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WORK TITLE: One Day You’ll Thank Me
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1976
WEBSITE: http://www.davidmcglynnbooks.com/
CITY: Appleton
STATE: WI
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1976; married: children: two sons.
EDUCATION:University of Utah, M.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, essayist, memoirist, and educator. Lawrence University, Appleton, WI, professor.
AVOCATIONS:Swimming.
AWARDS:Utah Book Award, 2008, and Outstanding Achievement distinction, Wisconsin Librarians’ Association, both for The End of the Straight and Narrow; Nonfiction Book Award, Council for Wisconsin Writers, 2013, and Outstanding Achievement distinction, Wisconsin Librarians’ Association, for A Door in the Ocean.
WRITINGS
Contributor to books, including Best American Sports Writing, Best American Essays, and Best American Non-Required Reading. Contributor to magazines and newspapers, including New York Times Men’s Health, Parents, Huffington Post, Swimmer, and Real Simple.
SIDELIGHTS
David McGlynn is a novelist, short-story writer, and memoirist. He has written for several major magazines and newspapers, including Men’s Health, Parents, New York Times, and Swimmer. His work has also appeared in books such as Best American Sports Writing and Best American Essays. He is a lifelong swimmer and competitor who won a national championship in the 500-yeard freestyle at the United States Masters National Championships in 2001, noted a writer on the David McGlynn website. He is a professor at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin and has a graduate degree from the University of Utah.
The End of the Straight and Narrow
McGlynn’s first book, The End of the Straight and Narrow, is a collection of short stories written when he was still a graduate student. This “superlatively crafted, deeply sympathetic debut story collection traces the spiritual agonies of Christians” who struggle with their faith and spirituality in the face of a sometimes frail and unreliable human nature, noted a Publishers Weekly writer.
The stories often deal with conflicts that arise from religion. For example, “Moonland on Fire” is set during a period of wildfires in Los Angeles while a divorced father struggles to maintain calm between his visiting teenage son and his evangelical girlfriend. “Landslide” involves two individuals who were best friends in Christian college but whose lives took different paths, and who now appear to be involved in a deadly landslide on the highway. The collection’s last five stories center on fifteen-year-old Rowdy Jarrett who faces extreme guilt over the fact that his mother went blind when she gave birth to him. Choice reviewer C. E. O’Neill commented that “the stories scintillate with sharp images and subtle nuances in character.”
A Door in the Ocean
A Door in the Ocean is McGlynn’s memoir of his spiritual transformation from fundamentalism to more traditional religious beliefs, noted Mary Heinecke Poulson in the Christian Science Monitor. The author presents information on his personal life and some of the struggles of his early life, such as his emotional turmoil when his father divorced his mother and left when McGlynn was twelve years old. He relates how the split was caused by his father’s religious views and his demand that his wife start going to church with him. He describes his own experiences as a father and how he worked to be an attentive and loving father. McGlynn recounts other traumatic events from his childhood, such as the still-unsolved murder of his best friend and swimming teammate when he was fifteen, the young man “shot, execution-style, alongside his older brother and father in the living room of their suburban home in Houston,” noted Maureen Corrigan in a review on the NPR website. Though there were difficulties in his life, McGlynn also makes it clear that there were plenty of bright spots, too, such as his love for swimming and the peace it gives him.
Corrigan stated, “McGlynn’s writing, particularly about his long stint in the ranks of Christian fundamentalists, is alive with an insider’s knowledge of the power and comforts—and, yes, sometimes delusions—offered by collective radical belief.” Thomas Lynch, writing in Christian Century, commented, ” McGlynn was able to discern what is essential and what is accessory to faith, what is fundamental and what is mere fashion in rubric and ritual. His book is the well-told story of that discernment.”
One Day You'll Thank Me
McGlynn’s book of essays, One Day You’ll Thank Me: Lessons from an Unexpected Fatherhood, examines his experiences as a father to two young sons, finding in those experiences universal truths related not just to parenting, but specifically to the act of being a father. He muses on his own experiences as a child of a divorce and how that affected his approach to parenting. McGlynn presents a “pleasing blend of humor and humility that shows what it means to be a father in America today,” remarked a Kirkus Reviews contributor.
In reviewing One Day You’ll Thank Me, Peter Grandbois, writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books, stated, ” the heart of his new book lies in his willingness to expose the fact that he, like the rest of us, has learned far more from the many parenting failures than from the rare success. To be a parent, says McGlynn, is to hope you are doing things right but to never be sure.” The Kirkus Reviews writer called the book a “entertaining, humorous, and enlightening series of essays on fatherhood.” Booklist contributor Melissa Norstedt concluded: “All parents will relate and enjoy, but fathers of sons will most certainly relish this charming and hilarious tale of fatherhood.”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
McGlynn, David, A Door in the Ocean, (memoir) Counterpoint (Berkeley, CA), 2012.
PERIODICALS
Booklist, May 1, 2018, Melissa Norstedt, review of One Day You’ll Thank Me: Lessons from an Unexpected Fatherhood, p. 51.
Choice, March, 2009, C.E. O’Neill, review of The End of the Straight and Narrow, p. 1312.
