In reading Rob Spillman’s coming-of-age memoir, I was reminded of something one of Don DiLillo’s characters said to describe another person in the recent New Yorker short story, “Sine Cosine Tangent.” “The vivid boy, she whispered. The shapeless man.” Indeed, Spillman seems to have had a vivid boyhood, characterized by living part time with each of his separated musician parents. He seems to have wanted to believe that his closeted gay father was a far more compelling figure than his mother, who was, after all, just a mother. With his father, he looked forward to road trips designed to feed his running fantasies; and living in Berlin, Aspen and Upstate New York—all exciting places peopled by all sorts of fascinating artistic types. Conversely, he found living in Baltimore with his mother to be stifling and looked forward to nothing more than escaping just as soon as possible. Both parents loved Robby in their own ways, but each maintained a certain distance from him, a situation that ultimately left him far too much on his own searching for an identity.

Using alternating chapters that give the narrative a sense of simultaneity, Spillman follows his childhood; and his later search as an adult for a bohemian writing lifestyle in Europe, patterned after Hemingway or Kerouac. Driven primarily by anecdotes, the narrative is both intimate and engaging. What Spillman fails to recognize throughout the memoir, however, —and only seems to come to terms with in the final pages—was that he was a perennial outsider who adopted several powerful coping mechanisms. He ran to escape. Although a talented runner, he never realized any of his running fantasies. One of the most troubling and curious anecdotes was his decision to leave his wife while she was obviously experiencing a medical emergency to go for a run through the rubble of East Berlin. He read widely and was obviously moved by what he read, but one gets the sense that this was another way to escape things he did not like, such as boring part time jobs. And most troubling of all, he aspired to being a great writer himself (probably influenced by his artistic father), but never really engaged with it. Instead he did things that actually interfered with it like drinking and partying to excess. Although a man known to like a party, Hemingway once said about writing, “All you have to do is write one true sentence.” Spillman wrote a whole manuscript for a novel that he later realized had no true sentences, so he discarded it.

Although the memoir is replete with colorful anecdotes and does not shrink from the truth, it can be frustrating to read because, filtered through the lens he creates, one sees a young man who was given far too little guidance and allowed to make far too many wrong turns and to venture down far too many blind alleys. He flunked out of college and had three major automobile accidents to mention just two. Clearly, he seems to have been prone to adopting risky behaviors that occasionally panned out, like electing to live in East Berlin prior to unification, but just as likely did not. Knowing that he landed on his feet in the end is a relief and a testament to his intelligence, perseverance and guile. ( )