The Tricky Part

The truth comes in many forms to each of us.  It's hard to find the truth through life sometimes because of the power of the market and of popular culture to configure our desires and self-understandings.  But every now and then, something breaks through, so powerfully crashing into our lives that we have to stop and recognize in it the essence of human experience, in isolation, in relationships, in pain, in longing, in redemption. 

I picked a random book off the display shelf at the public library a few weeks ago.  It's called The Tricky Part: One Boy's Fall from Trespass Into Grace by a middle aged writer and actor named Martin Moran.  It is a true story of his life, more honest than any memoir or spiritual autobiography I've read, including Anne Lamott and Kathleen Norris.  Marty cuts into his experience with the deftness of one who has been through hours of therapy and years of private self-reflection, the kind so private that one only shares it with oneself. 

He tells his story, beginning at age 12, when he first developed a relationship with a camp counselor twenty years his senior.  Their relationship quickly becomes sexual in nature and Marty is trapped in a cycle of depression, guilt, and euphoric intimacy.  He writes, "My bones are infused with a push that tells me I must fashion a dazzling public self.  Be the best and busiest eighth grader ever.  The push has always been there but now it's a kind of panic, an incessant living prayer: God, do not let shame fall upon my head.  For if it were to come, if the truth of things surfaced, I would die of it.  And I had no doubt that shame could kill a body." 


The book has a gravitational pull that draws the reader into the deepest secrets possible, through the ending of the relationship when Marty was 15, through the suicide attempts and the compulsive sexual behavior, through the small cracks of release that came decades later.  It's hard to believe something could be so vividly imprinted in anyone's mind, hard to understand having such vivid and sensual memories. 

You should read this book because it's human.  You should read it because you probably don't read books like this very often.  You should read it and look to see if any of Marty's truths echo some of your own, and if they do, you'll have a companion on the journey... even if there's part of you that never thought you wanted one.