Christian Century, September 19, 2012, Thomas Lynch, review of A Door in the Ocean, p. 40.
Christian Science Monitor, September 27, 2013, Mary Heinecke Poulson, “Reader recommendation: A Door in the Ocean.“
Kirkus Reviews, April 15, 2018, review of One Day You’ll Thank Me.
Publishers Weekly, August 25, 2008, review of The End of the Straight and Narrow, p. 47.
ONLINE
15 Bytes, http://www.artistsofutah.org/15Bytes/ (March 16, 2013), David G. Pace, “Swimming for Your Life: Interview with Memoirist David McGlynn.”
David McGlynn website, http://www.davidmcglynnbooks.com (August 9, 2018).
Los Angeles Review of Books, https://www.lareviewofbooks.org/ (June 20, 2018), Peter Grandbois, “Being There,” review of One Day You’ll Thank Me.
National Public Radio website, http://www.npr.org/ (July 11, 2012), Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air, “A Door in the Ocean Leads to Dark Depths,” review of A Door in the Ocean.
David McGlynn is the author of three books – One Day You'll Thank Me: Lessons From an Unexpected Fatherhood, A Door in the Ocean, and the 2008 story collection, The End of the Straight and Narrow, all published by Counterpoint Press.
A Door in the Ocean was reviewed on National Public Radio’s Fresh Air, won the Council for Wisconsin Writers’ Nonfiction Book Award in 2013, and was named an Outstanding Achievement by the Wisconsin Librarians’ Association. The End of the Straight and Narrow won the 2008 Utah Book Award, was a finalist for the 2009 Steven Turner Award for Best First Fiction by the Texas Institute of Letters, and was named an “Outstanding Achievement” by the Wisconsin Librarians’ Association.
David’s writing has appeared in Men’s Health, Real Simple, Parents, The New York Times, Swimmer, Best American Sports Writing, and numerous literary journals. Three of his essays have been named Distinguished Essays in the Best American Essays and Best American Non-Required Reading anthologies. He teaches at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin, where he lives with his wife and sons.
A lifelong swimmer, he captured a national championship in the 500-yard freestyle at the 2001 United States Masters National Championships. He now competes most regularly in open-water races. On most mornings, he’s the first one in the pool.
Swimming for Your Life: Interview with Memoirist David McGlynn
BY DAVID G. PACE ON MARCH 16, 2013 • ( LEAVE A COMMENT )
David McGlynn will read from and sign his memoir, A Door in the Ocean, a coming-of-age story centered on swimming and a violent tragedy and how the author came to evangelical Christianity. Saturday, March 23, 2 p.m., King's English Bookshop, 1511 S. 1500 E., Salt Lake City.
David McGlynn will read from and sign his memoir, A Door in the Ocean, Saturday, March 23, 2 p.m., King’s English Bookshop, 1511 S. 1500 E., Salt Lake City.
In 2008, The End of the Straight and Narrow, a collection of short stories by then-grad student David McGlynn, won the Utah Book Award. In 2012, McGlynn, now a professor at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin, published A Door In the Ocean, a memoir that “charts the violent origins of one man’s faith and the struggle to find meaning in the midst of life’s painful uncertainties.” On March 23 at 2 pm, McGlynn will be in Salt Lake at King’s English for a reading and book signing. In anticipation of the event, we asked the artist a few questions.
15B: You’ve gone from a book of short stories, some linked, in The End of the Straight and Narrow, to a memoir, your recently released A Door In the Ocean. Was that an easy segue from fiction to nonfiction? I’m sure the earlier work informed the latter. Can you talk about that?
DM: I started writing nonfiction a few years after I started working on the stories in The End of the Straight and Narrow. But I immediately fell in love with nonfiction, with the familiar voice of the nonfiction narrator and nonfiction’s ability to muse and ruminate even while telling a story. There’s a kind of meditative quality to my fiction and, in contrast, a dramatic narrative at the heart of the memoir. So the transition from fiction to nonfiction was, for me at least, rather easy, since I’d never really seen the two genres as all that separate. Both, at their hearts, are modes of telling stories.
15B: The University of Utah was your last choice for graduate school, but you ended up here in the creative writing program. How do you feel it shaped the direction of your writing as opposed to if you had gone elsewhere, say, the Univ. of California, Irvine?
DM: I say the U was my last choice, but only because I fancied myself — in the fashion of so many young writers — living in a brooding, coastal city, like New York or Seattle. But the U was a great place for me. I loved my professors: Melanie Rae Thon gave my work (and me, personally) more than I ever dreamed a dissertation director could, and I never would have found the courage to write about religion in the way that I do had it not been for her. And I was lucky to be a part of a dynamic and talented class of writers, including Lynn Kilpatrick (who still lives in Salt Lake City), Nicole Walker, Margot Singer, Julie Paegle, Matt Batt, and Steve Tuttle (and several others), almost all of whom have gone on to publish books and win awards for their writing. I had a supportive and fiercely intelligent community of writers at the U and their successes helped motivate me to do my best and my daring work. I love them all for their good will, friendship, and big talents.
