by Dinty Moore
Nebraska Press
2008

In his recent book project, Dinty Moore has written a memoir—of sorts. This isn’t your father’s memoir, although it is a memoir about fathers; real fathers, would-be fathers, perhaps imaginary fathers. Between Panic & Desire uses the traditional narrative form of memoir but also explores a variety of other structures to give Moore’s account of his formative years spanning the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s.

Like many memoirs, Moore recounts his childhood, which involves coming from a broken home with parents who had more than their share of problems. It also includes the author’s own forays into drugs and alcohol. But unlike Augusten Burroughs, for example, Moore’s accounts of childhood come across as completely believable. Maybe it is because they are so believable and not the flabbergasting tales told by many modern memoirists that Moore feels pressed to push the book further.

So rather than simply stating that his surrogate fathers came in the forms of TV personalities such as Leave It to Beaver’s Hugh Beaumont, Father Knows Best’s Robert Young, and Captain Kangaroo’s Mr. Green Jeans, Moore provides us with an alphabetical meditation on missing fathers. In exploring a long rant by essayist Curtis White, Moore offers a long rant of his own in the form of a make-believe conversation (though using each person’s own words) between White, NPR host Terry Gross, Kiss bassist Gene Simmons, and the character Maggie from the cartoon strip “Bringing up Father.” And Moore writes one chapter in the form of a Buddhist koan—a chapter that he calls Leonard Koan and mentions Canadian legendary singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen.

This book clearly isn’t a memoir for traditionalists. If you aren’t open to some unusual writing techniques, you probably won’t enjoy this book. On the other hand, if you enjoy a fresh approach and a smattering of pop culture in your memoirs, you are in for a treat as Moore brings his own insight in this chronicle of an age—an age of idealism found, and lost; of hippies and trips; of panic … and desire.

Tim W. Jackson began exploring Buddhism upon reading Dinty Moore’s book The Accidental Buddhist.