Brutally honest bio woefully wonderful

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This article was published 17/10/2015 (3984 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Bob Morris will be the first to admit he was a selfish, self-centred, negligent middle-aged son. This little book anecdotally and painfully documents the roster of these vices; Morris recently faced the rapid decline and death of his septuagenarian mother and, a couple of years later, the slow decline and final breath of his octogenarian father.

Morris, a New York-based writer, is a jack-of-all-trades. He has written humorously for periodicals, appeared on National Public Radio, and authored several comedic off-Broadway plays.

Here he offers a tiny memoir, one focused first on the startling demise of his mother, the parent he was desperately close to, but second — and much more thoroughly — on the meandering demise of his father, the parent he bickered with, played with, laughed with, fumed at and loved.

Bobby Wonderful is brutally honest, to the point one cringes as with each page turned, fearfully expecting yet another embarrassing self-indulgent misplay by Morris as he struggles to balance striving to live a full, fulfilling life as a partner, traveller, author and showman with his increasingly cumbersome duty to his dear mother, his maddening father and his infuriating older brother.

Morris does not shrink in shame in laying out these struggles — there are no apologies here. Instead, he tells small story after small story of his aching, often quite funny miscues. He lingers on a luxurious booze-tasting romp through Scotland’s castles and nearly misses the death of his mother. He sets out to buy his incapacitated father some comfy slippers and instead splurges on decadent lamps for his own new apartment. He schemes to exclude unwanteds from the impending funerals. He barks at his brother for being better at all this than he is.

It takes quite a bit of time, but the realization comes that this is a bare, brave book that pulls no punches, even as almost all of these flurries end up aimed at Morris himself. He stomps and pouts and tarries and shirks. And he knows it and has decided not to cloak any of that. Not at all.

It is, in many ways, very much in the mode of Mitch Albom’s chronicle Tuesdays with Morrie (if the subject were a moody father and not a dear old professor) or Daniel Wallace’s fictional Big Fish: A Novel of Mythic Proportions (if the subject were a cantankerous reiterator and not a vibrant story and joke teller).

But there is an important difference. This isn’t a book that at any point rues at length the author’s childish behaviour nor preaches with arrogant, self-satisfied, new-found “wisdom” about lessons he and we ought to learn from his ill-timed grumpy funks.

Morris in no way pretends his travails are peculiar. Rather, he repeatedly connects his story to the story we all share and face. It’s just that he didn’t play his character very well when his turn came up, and he knows it and is prepared to make that plain.

In the end, he dwells simply and only on the individual final words of each parent: his mother whispered his name, “Bobby;” his father just exclaimed “Wonderful!” and expired. There is no big-speech-at-the-end that brings it all together, and Morris never tries pointedly to jerk the reader to tears. It is all just laid out, with pith and with pain.

 

Laurence Broadhurst teaches in the departments of religion and culture and classics at the University of Winnipeg.