15B: I haven’t finished reading your book, but it seems from what I have read, including your chapter “Wandering in Zion” that you continue your exploration on religion and faith. How did living in Salt Lake advance your perceptions of both the value and danger of organized religion?
DM: Salt Lake City is a wonderful place to question and evaluate the functions of religious institutions. The conversation about faith — despite the stereotypes that often adhere to Utah — is far more varied and complex than I think most people living outside the state realize. Wallace Stegner, who easily ranks as one of my favorite writers, talks openly about how much he valued the LDS church during his time in Salt Lake City, even though he wasn’t himself a part of it, and I can say I agree with him on most accounts. I’m not LDS (obviously) and I don’t agree with many of its doctrines or political positions, but I nevertheless had hours of fruitful and challenging conversations about faith during my years in Utah. And Mormons and evangelicals, though opposed in a number of ways, are actually very much alike. It was interesting to look upon a religious world that was similar to my own but ultimately distinct from it. That glimpse, as it were, helped me to see the ways that my faith needed to shift and gave me the courage to do so.
15B: Water and swimming are the central metaphor of your book, it seems, and your book opens on a chilling but beautifully-rendered account of your best friend and swim teammate being murdered execution style. Can you talk about the book’s title and what a door in an ocean might mean?
DM: Traumatic experiences have a way of bending time, if for no other reason than because they loom so largely in the mind. You’ll be sitting in class or driving in a car and all of a sudden a memory will rush in and you’ll feel engulfed by it. I felt like that a lot in the months just after my friend’s death — almost like I was sucked through a portal in time. A few months after the murders, I left Texas for Southern California, to spend a few months at my father’s house in Laguna Beach, where I spent a lot of time swimming in the Pacific Ocean. The ocean calmed me and was the place I went (and still go) whenever I needed solace. At one point — and this moment is narrated in the second chapter — I found myself sort of believing that if I could dive to the bottom of the ocean, I could find a way through the portal in time and could go back and save Jeremy from being murdered. The door in the ocean endures throughout the book as a metaphor for my desire to slip through time, to both reclaim and alter the memories of the murders.
15B: I confess to having been a competitive swimmer myself, but I gave it up after high school even though I stayed chlorinated as a lifeguard through college. So here’s the most personal question today: What’s your best time in the 200-yard freestyle?
DM: 1:41.98. Nothing special by today’s standards, but I was proud of the time when I swam it, now more than 15 years ago.
Excerpt:
With Trey and Mike and Ted, I ventured into Houston’s decaying inner-city wards, neighborhoods without streetlamps or lighted storefront, neighborhoods with police cameras mounted to telephone poles. We went to poorly lit, spartanly furnished clubs, if clubs is the right word–cramped, boxy spaces without tables or chairs or windows, linoleum on the floor and walls, peopled by a mix of scalped young men and tatooed women, black men in groups of seven or eight, and grizzled gray-haired men you approached if you wanted a beer or a joint or a bump of acid. No one checked IDs at the door. I caught myself looking for Jeremy among the bizarre bodies and unfriendly faces. He seemed to show up in pieces, as though his body had been broken down and distributed to a thousand people. The bartender had received the back of Jeremy’s head; the black-haired woman leaning over the balcony his pursed lips. The curious thing about memory, I discovered, was how much of it I had. I’d never consciously paid attention to the idiosyncrasies of Jeremy’s body while he was alive, but here, surrounded by strangers, I could identify enough parts of him to fuse together a disjointed whole. It was, in its way, a pleasurable experience, and it kept me coming back. (p. 31)
A Door in the Ocean (266 pgs.), $26.00, Counterpoint
A Door in the Ocean (266 pgs.), $26.00, Counterpoint
David McGlynn grew up in Houston, Texas, and Southern California. His story collection, The End of the Straight and Narrow, won the 2008 Utah Book Award and was named an “Outstanding Achievement” by the Wisconsin Librarians’ Association. His stories and essays have appeared in Men’s Health, The Huffington Post, Best American Sports Writing, and numerous literary journals. He teaches at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin, where he lives with his wife and sons.
A lifelong swimmer, he captured a national championship in the 500–yard freestyle at the 2001 United States Masters National Championships. He continues to compete in open–water swimming races all across the country, and on most mornings is the first one in the pool.
David G. Pace
David Pace is a writer and literary editor, with Calvin Jolley, of 15 Bytes. Pace is author of the novel “Dream House on Golan Drive,” (Signature Books), and his creative work has also appeared in Quarterly West, ellipsis…literature and art, Alligator Juniper, Sunstone, Dialogue and reprinted/posted in Phone Fiction. His byline has also appeared in the Christian Science Monitor, American Theatre, Huffington Post and elsewhere. He writes regularly about literature, culture and politics at www.davidgpace.com
Reader recommendation: A Door in the Ocean
Mary Heinecke Poulson
The Christian Science Monitor. (Sept. 27, 2013): Arts and Entertainment:
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 The Christian Science Publishing Society
http://www.csmonitor.com/About/The-Monitor-difference
Full Text:
Byline: Mary Heinecke Poulson, Appleton, Wis.
A Door In the Ocean, a memoir by David McGlynn, carried me wave over wave with beautiful and intimate descriptions and narrative on his spiritual journey from fundamentalism to traditional beliefs.
