the things he gave me
are totemic & devoid
at once. a hand drum
from ahmadabad, a
costa rican hammock,
a cuban baseball jersey,
some low red candle
holders from the crate
& barrel outlet store,
a ginger grater he
swore by, a wooden
molinillo that was
a favor at his wedding,
a yerba maté gourd &
metal straw, a kurta pyjama.
on his birthday & the
anniversary of his death,
i gather a few into a pile
& think this, this is all i
have left or tell myself
i had a brother once.
The subtitle says it all: I Had a Brother Once is both a poem and a memoir; a free form verse that tells the story of a life going on after another life ends. Other than the potty-mouthed picture books he’s famous for (Go the F**k to Sleep et al), I didn’t know of Adam Mansbach’s work (which I now understand to be wide-ranging and lauded), and without that knowledge, I thought this to be a strange left turn for (what I mistakenly considered) a humourist who got lucky. What this is is elegiac and expansive; a moving tribute to and a frank exploration of family and what remains when all seems lost. I’m giving this five stars: not because I think it’s the best thing I’ll ever read, but it did move me, and considering the engaging and appropriate format he chose, I can’t imagine how Mansbach could have done this better. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
my father said
david has taken his own life
& i answered as if i didn’t
understand or hadn’t heard.
my reply was what? & he
repeated it. there is plenty
to regret & perhaps this
is insignificant but i
wish i had not made him
say it to me twice.
Mansbach’s brother killed himself just two weeks before Go the F**k to Sleep was officially released; a book that was, at the time, the fastest selling preorder in the world. Already booked on an extensive publicity tour, after David’s funeral, and while still unable to reconcile the brother in hidden pain with the bigger-than-life brother that he knew, Mansbach was forced to spend months appearing on morning television and radio talk shows, answering questions about his potty-mouthed picture book and dreading that someone would have learned about David’s suicide and ask him about that. How could the best and the worst thing to ever happen to you occur just two weeks apart? And how do you live with that? This slim volume seems the result of someone trying to work out an answer to such imponderables of life.
I liked what appeared to be Mansbach’s self-awareness here:
here begins a different
kind of struggle, on this
page, akin to keeping the
steering wheel perfectly
straight, a struggle not
to crane out of this shot, not
to add voiceover, not
to do the one thing i am
trained to, which is make
things legible, impose
structure & plot, motivation,
a frame, a double helix of
narrative to snake through
the spine, to be the spine.
here i am, here we are,
not fifty feet from the news
of my brother’s suicide &
already i can feel a tug at
the reins.
Or while describing his brother’s “out of proportion” idiosyncrasies: in my fiction workshop they would have been derided as lazy, an end run around character development. Something in this poem form allows Mansbach to free himself from the "rules" of long-form prose (while acknowledging them) and also gave him just enough space to relate the highlights of his own life (who knew he was a hip-hop DJ, a Professor of Fiction at Rutgers, or a travelling tech for "the world's gretaest drummer", Elvin Ray Jones?) I also appreciated that being true to himself meant that Mansbach would turn to dark humour at times:
on the curb, emery asked
if he could pray for me &
i said yes & meant it. he
grabbed both my shoulders,
bowed his head. it began
heavenly father. i’d never heard
anyone make up a prayer
before; in judaism that is called
forgetting the words.
And he could also reach for the engaging literary metaphor:
time is longer than rope but
both can strangle you or
knot themselves beneath
your feet & implore you
to climb.
Touching and thought-provoking, I Had a Brother Once succeeds at what it is; I hope it offers healing for the author and others facing such inconceivable loss.
