The Sparkling-Eyed Boy: A Memoir of Love, Grown Up – A Lyrical Story of Desire and Nostalgia

The Sparkling-Eyed Boy: A Memoir of Love, Grown Up – A Lyrical Story of Desire and Nostalgia

"The Sparkling-Eyed Boy is so full of color and light and life." -- Brad Land, author of Goat The theme of summer love, in Amy Benson's hands, grows up: The Sparkling-Eyed Boy searches out the fault lines of adult nostalgia and desire. The achingly intense adolescent summer days that Amy Benson and the sparkling-eyed boy spend together on the remote shores of the St. Mary's River of Michigan's Upper Peninsula are at the complex emotional center of The Sparkling-Eyed Boy. For her, summers meant returning from her home in Detroit to a three-month idyll on much-loved family land, owned for generations, and to a heady culture of teasing, testing local boys. For him, this land is the place he was born, where he'll later find work, marry, and stay: and she was the one he had loved. "Can you pinpoint that moment? When you made a choice before you even knew that choosing was possible, or the terrifying nature of choices?" The Sparkling-Eyed Boy, with its heart-stoppingly erotic -- and yet wholly imagined -- scenes of illicit love, its searching riffs on love as possession, love as pain, reads like a friend's deepest secrets, shared. “The Sparkling-Eyed Boy is so full of color and light and life. This is truth of the most profound sort; truth revealed in the artful and lyrical sensibility of Benson’s words and memory. She is dancing with us: not leading, but simply asking us to watch her move and take what we will. Benson shows us here what the memoir can and should do — destroy and resurrect itself over and over. Benson is doing exactly that.” — Brad Land, author of Goat “The great pleasure and triumph of this memoir is Amy Benson’s ability to make the familiar new again as she explores the country of first love. Over and over I found myself surprised by the unexpected twists and turns, peaks and abysses, of her journey. And also by her lovely, fiercely intelligent prose.” — Margot Livesey, author of Criminals In this rather self-absorbed, obsessive reworking of her first experience with love, Benson recounts her childhood summers spent on the Upper Peninsula (UP) in Michigan, where she met the sparkling-eyed boy, who lived there year-round. Although she never tells us his name, she precisely details his physical appearance, their halting conversations, and their every encounter from the first moment they met diving off a country dock. She tells of the fraught relationship between UPers and summer residents, who often vied over who had a deeper sense of place. More often, she dithers over the fact that he has married, as though she expected him always to be there, waiting for her. Her memoir is filled with an aching yearning and tinged with an eroticism that seem out of all proportion to the innocent relationship they shared as adolescents. Yet her unseemly obsession also works as a remarkably candid disclosure of what it feels like to be young and in love for the first time. Winner of a prize for creative nonfiction from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, this is a provocative, intense read. Joanne Wilkinson Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved "[Benson] endeavors to purge her pain via poetic expression, intimately exploring the nature of desire." Elle "[Her] poetic memoir...built on dreams and memories of what never happened, but could have...." USA Today "A provocative, intense read." Booklist, ALA "Startling insight and precision...a potent meditation on love, summer, youth, and how the three intertwine." Body&Soul Amy Benson is the winner of the 2003 Katharine Bakeless Nason Prize for creative nonfiction, selected by Ted Conover and awarded by Middlebury College and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. Up North They called us trolls because we lived for nine months of the year below (that is, south of ) the bridge. The Mackinac Bridge connects the Upper Peninsula of Michigan with the Lower Peninsula. For the five miles of the bridge, all you see is water and sky, blurring out at the edges. People died erecting its towers and suspending its cables over water three hundred feet deepthey say the body of at least one man is trapped in a concrete tower. In high winds, tiny un-American cars like mine have been blown off the bridge, down to the storm-blackened Straits of Mackinac. I imagine the impact every time flying free from the car, the beautiful water like an anvil driving the bones in my toes all the way up into my soft neck. Some people who live far from the Great Lakes don’t know that Michigan comes in two pieces disconnected by water. The Lower Peninsula looks like a mitten, a comfort to trolls far away from home, who can always, when asked by strangers where they’re from, raise their right handspalm forward and lined like a road map, thumb out to the sideand point to their hometown. But the mitt of Michigan is not charming to the billy goats above the bridge. Yoopers, as they often call themselves (a phonetic version of UPers), are surrounded on every side by the larg