I’ll admit this was a hard book to read. Brian took me through so many emotions as if I was there, with him. And that journey was full of pain and rejection and violence. I don’t have a good “but all in all, there was a happy ending.”
But I don’t think that’s what Brian is going to say about anything, not his own life, not the lives of the people around us, not the lives of those still too young to understand, not the lives of those now gone who sometimes understood this.
Brian’s book, instead, is about telling the truth. Truth is never as hard as life is, but we try to deny both and we try to make a story up that will give us satisfaction and closer that ultimately we learned a lesson or we were made a better person or we effected real change.
A lot of times, though, we are powerless, whether in our families, in our schooling, in our careers, in our personal relationships. We are surrounded by people who are broken and systems that are designed to crush, and the best we can do on our best days is just to survive.
This is a book about that.
I’ll let others give you the summary. I’ll just encourage you to read this yourself and go along the journey with Brian.
Now, I’ve been reading Brian’s work for years. Discovered him through social media and fell in love with his voice. There is such raw honesty and openness that invited me in—invited anyone in—to have a conversation that wasn’t simply a continuation of everyone repeating what they heard from someone else. Brian’s work shows that he is going to tell the truth, even though sometimes he wraps it in a voice that can make us laugh through the pain. And he is going to invite us to listen, and maybe respond—but we have to tell the truth as well, and that is often something more painful to us that the pain we are living through.
Brian interweaves his biography here with his observations of a young boy on the city bus with his young father. The child is boisterous, inquisitive, hopeful, wanting connection with strangers, and his father, unfortunately, is struggling with a conversation held over a phone. The reactions of both the father and the son serve as a template for Brian’s own recollections of his relationship with his own father and how he (Brian) lived out his life. The title of the book comes from a conversation Brian’s father once had with him—a time when his father’s frustrations broke out to inflict pain on his own son.
It is not to unduly blame the father. It is not to declare that a child cannot be a frustration for a parent. It is just the awfulness of life that exhausts us and drains our love and our hope and our pity so that all we have left is pain, pain to endure and pain to incite us.
But—and here is, perhaps, the “happy ending”—we do not always have to live in the full experience of pain. We can find those who will love us. Sometimes we make mistakes in whom we choose, and we lie about what we believe because we desire that love and intimacy so, so much. But we learn, slowly, how to gather the people around us who will care for us and who will give us some space in their own lives. Brian’s life has been full of pain, sure—you can read about some of his experiences—but without his saying so directly he has found the people who will be there with him and for him.
And it is impossible to believe that there is no hope when we see his hope for that young boy on the bus. Maybe he will be cherished and loved and wanted. We can always hope.
Punch Me up to the Gods, by Brian Broom (May 2021)