by Kelly Pickerill
Malcolm Jones will be at Lemuria to sign and read from his memoir, Little Boy Blues, tomorrow night (Tuesday the 2nd) starting at 5pm.
Jones’s childhood in North Carolina wasn’t idyllic; he didn’t see much of his father, who was drunk much of the time he was around, and, while his mother was a bigger presence in Jones’s life, she was more often than not nitpicking her son or railing about one relative or another. His book, however, doesn’t read like many of the “poor young me” memoirs that have been pervasive the past few years. I enjoyed reading about Jones’s childhood so much because the stories he tells are not meant to shock the reader or reprove his relatives; rather, they are glimpses into a little boy’s joys and tribulations.
There’s a chapter devoted to Jones’s childhood affinity for marionettes, where the shouting matches between Jones’s parents fall into the background while he struggles to deal with his simultaneous feelings of excitement and shame because so many peers and respected adults think he may be “funny” for “playing with dolls.” And there’s a wonderful passage about the summer he was best friends with the cinema owner’s son — a summer he wiled away the sweltering days in the cool of a movie theatre and learned “the esthetics of pleasure, of savoring something for its own sake.” Through racial and religious bigotry, dysfunction and instability, there’s discovery and wonderment and the delights of being young.
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