Mary Heinecke Poulson, Appleton, Wis.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Poulson, Mary Heinecke. "Reader recommendation: A Door in the Ocean." Christian Science Monitor, 27 Sept. 2013. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A344077074/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=afe78ff9. Accessed 14 July 2018.
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Print Marked Items
McGlynn, David: ONE DAY YOU'LL
THANK ME
Kirkus Reviews.
(Apr. 15, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
McGlynn, David ONE DAY YOU'LL THANK ME Counterpoint (Adult Nonfiction) $25.00 6, 5 ISBN:
978-1-64009-039-2
A father shares stories of his childhood and those of his two sons.
McGlynn (A Door in the Ocean, 2012, etc.) was not expecting to become a father when he did. When he
and his wife found out their first child was on the way, he gulped nervously and moved into the role with a
mixture of trepidation and elation. The author gathers tales of his two young sons and of his own childhood
into an entertaining, humorous, and enlightening series of essays on fatherhood. Readers learn of his
longing for his father, who divorced his mother and moved away when the author was 12. Suddenly, his
father's physical presence was reduced to a few weeks during the year, so McGlynn learned snippets of
wisdom on growing into adulthood over the telephone, a touching memory of a pre-digital era. The author
also shares moments of pride: watching his son at his first swim meet, supporting him at basketball games,
and seeing him use the author's old skateboard. McGlynn doesn't ignore his struggles with his children:
trying to discipline them when they used profanity, told their classmates that Santa was dead, or would not
go to sleep at night. Throughout, the author's love for his children is palpable, as is his feeling of
achievement at having done the best that he could regardless of the situation. He and his wife have favored
a smaller home in order to have more money for travel, giving up material goods for the chance to create
lasting memories with their children, and he hopes they appreciate that approach as they grow into adults
and have their own children. Overall, the book is neither shallow nor profound but a pleasing blend of
humor and humility that shows what it means to be a father in America today.
A father tells timeless, funny, and honest stories of raising boys.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"McGlynn, David: ONE DAY YOU'LL THANK ME." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Apr. 2018. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A534375020/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e838ed00.
Accessed 14 July 2018.
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One Day You'll Thank Me: Lessons from
an Unexpected Fatherhood
Melissa Norstedt
Booklist.
114.17 (May 1, 2018): p51.
COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
One Day You'll Thank Me: Lessons from an Unexpected Fatherhood.
By David McGlynn.
June 2018. 272p. Counterpoint, $25 (9781640090392). 306.874.
Parenthood is never easy, especially when it's a surprise. For McGlynn, who first became a father as a broke
graduate student and for the second time shortly after moving across the country for a job, fatherhood was
immediately filled with ups and downs. A child of divorce, McGlynn grew up calling his dad whenever he
needed to talk and continued to do so when his early adulthood insisted on throwing him curveballs: "To
grow up longing for a father is to grow up preoccupied with fatherhood itself." Years later, with both sons in
school and life established in the Midwest, things still haven't settled down, but in a positive way. Each
brutally honest chapter is filled with heart and humor as McGlynn shares his most tender and most trying
moments as a parent. "Fatherhood, as I've come to understand it, is an endlessly moving target, especially
when it comes to boys." All parents will relate and enjoy, but fathers of sons will most certainly relish this
charming and hilarious tale of fatherhood.--Melissa Norstedt
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Norstedt, Melissa. "One Day You'll Thank Me: Lessons from an Unexpected Fatherhood." Booklist, 1 May
2018, p. 51. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A539647311/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f00028bb. Accessed 14 July 2018.
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A Door in the Ocean: A Memoir
Thomas Lynch
The Christian Century.
129.19 (Sept. 19, 2012): p40+.
COPYRIGHT 2012 The Christian Century Foundation
http://www.christiancentury.org
Full Text:
A Door in the Ocean: A Memoir
By David McGlynn
Counterpoint, 288 pp., $26.00
In his sparkling new collection of essays--presented as a memoir after some adept editing--David McGlynn
wrestles with some of the same fierce angels that haunted his debut collection of short stories, The End of
the Straight and Narrow. Both books bear the mark of a serious craftsman; their paragraphs hold the reader
with lyric and narrative power.
A champion swimmer, McGlynn found himself adrift as he wrestled with the undertows of adolescence.
Before the final failure of his parents' marriage, McGlynn's father had offered to return to the family home
if his wife would agree to start attending church with him. Having recently had a religious experience with
another woman, he wanted Christ to be the center of his family's life and insisted that his wife become born
again. When she refused to take part in what she regarded as her husband's hypocrisy, it was a deal breaker.
And it allowed the straying husband to blame the failure of the marriage on his wife's recalcitrance.
The divorce of his parents when he was 12 and the murder of his best friend when he was 15--a horrific,
inexplicable and unsolved crime--were watershed moments of McGlynn's formation. Much of this book
concerns the author's efforts to connect the dots between brute happenstance and the meaning of life--an
enterprise that revisits the predicament of Job of old. Sometimes the dots just won't connect; sometimes
what is senseless remains steadfast in its senselessness.
