2024-05-26
A baby boomer looks back on an unlikely friendship that shaped his life.
Hirsh’s “Real-life Memoir Adventure” starts in November, 1963, when President John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas, Texas. The 16-year-old author, enrolled in the University of Houston at the time, had looked forward to seeing the president at a gathering that preceded the incident but was waylaid by a stringent professor—the missed opportunity made him feel like “the victim of someone’s negligence, perhaps even downright malfeasance.” Despite the detailed first chapter devoted almost entirely to Kennedy (including a play-by-play of his assassination and an exaltation of his character), this is not a biography of JFK. The narrative instead focuses on the author’s old friend, Jim, a blind man and fellow University of Houston student who lived with disfiguring burn injuries sustained in a racecar accident. “I sometimes wonder how it would have played out if sun-loving Jack Kennedy had survived the ambush the way Jim survived the violent end of his part-time racetrack career,” muses Hirsh. The “Adventure” promised by the author refers to the big events in Hirsh’s young adult life, many of which center around Jim (not including a run-in with Che Guevara) and the research that revealed the details of Jim’s accident, which his friend was hesitant to elaborate on when he was alive. While the author’s writing and research prowess shine through on every page, so does his exceptional privilege—many readers will have difficulty relating to Hirsh’s story after gauging his sheltered, upper-class upbringing, replete with a “colored” maid and a strong sense of class superiority. The author’s mockery of Jim’s “undereducated” speech is just one example: “An’ shooty shucks!That ol’ grammary stuff waren’t no big deal after all!” While the author’s heart might be in the right place, moments like this distract from the project. The memoir expertly balances the personal with the historical, but younger readers may find Hirsh’s voice glaringly out of touch.
A well-mounted memoir hindered by some outdated attitudes.
