Glen David Gold will appear tonight (July 18) in conversation with Rob Spillman at Powell’s City of Books, 1005 W Burnside, 7:30 pm.
The first page of Glen David Gold’s new memoir consists of a simple and surprising caveat: “My mother assures me none of this happened.” The reader spends the rest of I Will Be Complete discovering just how illuminating this opening statement is. This riveting, sneakily emotional book—if it is to be accepted at page-value, and I believe that it is—is a brutally honest account of Gold’s upbringing at the hands of a troubled, unreliable mother and a distant, disinterested father. Their marriage disintegrated when Glen was at an early age and his father’s fortunes evaporated.
In a sense, Gold could have called his book How I Learned to Stop Loving My Mother in 480 Pages. You almost never hear someone make the types of confessions Gold does—but then again, you didn’t have the mother he had. She’s a fascinating and at times loveable character, but one whose existence is slippery and almost devoid of any sort of accountability. After the divorce, she brought Glen to San Francisco and embedded the boy in a ’70s scene of free love, drugs, and con men. When he was 12, she got on a plane to New York and left him to fend for himself. That his story is not one of a young wastrel making his way on the mean streets, dipping in and out of addiction and petty crime, says something about his character. That his mother found herself a surrogate in the form of a boyfriend close to her son’s age—who was a violent criminal and addict—says something about hers.
Gold’s story is a uniquely awful one, but the experience of reading I Will Be Complete is anything but.