McGlynn's father was a traveling salesman. A while before the divorce, he lost his job in Houston and took
work in Southern California, where he had an affair with a woman in his office--an evangelical Christian
and former missionary. He proclaimed his love for her and for Jesus and ultimately left his family in
Houston for a new life near the ocean and a megachurch. On custodial visits, McGlynn the younger
accompanied his father, a kind of born-again Willy Loman, on his rounds:
He was charming, quick with a joke,
an ace at talking his way past the
receptionist and administrative assistants.... He
never entered a business
without his tie crisp and straight, his
breath rinsed with the peppermint oil
he kept in the glove compartment.
Between sales calls, McGlynn the elder listened to Rush Limbaugh and Dr. Laura, Chuck Smith and James
Dobson, and his son was catechized in right-wing politics and evangelical certainty.
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Back in Texas, McGlynn's mother remarried, his friend's murder remained unsolved, and he longed for his
absent father's approval. California began to seem like a land of milk and honey, where the magical thinking
of evangelical Christianity established an accountancy of good and evil, like the "seed offering" pitches of
TV preachers who promised that whatever viewers sacrificed would be returned tenfold. Faith became a
kind of ecclesiastical bull market where goodness followed a life lived rightly and bad things happened
when one strayed from the straight and narrow.
The son intuited the father's evidently conditional love:
I was being offered the same choice
my father had given my mother a few
years earlier: obedience to God in
exchange for God's blessings, his protection
from future calamity. My
mother had been obstinate in her
refusal, strong-willed and stubborn.
Now the choice had been passed to
me, and I didn't hesitate to promise
God my entire life.
He committed himself to remaining chaste until marriage, voting Republican and spreading the gospel of
godly citizenship in trade for his father's love and for protection from the mayhem and murderous
contingencies of life.
A Door in the Ocean gives us a glimpse into the deepening interior conflict of the author's odyssey--farflung
in both body and soul--from fear-based and triumphalist religious practice to a fundamental and
authentic faith, from surety to hope, from a hunger for safety to a willingness to play in the deep end of the
pool. There are vexations over theodicy, virginity, gender politics, and sin and sacrifice, and there are
multiple Bible study intrigues.
When the author's fondness for Paul was trumped by doubts over Timothy 2:12 ("I permit no woman to
teach or to have authority over a man"), it was a woman in the flesh and in the spirit who led him happily
and blessedly astray, into the real world of love and grief even Christians must inhabit. His attachment to
Christ became stronger even as his ties to a highly politicized version of Christianity were loosened.
McGlynn was able to discern what is essential and what is accessory to faith, what is fundamental and what
is mere fashion in rubric and ritual. His book is the well-told story of that discernment.
Readers who have been shaped by the confluence of Ronald Reagan's trickle-down economics and Jerry
Falwell's Moral Majority--by the arrogance of a bubble-and-bust nationalist and religious chauvinism that
claims that God is always on our side--will find in McGlynn's memoir a reliable witness to their own
experience. There is poetry here, as in the Book of Job, but no easy answers or tidy comforts. McGlynn
trades glorious and sorrowful mysteries for an adult and hard-won faith in God's merciful habit of keeping
us afloat, even when the worst that can happen happens, as in every life it does.
Reviewed by Thomas Lynch, whose most recent book is The Sin-eater: A Breviary (Paraclete).
Lynch, Thomas
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Lynch, Thomas. "A Door in the Ocean: A Memoir." The Christian Century, 19 Sept. 2012, p. 40+. General
OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A307788608/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b9489ad6. Accessed 14 July 2018.
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The End of the Straight and Narrow
Publishers Weekly.
255.34 (Aug. 25, 2008): p47.
COPYRIGHT 2008 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The End of the Straight and Narrow David McGlynn. Southern Methodist Univ., $22.50 (228p) ISBN 978-
0-87074-550-8
McGlynn's superlatively crafted, deeply sympathetic debut story collection traces the spiritual agonies of
Christians trying to make sense of their faith within the vicissitudes of human nature. "Landslide" takes
place in Southern California, concerning two best friends in a Christian college who follow divergent paths,
who both seem involved in a deadly highway landslide they witness together. In "Moonland on Fire," a
divorced father of three struggles to keep the peace between his visiting teenaged son and his evangelical
girlfriend amid encroaching L.A. wildfires. The last five stories move the action to Houston, Tex., and come
together like five facets of one novella, centered around a 15-year-old, Rowdy Jarrett, harboring crushing
guilt over his mother, Cordelia, who went blind while giving birth to him and whose health is now
deteriorating. As each successive story shifts points of view among the family members, their multipronged
predicament moves into more well-defined but perilous territory, amounting to an affecting family parable.
(Nov.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The End of the Straight and Narrow." Publishers Weekly, 25 Aug. 2008, p. 47. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A184429536/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=93ca7634.
Accessed 14 July 2018.
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McGlynn, David. The end of the straight
and narrow: stories
C.E. O'Neill
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries.
46.7 (Mar. 2009): p1312.
