From Our House: A Memoir

Relentlessly honest, Martin's account of growing up with an abusive parent is wise and healing. In 1956, when the author was a year old, his father lost both hands in a mechanical corn-picker on their Illinois farm. That tragic accident transformed Roy Martin into a bitter man who harbored a deep, corrosive rage that he vented on his son in sadistic beatings. Generous and friendly with neighbors and relatives, Roy was a strict and hypercritical parent. Though father and son enjoyed small pleasures together, Martin remained timid and fearful that he would never measure up, and he desperately tried to love and connect with the father whom he frequently despised. He walked a tightrope between his father's brutality and the abiding compassion of his soft-spoken, gentle mother, a schoolteacher who ""lacked the courage to confront my father's rage or to escape it."" While Martin never calls his mother an enabler or his father an abuser, by age 16, years of family dysfunction had turned him into a shoplifter, burglar and arsonist, putting him close to ""becoming ruined beyond return."" Martin, whose story collection The Least You Need to Know (winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize for short fiction) explored troubled father-son relationships, taps directly into his own psychic pain in this understated memoir. Both his parents are now dead, yet this moving family album, suffused with forgiveness and reconciliation, binds up the wounds. (June) FYI: Martin teaches creative writing at the University of North Texas and edits the American Literary Review.