A writer from Peckham buys Obama's memoir for two pounds fifty in a charity shop on Denmark Hill and reads it on the 36 bus. Within a year the shelf is full and leaning. Agassi facing the ball machine at four years old. Tyson on a Brownsville rooftop, keeping pigeons safe. Marvin Gaye's father, and the gun Marvin gave him.
Twenty-six men who built something in public and paid for it somewhere quieter, drawn from the books they left behind. Between the portraits, five essays from the man doing the reading, who has a father story of his own and has been putting off writing it down.
He read them looking for something. This book is what he found instead.
1. I did not start with a list. I did not sit down one morning and say: I will read the memoirs of twenty-six men and write about what I find. That version sounds deliberate, and deliberate is not what happened. What happened is I was twenty-eight and broke and living in a rented room in Camberwell and I found a copy of Obama's memoir in a charity shop on Denmark Hill for two pounds fifty. The spine was cracked. Someone had folded the corner of page 214. I bought it because it was the cheapest thing in the shop that wasn't crockery.
I read it on the bus. The 36. Camberwell to Peckham, the route I could walk in twenty minutes but rode because my feet hurt from a double shift at a restaurant I am not going to name because naming it would make this sound like a story about struggle and this is not a story about struggle. It is a story about a shelf.
The shelf was in the room I was renting. Four planks of MDF screwed into the wall by a previous tenant who had not used a spirit level. It leaned. Everything on it slid slowly to the left over weeks, so I'd come home and find the books stacked against the wall bracket like commuters pressed together on a platform. I put Obama on the shelf. The shelf held.
His father left when he was two. This is the fact that organises everything that follows.
Three churches every Sunday. One Black, one white, one mixed.
There was a wall in front of his shop. Sixteen feet high, thirty feet long. And one day he decided it needed to be rebuilt.
Two thousand five hundred balls a day. He was four years old.
He looks like a boy who writes poetry and studies ballet and has not yet been told by the world that this is something he needs to stop doing.
When he sang about love, it sounded like prayer.
Every man in these pages was shaped by a father.
When he lit the Olympic torch in Atlanta in 1996, his hand shaking, his face still, the entire stadium stood.
The boy who threw his first punch over a dead pigeon, forty years later, still opening his hands and releasing something fragile into the air and trusting it to return.
He recorded it once. He never performed it live.
The cape goes on. He throws it off. The body refuses to be finished.
The problem with an alter ego is that it works.
The crowds laughed. They always laughed.
You can see the mask. You can name the mask. You can write an essay about the mask. You are still wearing it.
He left America at twenty-four because he was afraid he would kill someone or be killed.
The revolution had not been televised. It had been survived.
He was thirty-six.
He was not grateful. He was Eddie Huang.
The store is still open.
He did not see a mirror until he was ten years old.
The first departure did not have a suitcase.
He was learning to think, and the thinking required words he did not yet possess.
A cell so small he could lie down and touch both walls.
For the length of time his hands were on the keys, the world was organised.
Some rooms never caught up. He didn't change the act.
He opened his mouth. The room leaned forward.
Post-it notes on a bathroom mirror. Accusations, not affirmations.
The book is not the bridge. The book is two hundred pages about the distance.
He was dying for four years, and he never told the story.
He held the door open until his hands gave out.
Jude Sable is a writer from Peckham, South London. He studied on the 36 bus and started keeping a notebook before he knew what it was for. His work moves between prose, screenplay, and short form. MENMOIRS is his first book.
For press, rights, and readings: jude@avdience.com