COPYRIGHT 2009 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Full Text:
46-3702
P53613
2008-24272 CIP
McGlynn, David. The end of the straight and narrow: stories. Southern Methodist, 2008. 216p afp ISBN
0870745506, $22.50; ISBN 9780870745508, $22.50
Comprising nine stories, eight previously published in literary magazines, this is McGlynn's debut
appearance in book form. McGlynn (Lawrence Univ.) divides the volume into two sections: part 1 includes
four freestanding stories; part 2 is, in effect, a novella in five chapters (the characters and the plot continue
from story to story). McGlynn's fiction reminded this reviewer of the work of Flannery O'Connor, James
Joyce, and Bobbi Ann Mason, writers who use irony, metaphor, and understatement to describe the
dilemmas of characters trapped in presumption and moral equivocation. And like O'Connor's, McGlynn's
stories rest on a strong sense of place and explore the grotesque as manifestation of spiritual and
psychological paralysis and ruin. Although the stories scintillate with sharp images and subtle nuances in
character, McGlynn's use of the first person is questionable since it offers the reader no helpful
understanding of character and in places seems less than effective in representing the protagonist's thoughts.
For example, careful readers may notice that the novella's first-person narrator occasionally slides into
omniscience, recounting the private musings of other characters. That aside, this is an impressive first
collection. Summing Up: Recommended. ** Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general
readers.--C. E. O'Neill, New Mexico State University at Carlsbad
O'Neill, C.E.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
O'Neill, C.E. "McGlynn, David. The end of the straight and narrow: stories." CHOICE: Current
Reviews for Academic Libraries, Mar. 2009, p. 1312. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A266636052/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=9e8d5d67.
Accessed 14 July 2018.
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'A Door In The Ocean' Leads To Dark
Depths
Fresh Air.
2012.
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Book critic Maureen Corrigan has a different kind of beach book to recommend this week. Here's her
review of "A Door in the Ocean," a memoir by swimmer and short story writer David McGlynn.
Many of the key scenes in David McGlynn's striking new memoir, "A Door in the Ocean," take place at the
beach or in swimming pools. McGlynn was a surfer and competitive swimmer in his school days and still
squeezes into his Speedos for races, like the annual 5K Gatorman off the coast of La Jolla, California.
Ocean swimming, in particular, transports McGlynn to another realm, and he does a terrific job of
dramatizing the allure of solitary swims in open water.
Midway through his book, he writes: In the ocean, I was not afraid, though I had plenty of reason to be. The
water was dark and cold, the waves could swell to enormous heights, and no one knew where I was. I didn't
want anyone to know where I was.
I wanted to edge away from myself. I'd left everything I owned on shore, and feeling the cold water work its
way into the creases of skin beneath my arms and behind my knees, I was reduced to the raw dimensions of
my anatomy, all body, no spirit, and so free from the burdens my spirit demanded.
As you might glean from that passage, McGlynn's story is more in the meditative tradition of something
like Anne Morrow Lindbergh's best-seller "Gift From the Sea," rather than a salty ode to the pleasures of
endless summer.
There's ample reason for McGlynn's gravitas. When McGlynn was in high school, his best friend and fellow
teammate was shot, execution-style, alongside his older brother and father in the living room of their
suburban home in Houston. McGlynn had been talking to his friend on the phone just about 20 minutes
before the murders occurred. The case has never been solved.
In "A Door in the Ocean," McGlynn vividly describes what it feels like, as a teenager, to suddenly learn that
the universe can go violently haywire at any second. Initially, he and his buddies on the swim team
anesthetize themselves with drinking and partying at punk clubs.
McGlynn even confesses to taking shameful pleasure in the sympathetic attention showered on him by the
popular girls. But in a turn that makes up the most interesting and longest part of his memoir, McGlynn
seeks immunity from the random horrors of life by embracing evangelical Christianity. In college, McGlynn
joins an intense Bible study group and takes a pledge of celibacy. After graduation, he travels to Australia,
trawling for souls as a missionary.
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All the while, he struggles with feelings that his radical faith is turning him weird and isolating him
irrevocably from people his own age. One of McGlynn's crummy grad student apartments in California
looks directly into his neighbor's bathroom and, one night, he sees a naked young woman, standing before
the mirror over the sink, putting on makeup.
McGlynn says he felt like the Patrick Swayze character in "Ghost,": a witness to life in a body, but deprived
of that life myself, my hand whooshing through flesh each time I tried to reach out. "A Door in the Ocean"
sometimes gets lost in the wide Sargasso Sea of extraneous details.
For instance, we could do without the pages devoted, here, to McGlynn's hapless efforts to repair the wax
seal on his downstairs toilet. But, McGlynn's writing, particularly about his long stint in the ranks of
Christian fundamentalists, is alive with an insider's knowledge of the power and comforts - and, yes,
sometimes delusions - offered by collective radical belief. In a larger sense, this is a compelling coming-ofage
story, one marked by random tragedy and biblical tracts, bad church coffee and chlorine.
Eventually, McGlynn does break through to the world of the flesh and marries and has children. Although
he still retains his faith, he's left the evangelical fold. McGlynn says: I saw how a life spent trading tangible
happiness for the abstract avoidance of horror led to a kind of madness. Better to swim in the ocean,
McGlynn implies, despite its dark and unknown depths, than spend a life safely standing on the shore.
