Musings capture struggles, path to happiness

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This article was published 22/06/2024 (506 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

This is less a book and more a kind of thumbnail treasury of rather random reflections from a remarkable human.

These are not essays: these are short (sometimes short-short) autobiographical vignettes, arranged quite sporadically, often seemingly illogically. Many are ironically amusing, others desperately sad — all are gently touching.

David Roche, now 80 and, as of 2021, a fresh and sprightly member of the Order of Canada, announces on the first that he was born with a “vascular malformation” in his face that required intensive surgery and treatment as a wee child. This all left him with what he now calls — with some mirth — a “pronounced facial difference.” Much of his biography, through early adulthood, amounted to a solitary struggle with that loud fact, with the deep shame of that difference and with the social oppressions that invariably accompanied it.

A marked consequence of the haphazard structure of this compendium of snippets is that it’s difficult to discern specifics of chronology. Sometime in his early-ish years (his late 20s? 30s? 40s?), Roche willfully decided to chuck his inured soul-crushing outlook. There was no moment of epiphany, no single pivoting event: it arrived as a welcome ramification of just simply having had enough. Roche decided to turn his shame on its head, to stop quietly cowering and to start playfully preening, to cease ruminating and to commence chatting. He began to speak, to speak out, to try to amuse, to spins some yarns. And so he became what he calls a professional storyteller. A roaming one.

Standing at the Back Door of Happiness continues his irrepressibly cheery style of his 2008 memoir The Church of 80% Sincerity. Here once again are darting stories — now of his wild and weird experiences with the Democratic Workers Party, his self-avowed “communism” and his slow realization and stern assertion that the party was replete with, and doomed by, rampant alcoholism. Here are a precious few stories of his daughter, Amy. Here and there is a dear, lurking theme of the love-of-his-life, Marlena.

Throughout are dozens of anecdotes of his visits to schools across North America. Typically in those school adventures, Roche strides into a school, stuns the assembled students with his face and his frankness, engages them individually and corporately in dialogue entirely off-script, all the while moving stealthily toward his end-game — teasing out the students’ own initially reluctant, eventually exuberant stories of shame, fear and, ultimately, uncelebrated beauty.

Here also are stories of Roche in the street trenches, frantically and tirelessly doing whatever he possibly can to assist the addicted, the afflicted, the outcast, the starcrossed, the nigh-dead. He is a large, steady, quiet, modest hero in these stories, and one feels very small reading them.

The book’s big title is its simple, plain thesis couched in a very Rochean style. Roche feels he found (and continues to find) pure, profound, personal and collective happiness exactly where one would expect not to find it — in disfigurement, solitude, shame, concealment, sickness, suffering, pain and, eventually, in death.

Even so, two characters do skulk amongst these pages. The first is Roche’s own now-victorious struggle with escapism and its attendant, alcohol. The second is his once-all-consuming Catholicism and his ongoing flirtations with it. These two loiter about the margins but never quite get the spotlight the reader comes to crave.

Nonetheless, in the end, Roche is undeniably a real-life, historical activist, a peculiarly driven human who sees storytelling and earnest communication as perhaps the route toward ushering the downcast to their merited and destined ascendancy. He believes his stories and our shared stories are his god’s work booming, with magnificence. He believes he has figured it out.

If this all sounds a bit like a modern-day C.S. Lewis-on-the-street, then you get the tenor precisely.

Standing at the Back Door of Happiness, even as it professes to offer keys to grand, shared locks, will not be for everyone. There can be something fundamentally off-putting about a storyteller who advertises himself as a piercing, effortless storyteller, one who recounts many, many instances of his telling stories for the purpose of expounding his storytelling prowess and efficacy. And Roche’s dangling but retracting of so many tantalizing wrinkles beside and within stories of absolutely stark, bare honesty can be forbidding.

But there will also be those who will revel in the bite-sized tales that beat a tender drum of unadulterated altruism, indefatigable hope and sparkling happiness mysteriously found.

Laurence Broadhurst teaches English and religion at St. Paul’s High School in Winnipeg.