Name: Stop-time
ISBN: 9780140044461

Frank Conroy

'Stop-Time' is a memoir of boyhood and adolescence unlike any other. Beginning with a lesson in brutality at a progressive boarding school, it moves to a self-help settlement in Florida, to a Connecticut mental home (where Conroy's mother and stepfather are wardens), and to New York City (where Conroy survives by his wits in school, at jobs, and even more dangerously at home). Then, after his mother leaves for Europe ... Conroy runs away, embarking on new, and even stranger adventures.

Stop-time

Mat Connor

Autobiographies and Memoirs have always been a bit of a blind spot for me. I probably read too many political campaign style autobiographies when I was young and got turned off them. 

Still, if I had to choose between a memoir or a biography about someone, I am taking the biography just about every time. I've always felt that how a person was perceived or understood by others was somehow more revealing and tangible than how that person understood themselves. I wondered whether people can ever really be honest and unbiased enough to tell their story truthfully. 

I get especially sceptical if I read memoirs like Blake Butler's Molly or Tara Westover's Educated that feel so detailed that you start to feel the presence of a fiction writer carefully adding in bits of foreshadowing and theme repetition. If a memoirist starts reciting long bits of dialogue my BS meter starts to raise. I give Westover credit in her book for frequently calling out that memory is not infallible and that she's always giving her version of events.

I am starting to appreciate memoirs more and it's because of books like Frank Conroy's Stop-Time. He gives us his memories of being a young boy and teenager. It's episodic but to me that's what makes it feel so real. When I think back on my own childhood, it's not a linear version of events. It's a series of scenes and anecdotes, some of them so random that it's a mystery to me why my brain won't let them go. I don't know why some random uneventful days and moments in our lives can still seem so vivid when there are whole years that blend together. Conroy's book describes this feeling better than any other I've read. 

Conroy's also great at showing how children notice things more thoughtfully than adults give them credit for. I bet everyone has a memory from when they were a kid where the adults around them underestimated their ability to notice or remember something. I think we probably remember these moments because nobody, especially children, appreciate being underestimated or slighted.

I found Conroy's depiction of his stepfather Jean fascinating. It feels weird saying this because he was a real person but Jean is one of my favorite characters in any book. He was a charming, flawed, contradictory, dunce. You know he was real because it's hard to make a fictional person that complicated and interesting. I looked him up to see what happened to him after he left Conroy's life but I never found anything.

Stop-time

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