Stories I Tell Myself

A short time ago, I was complaining about the lack of winter having the effect of prolonging 2015.  The 10th day of the year came with winter in full force.  Temperature dropping all day.  Wind howling all day.  So brutal that only a short dog walk was tolerable.  With a planned plumbing project apparently not needed, I sat down to read Stories I Tell Myself by Juan F Thompson.

I've read much of what Hunter S Thompson has written in book form, so when I saw on a website somewhere a reference to the book written by Juan, his son, I immediately requested it from the library.  It was listed as "In Cataloging" which often means a long wait, but it was available within a day.  I originally planned to read this on an upcoming trip, and I rarely sit down and read an entire book in one sitting.  But I did so with Stories I Tell Myself on that frozen windy day.

The book tells the story of Juan growing up in the shadow of his father.  I was sort of expecting something along the line of  Agusten Burrough's Running with Scissors, but Juan's growing up was substantially more normal than that.  If I were to compare it to another Burrough's book, it is almost closer to A Wolf at the Table, but not with the same level of overt brutality.  Largely, it sounded as if Juan's youth was grounded much more in his mother, with his father a figure to be feared.  After his parent's divorce, I read between the lines that there were several years with minimal contact between Hunter and Juan.  Juan alludes to this, but doesn't come right out and say it.
Juan also goes out of his was several times in the book to point out that he is describing things from his memory and that his memory may be incomplete or possibly erroneous.  This is part of the narrative that runs through the book, and I found it interesting as also something I've become increasingly aware of.

The most prominent theme in the book is one of the relationship between fathers and sons.  This almost seems to be more important at some points than the fact that Juan's father is the famous and eccentric Hunter S Thompson.  Still, after reading books like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas or Screwjack, growing up with Hunter does have aspects and events that might be expected.
It was somewhat shocking some of the other figures who appear in the book:  Jimmy Buffet, Kieth Richards, John Kerry - if more than eccentric, Hunter certainly had a diverse A-List crowd he moved in.
Sometimes the right book comes along at the right time and Stories I Tell Myself was one of those.  As my dad's recent death has had me pondering my relationship with him over the years, Juan's book allowed for a different perspective and some introspection.  Not that my dad, although he did work in the book publishing industry, should be compared to Hunter as this would be like trying to compare peacocks and robins, or maybe peacocks and suspension bridges.

The other thread running through the book is the overall theme of growing up.  All of the painful moments of awkwardness, confusion, alienation, childhood difficulties are laid bare.  This is more poignant as Juan appears to be somewhat clingy to his mother and quite an introvert.
Like most of us, Juan eventually finds his own life and ends up surprisingly normal, even somewhat boring at the end of the book.

There was one detail of the book I found somewhat maddening.  Juan first goes to college at Tufts and writes about being lonely and quite unhappy there.  Transferring to Colorado University and spending a year in England suites him better before returning to the US to finish college.  He writes, "Upon my return to Boulder for the first of my two senior years, I declared English literature my major."  And on the next page he graduates.  This implies graduation from CU in Boulder, but his bio states he graduated from Tufts.  So either he transferred back to where he was previously miserable, or his bio is wrong.  Either way, something is missing either in the story here, or in the editing.  While a minor detail, I find this hard not to perseverate on.

There are a few revelations about Hunter I found surprising as I read the 272 pages.
First, I was surprised at the level of money issues he faced.  It reads like this was mostly self-induced, as it often is.  But I would have thought that a famous writer who had sold millions of books could endure poor money habits without as much effect as was eluded to in the book.  More than anything, this probably supports the notion that no matter how successful a person is, living at the end of means is dangerous.
The other revelation was Hunter's relationship with drugs and alcohol.  I had always assumed that his consumption of drugs and alcohol was somewhat exaggerated as part of the persona that sold his wares.  Peter Whitmer's unauthorized biography When the Going Gets Weird makes mention of health issues early in his life from overindulgence, and I inferred from this that as he aged, he was more careful - or possibly he needed to be more careful.  Apparently, overindulgence in both alcohol and cocaine was a daily occurrence and it is somewhat surprising that Hunter lived as long as he did.  Still, the effects of this debaucherous lifestyle become clear through the end of the book and the end of Hunter's life.

The book ends with a narrative around Hunter's ultimate suicide and final, spectacular sendoff.

The book was a good read and a different take on an interesting man.  As with much of HST's writing, it wasn't always clear if the main thrust of the book was about Juan, or Hunter.  I'll end, not with a something about Juan Thompson or Hunter Thompson, both of which would be easy, but I'll end with a quote from Peter Hamill's A Drinking Life.  Because while Juan's story is distinctive as the only son of an eccentric, gonzo father, the larger story isn't unique - but is the same story experienced through history of growing up and becoming an individual separate from where anyone came from.

I was myself now, for better or worse.  I was forever Billy Hamill's son, but I did not want to be the next edition of Billy Hamill.  He had his life and I had mine.  And if there were patterns, endless repetitions, cycles of family history, if my father was the result of his father and his father's father, on back through the generations into the Irish fogs, I could no longer accept any notion of predestination.