Maureen Corrigan teaches literature at Georgetown University. She reviewed "A Door in the Ocean" by
David McGlynn. You can read an excerpt on our website freshair.npr.org where you can also download
Podcasts of our show.
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Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"'A Door In The Ocean' Leads To Dark Depths." Fresh Air, 11 July 2012. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A296736552/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=06b3116f.
Accessed 14 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A296736552
Being There
By Peter Grandbois
53 0 0
JUNE 20, 2018
“EVERYBODY KNOWS how to raise children, except the people who have them.” So the satirist and journalist P. J. O’Rourke reveals two truisms about parenting: first (as with writing), everyone thinks they know how to do it until they actually try. Second, the trying part only confirms that those who actually parent, regardless of how prepared they think they are, know nothing about what they’re trying to do. So why should we read David McGlynn’s collection of 21 essays, One Day You’ll Thank Me: Lessons from an Unexpected Fatherhood? Leave aside, for a moment, that the book is often (painfully) funny — as when he calls Trump “the golden-haired love child of Gordon Gekko and Rodney Dangerfield,” or when he describes winter in Wisconsin as “an atonement, swift and severe” — forget that McGlynn is the award-winning author of the memoir A Door in the Ocean and the story collection The End of the Straight and Narrow, as well as a professor of creative writing at Lawrence University; the heart of his new book lies in his willingness to expose the fact that he, like the rest of us, has learned far more from the many parenting failures than from the rare success. To be a parent, says McGlynn, is to hope you are doing things right but to never be sure.
McGlynn’s own father left his family in Texas after divorcing McGlynn’s mother and remarrying in California. The pain of that divorce and separation (the 13-year-old McGlynn will only see his father four weeks a year) is chronicled in the first essay, “Daddy Did It,” which poignantly establishes the raison d´être for the collection: “To grow up longing for a father is to grow up preoccupied with fatherhood itself.” Specifically, McGlynn is interested in what it means to raise boys (he has two), when “the very word, masculine, has taken on such a pejorative aura, conjuring forth images of dick pics circling the Internet and presidents landing on aircraft carriers.” In, say, a book on parenting by Dr. Spock or Dr. Phil, the opening essay would work to establish the author as authority, but McGlynn takes a different tack, showing us the painful portrait of a man still haunted by the divorce of his own parents, a man thrust into fatherhood before he’s ready:
I can’t shake the feeling that I’m still a kid on the lam from class, hiding out beside a pay phone, calling across the miles for someone to make sense of things, to whisper in my ear, Don’t worry, everything’s going to be okay.
The gambit works, setting the stage for exploring a series of parenting dilemmas from when to tell your kids about Santa to when to buy them an iPhone, and even several musings over when and why we push our children to do the things we used to do.
The essay “In the Tank” details sports culture in the United States through the author’s look at his own history with swimming and his questioning of why he wants his son to follow in his footsteps.
Throughout most of college, in fact, I dreaded the water, the constant fatigue I felt in my bones and joints, the twice-daily grind that lasted forever and granted too little reprieve in between, the long streak of races where I had my ass handed to me by everyone I went up against, my pride in my throat like an apple in the mouth of a luau pig. I used to dream of quitting and envied those who had the courage to tell our coach to his face what we all said behind his back.
Despite the fact that he admits hating swimming during his childhood, he nearly weeps with joy at the prospect of his own child entering his first race at the local Y. Later, when his son wins the race, he is beside himself. The son’s stellar time earns him a spot at the regionals. As the boy peels off his goggles and asks if he can go to the meet, McGlynn acknowledges the complicated array of feelings that come as parents sometimes intentionally, sometimes accidentally, push their children down the same paths they chose, even when they regretted those paths:
I could see my future. I wasn’t ready, and at the same time I was so tingly with pride I could hardly contain myself. The textbook definition of ambivalent […] “Of course,” I said. I set my hand on his wet head. “We wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
That ambivalence is honest, and it’s real. The same pattern occurs in the essay “Ordinary Time” when he indoctrinates his children into an Episcopal religion he doesn’t fully believe in himself.
I could give up the entire hocus-pocus of religion altogether. I could proclaim, like Nietzsche, that God was dead, or like Marx, that he’d never been. But in my most private moments, I still believed in a grand intelligence at the center of the universe.
That being so, he continues to “drag the boys to church on Sundays” even when he knows they’ll resent it as much as he did. It’s the recognition that so much of what we do as parents is confusing at best and downright contradictory at worst. Bottom line, we want to instill in our children those traditions that make us who we are even when we’re not sure it’s good for them.
Even as McGlynn records the many ways in which he is controlled by his own childhood, he is aware enough as a parent to break free of that experience. After spending yet another weekend crisscrossing Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Illinois attending basketball tournaments with his son Galen, he spots the kid’s misery over a burger in “The Q Word,” a smart companion piece to “In the Tank.”
He shoved half his burger into his mouth. “How long till we have to be back?”
I checked my watch. “We don’t play until noon. Plenty of time.”
“The team we’re playing won their last game fifty-six to nineteen. They’re going to cream us.”
“You don’t know that,” I said. Though he did know. I did, too They were going to get creamed.
