Joel's Reviews > Cures for Hunger: A Memoir

Deni Bechard's s memoir is an astounding odyssey of personal grappling and growth. A young boy, in British Columbia, realizes his only real interests in school are literary and artistic. His spiritualist mother is encouraging. Yet his middle-aged, barely literate, ex-con father—a wholesale/retail guy who solves problems in his business life with his fists—intrigues him. Deni's dad thrills him with fast, reckless car rides and true stories of his earlier days as a criminal, who for years had robbed banks and other targets in scattered localities in North America.

Deni meticulously narrates this wild story. Things progress to where his mother flees with early-teenage Deni (and his brother) with the hope of living a quieter and less threatening life down in rural Virginia. Deni winds up angry and filled with resentment for his father. But after some petty crime of his own, and some effort to expand his horizons via hitchhiking, he re-establishes contact with his father—traveling back to Canada where he’ll work in his father’s business for a stretch while earning the money needed to set out on his self-directed path.

His dad makes fervid attempts to goad Deni into becoming a hardass and to forego any education beyond high school, something Deni can’t accept. Deni endures the tensions, wanting to learn everything his father has never told him about his impoverished past, in order to understand this deracinated, driven man and himself—to delineate the truth. He doggedly pursues this knowledge while actually metamorphosing into a writer.

I’ve read few autobiographies or memoirs as completely gripping (and literary) as this one! I recommend it.