Chicago Review of Books, "Best Books of Oct 2019"
Literary Hub, "Twelve Books You Should Read This October" (2019)
Excerpted in The Paris Review Daily, October 10, 2019
“The thing about eras is that, someday, they're bygone, and Howard records
this one with clarity and a kind of reverence. This is both funny and touching, and likely to reach readers in wholly unexpected ways.”
- Booklist
"This is a short, fast, laugh-out-loud read, but it’s sticky; Rerun Era will keep playing in the reader’s mind like the earworms of childhood."
-Buzzfeed
"Rerun Era captures the sounds, smells, and emotional tenor of growing up in rural Oklahoma. Entwined with Howard’s memories of countrified TV and movies (she loved Smoky and the Bandit even more than Robin Hood) are those of her cheating, truck-driving father and her women’s rights activist mother. Together, these memories portray a part of America—and its provincial popular culture—rarely explored in literature."
-Literary Hub
Rerun Era is both a romp and a deep dive through a late-70s-and-80s childhood, where many of us were remanded to the television for caretaking, fueled on the intoxicants of processed foods, where the day was vast and sometimes, particularly if you were down south, crushing with heat or emptiness or endless lots of red mud. There is a warm hilarity that moves through this book and a kind of cracking pain that follows. It's a story of time, family, culture, and subjectivity we all need to read, written with a wild, quiet, and wide intelligence.
- Renee Gladman
Children are given the gift and burden of feeling the infinite in a single afternoon, an hour, an event-Rerun Era, a wonderfully tactile and intimate book, returns that gift to its readers. Each chapter explodes with the force and shine of fireworks on an unlit night.
- Catherine Lacey
Joanna Howard has a masterful understanding of the way memory bends time and forms startling new structures from the patterns of good sameness, bad sameness, strange sameness that compose our lives. She tunnels through this sameness to the glorious specificity at its core, so that these swathes of childhood recaptured feel like they belong to me, even though I know that I never witnessed my own life with such penetrating beauty or insight. Rerun Era is startling and new on every page, a book that you will find yourself in, lose yourself in, and long to return to again and again.
- Alexandra Kleeman
"Deftly written, with a tonal command that complements a child's observations with an adult's insights."
-Kirkus Reviews
"It’s [Howard's] un-self-conscious, observational deadpan that lends humor and wit to an otherwise heartbreaking tale. This partnership between past and present Howard is the source of the memoir’s poignancy; each shows the other is missing through memories."
-Ploughshares
2019-07-17
An elliptical and elusive memoir that skips back and forth across time and circles back on itself as the author comes to terms with events and circumstances in a way that she couldn't comprehend as a young child.
"I am five," writes Howard (Literature/Denver Univ.; Foreign Correspondent, 2013, etc.), of a time when her father's health and her family both seemed to be falling apart. "It's probably only a few months or slightly more. Any time is a very long time, and all that time is time in the memory of an unformed mind. Be careful, my therapist reminds me, now, in these much later days: those may be screen memories…the memories that we put in place to protect us from worse memories." This is one of the rare intrusions of the author's adulthood on her impressions as a child, when coming-of-age in hardscrabble Oklahoma didn't seem as toxic as she would later realize it was, when her parents' marriage wasn't as unstable as it would soon prove to be, and when TV reruns, turning time into something of a jigsaw puzzle, seemed as real as whatever she was experiencing in her so-called real life. Actors on TV (including musician Jerry Reed) become more vivid characters in her memory—and her memoir—than the members of her family. Over the course of this brief memoir, everything changes, primarily because of the stroke suffered by Howard's father, who had been in the process of leaving her mother and moving in with his girlfriend, starting a new life. That new life proved stillborn, though the tension between mother and girlfriend intensified as the stroke and subsequent surgeries left her father "a patchwork doll." Instead, the author is the one who found new life. She is the one who got away, the one that those left behind resent because she escaped "this hell hole."
Deftly written, with a tonal command that complements a child's observations with an adult's insights.