He stabbed his fry into his pool of ketchup. “I just want to get it over with.”
In order to cheer up the boy, McGlynn kills time between games driving him around town, only for them to stumble on a nearby prison. When Galen asks his father, “What are we doing here?” the literal question needles McGlynn into facing his original ambivalence, and he says the words he’d wanted to say when he was a kid: “Maybe it’s time to quit […] The hell with basketball […] The hell with all of it. It’s obvious it doesn’t make you happy.”
When Galen replies, “But I don’t know what sport to play instead,” we realize the depth of the problem. In American culture, sports have become a substitute for play. Without one, Galen explains, “I’ll be a nobody.” The essay ends with McGlynn buying his son a skateboard and taking him to a nearby parking garage. A moment of unplanned, unscheduled time — one without the competitive push to win. At first, he worries about his son, asking if he should follow in the car, but eventually he learns to let go. He waits, listening to Galen skate around the garage: “He wasn’t talking; he was singing. His boyish voice was amplified by the cavernous space around him, as well as — there was no denying it — by his joy.”
It’s the great paradox that in letting go of being the parent, McGlynn describes his most successful parenting moments. Although, strangely, it’s in his exploration of some of his bigger failures that the book occasionally comes up short. Specifically, in “The D Word,” an essay that recounts how he got drunk at a party and tried to drive his kids home: “When it came time to leave, I could barely walk. I somehow ushered the boys to the car and got them buckled into the back seat. […] A friend came down the driveway and took the keys out of my hand.”
It’s a moment of raw honesty — one of those real failures of parenting that can have tragic consequences. However, instead of exploring the ramifications of what might have happened or the insidious ways in which we model alcohol culture for our children, McGlynn tentatively considers quitting drinking but ultimately concludes:
If adhering to an abstentious code would allow me to ward off trouble before it arrived, to guarantee that the boys would never have a problem with booze, I’d gladly do it. But I wasn’t the only one the boys were watching. They were becoming, more quickly than I’d anticipated, citizens of the world, and I could feel the magnitude of my influence starting to diminish.
Perhaps he wants this to feel like a capitulation to reality, but his reasoning feels too much like an evasion of the deeper levels of honesty required regarding his own role, however small, in determining his children’s future. Similarly, in “Sleep or Die,” an otherwise hilarious piece on the difficulties of getting a toddler down for the night, he begins the essay thinking he’s devised a foolproof formula. The reader rightfully expects him to get his comeuppance, which he does: young Hayden becomes so adept at escaping his crib that McGlynn finally chooses to bar the door with a shower curtain rod to keep him imprisoned. The idea itself is funny. And at first, when he’s questioned about it, it looks like McGlynn might face the fact that this kind of coercion is possibly misguided. But instead of considering other possibilities, he doubles down, ending the essay in John Wayne mode: “I’ll take grit over genius any day,” he writes, choosing to defend his child’s stubbornness and his own, as opposed to coming up with a healthy long-term solution. In a book that so often demonstrates parenting failures as necessary and normal, the reader can’t help but feel a bit cheated in these moments. The good news is that they’re few and far between.
The book ends with the climactic “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting” — a powerful and poignant meditation on both male violence and our propensity for violence in general that returns us to the original image of a family in crisis — this time, the author’s own. In a scene any married couple will recognize, what begins as a simple spat over an elbow bump turns into a knock-down, drag-out fight. “The look on Katherine’s face said she was nowhere near backing down. I didn’t want her to. I wanted her fury to match my own so that I could continue to holler.” There’s truth in McGlynn’s acknowledgment that sometimes we want violence and that sometimes it becomes its own end. As the argument continues, we feel the horror at the bigger failure, one so many married couples face — the ways we revisit the pain of our own childhoods on our children. “The argument reached its apogee when Katherine grabbed the car keys and threatened to leave and I punched the bathroom door so hard I felt something crack in my hand.” He goes on:
The boys had retreated to the living room when the fighting started. They tried to drown us out with the television, but as the argument raged on, they’d had to move farther out of the way until they ended up sitting on the stairs together, the lights turned off as if to hide from us.
At that point, the door creaks open, and their son Hayden steps inside, begging them to stop. “I saw the fear I had discovered when I was about his age. The terror of my own parents fighting and the desperation that accrued with each new argument.”
We are left to wonder about the complicated relationship between one generation and the next, how much behavior is genetic, how much is learned, and how slowly we indoctrinate our children into our own patterns of behavior. Thankfully, we do sometimes break with old patterns, as McGlynn does at the end of the book. “Fatherhood, I now understood after years of gnawing on the obligations of the job, was much more about presence than wisdom. Being there versus being right.” The idea is simple yet profound, as are so many of the hard-won conclusions in this engaging and ultimately cathartic collection. There’s so much at stake for a parent. So little room for error, and yet, the author reminds us, we err all the time. What’s most important, McGlynn seems to be saying, is not how many errors we make, but how willing we are to confront them. For our children, that willingness may be the greatest gift of all.
¤
An award-winning novelist, Peter Grandbois has been shortlisted for both the Pushcart Prize and Best American Essays. He’s an associate editor at Boulevard magazine and teaches at Denison University in Ohio.