young family, Boast Sr. moved them to Fontana, Wis., where he worked for a plastics company.
Will was in elementary school, and for him and his younger brother Rory, it was an adventure.

When he was a senior in high school, his mother was diagnosed with a brain tumour. She suffered a slow and painful decline before her death during his first year at college. The next winter, his brother Rory was killed in an accident, driving to a party with friends. And then — yes, there is more — while he was away at graduate school, his father died when an untreated ulcer, brought about by alcohol abuse, ruptured. At this point the author is only 24 years old.

The very fact of suffering bereavement three times over would have been enough of a story. But for Boast this was not all. As he works his way through family papers and his father's possessions, he comes across a file that reveals a secret that had been kept from him and his brother.

Andrew had been married in his youth — and had left (actually they divorced) his wife and two sons, ensuring that the children of his second family knew nothing about them. Just as he is casting about for a way to deal with his new reality — as an orphan, as the only surviving child — the author discovers that he is not, after all, the only one left.

It turns out that there will be other discoveries to make about his parents — it's a family fairly riddled with skeletons and ghosts in the closet. But their secrets are not of crimes or any kind of depravity. Rather, what will haunt the reader is that the things kept hidden, the tragically preserved secrets, reveal a past shrouded in abandonment, shame and regret.

Will decides early on that he will contact his half brothers and, at some point, that he will tell them of the sizable inheritance his father has left. In the account that follows, of subsequent trips to England, visits with elderly relatives and, eventually, meeting each brother in turn, he struggles — perhaps too much — to be fair to the memory of his dead father, even in the face of his half brothers' recollections of their own unhappy childhoods.

My Take On This Book

This is a powerful and an unflinching memoir about personal tragedies of losing your loved ones, one after another, about family secrets, about the complicated relationships between father and son and between siblings, about the awkwardness of trying to connect with siblings you never knew you had and also about wanting to know the truths about your parents. It is also about the anxiety and resentfulness you feel when the father you knew and loved is portrayed rather unpleasantly by your half-siblings. Will Boast is very frank about his feelings, especially about his father, his brother Rory and his half-brothers Arthur and Harry.

A Little Bit About The Author
Will Boast was born in England and grew up in Ireland and Wisconsin. His story collection, Power Ballads, won the 2011 Iowa Short Fiction Award. His fiction and essays have appeared in Best New American Voices, Virginia Quarterly Review, Glimmer Train, The American Scholar, and The New York Times, among other publications. He’s been a Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford and a Charles Pick Fellow at the University of East Anglia. His New York Times bestselling memoir, Epilogue, is out now from W.W. Norton Co/Liveright and Granta Books in the UK. He currently divides his time between Chicago and Brooklyn, NY. This fall he'll be a Literature Fellow at the American Academy in Rome.

The longer version… I was born in Southampton, England, and grew up there and in County Limerick in Ireland before my family emigrated to America, where we lived in Wisconsin. I attended the Sisters of Mercy National School of Limerick (Ireland) and Fontana Elementary School and Big Foot High School (Wisconsin). I did my undergraduate degree at Knox College and my graduate degree at the University of Virginia, after which I did post-grad fellowships at Stanford University and the University of East Anglia. Along the way I've also lived in Chicago, Madison (WI), San Francisco, Berlin, and Brooklyn. I'm currently a lecturer at the University of Chicago, though I'm on leave this year on a fellowship at the American Academy in Rome.

Alongside my literary pursuits, I've played, toured, and recorded with bands, and music has been a constant passion for me since high school. Through college, I played tuba and trombone in various ensembles and jazz groups. Since I've played drum set in rock bands, most of them San Francisco-based. Over the past few years, I've become interested in long-form narrative journalism and one-hour TV drama. In addition to projects in those mediums, I'm currently finishing a novel.