Sandra Scofield
Author of Novels & a Memoir

Excerpt:

He had been listing the events of his life. It was merely a way to combat boredom. He had thought of the list as an inventory, and he had been amazed at the ways he could vary it. It gave him an odd sense of power to realize that what he left off and what he put on the list changed the quality of his history. Did he say, for 1947, “Dad left us”? Or did he say, “Dad went back to New York to work”? Did he record his grandmother’s death, in the house she had been helping pay for? And what did he make of his many childhood illnesses--the mumps and measles, croup and chicken pox? What of his asthma attacks, which his father dismissed as phantom, his father being an expert after a lifetime of “real” asthma that had kept him out of the war. David saw that the details of his life were petty, but he sensed that if he amassed those details, they would add up to something, that their density would amount to a life. He was fascinated with the way stories and novels were built of particulars, how small details lingered in his mind for a long time after a book was put away... When he read The Great Gatsby months before his first visit to the Basin Country Club, he found himself dreaming of girls in dresses cut low on their breasts, of chandeliers, deep carpets, food arranged on platters like the petals of flowers. When he read "Winter Dreams," he heard himself saying, "yes, yes," even though the story was set in a part of the country far away, with white winters and summers of lakes. He understood Fitzgerald’s special talent at conveying longing, because it evoked his own yearnings, so that his own pain--what did he want so much, except, like Dexter Green, the possession of beauty in all its forms?--was as real and acute as if someone had been sticking pins in his chest. The more he played with memory, and with recording his own life, however sketchily, the more he burned to go on with it. He wanted to get to the good part, which he associated with independence, and which encompassed all those things for which he longed. He felt impatient, because he was sick of being a boy, and he did not know how to set his life in motion.