Too Good to Be True

by Anastas, Benjamin

• ISBN13: 9780547913995
• ISBN10: 0547913990
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-10-16
• Publisher: New Harvest

Summary

The most affecting father-son story since Cormac McCarthy's The Road, this astonishing memoir is a gut-wrenching account of a life at the crossroads. When he was three, Benjamin Anastas found himself in his mother's fringe-therapy group, a sign around his neck: TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE. The phrase haunts him at forty, when everything around him lies in tatters. Broke, his promising literary career gone, Anastas is hounded by debt collectors as he tries to repair a life ripped apart by the spectacular implosion of his marriage, which ended when his pregnant wife left him for another man. Anastas's fierce love for his young son forces him to confront his own childhood, fraught with mental illness, divorce, and the fumes of hippiedom. Charged with rage, despair, humor, and hope, this unforgettable book gets to the core of what it means to be a father.

Excerpts

At the Church Doors

It took a long time for me to admit that I had failed. Even as I write this, I can feel the old machinery kicking in and sputtering, “Yeah, but you still have time—” or “Don’t worry, things will turn around—” or that old dependable excuse trotted out by the teenager in all of us: “The world just won’t understand me.” But I’ve stopped listening to my own excuses. I have reached the point in life where I no longer accept false hopes, the palliative care of counterfeit wisdom. Part of this is courage; even more is necessity. When you have failed like I have—that is, when you’ve watched all of your best-laid plans, one by one, fly off on their own like crazed songbirds and peel off in long, lovely arcs into the nearest picture window—then you’ll understand how I ended up, one raw autumn day not too long ago, standing outside a church in Brooklyn with my hands pressed against the doors so I could pray. In broad daylight, arms spread like I was being frisked from behind, head bowed and murmuring pleas for help to a divine power I wasn’t even sure that I believed in. A stalled career would be enough to get you there; I had that. A failed marriage; I had one of those too—the story of its undoing was so high-drama that I should have been a sultry Argentine in a terry cloth robe, pacing my penthouse and arguing with a pre-op transsexual starlet on my product-placed mobile. The will to go on; it’s not that I had lost it—no, I have never lost that, and I hope I never do—but everything I had worked for was vanishing and my losses were mounting and I was in need. I was in need. It’s that simple.
   So I found myself at the doors of the church nearest to where I live with my hands pressed against the cold exterior, asking, Lord, I need Your help, show me a way out of this, while a bus groaned up the street behind me and the sky threatened to spit rain, or an early snow, and my hands turned white from the cold. Nothing. I heard nothing. Just the bus. Failure thrumming in my ears. So I asked again: Please, Lord, I need Your help. I am lost. My life is broken. Nothing works. Can You hear me? Nothing I try is working, and again I heard no reply, only the farting of hydraulics as the bus receded down the street. I didn’t stay there much longer. It was too cold. I opened my eyes, lifted my hands from the door, and plunged my fists in the pockets of my coat to warm them up. I turned and walked away. That’s where this testament begins: if you’ve failed all the way up to the heavens, like I did that day, after failing in every way possible here on earth, then truth is the only medicine that you will tolerate. Because the truth is what you need.