I Will Not Leave You Comfortless: A Memoir

(Hardback)

Available Formats

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

Spanning one year of the author's life, I Will Not Leave You Comfortless is the intimate memoir of a boy's coming to consciousness in small-town Missouri, from a writer who "is known for beautifully expressive and strikingly lucid prose" (Thisbe Nissen). 1984 is the year that greets Jackson with first loves, first losses, and a break from the innocence of boyhood that will never be fully repaired. The seeming security of family is at once and forever shaken by the life-altering events of that pivotal year. Through tenderhearted, steadfast proseredolent of the glories of outdoor life on the family farmJackson recalls the deeply sensual wonders of his rural Midwestern childhoodbicycle rides in September sunlight; the horizon vanishing behind tall grasses. Reanimating stories both heart wrenching and humorous, tragic and triumphant, Jackson weaves past, present, and future into the rich Missouri landscape. With storytelling informed by profound sense of place and an emotional memory remarkably sound, Jackson stands poised to join the ranks of renowned memoirists.

Reviews

Praise for Life at These Speeds:
"Occasionally, a sleeper of a book comes your way, a book whose author has not yet reached word-of-mouth status, and you think to yourself, 'My God, this is good.'"
Anita Shreve, author of The Pilot's Wife
Praise for I Will Not Leave You Comfortless

"Jeremy Jacksons memoir, I Will Not Leave You Comfortless, immerses the reader in the sights, sounds and senses of a happy childhood in rural Missouri just before the digital revolution: a basketball hoop, the smell of pie, rumbling storms, a BB gun, the stain of sour mulberries underfoot in June . . . this local coming-of-age memoir is a sweet record of a time and a place that was not Always On."
St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"[Jackson] has a poets touch with words simple, lyrical, evocative.... I could smell the mulberries crushed underfoot and the sweet steam of the cinnamon roll Grandma heated in the toaster oven just for Jeremy, hear the ever-increasing volume of an approaching late-spring storm.... The year of Jeremy Jacksons life on which he meditates in I Will Not Leave You Comfortless marked his transition from the perfect happiness of childhood to the much more complex reality of adulthood. It records, as well, the abiding comfort that remains family, home and love."
Melanie Zuercher Wichita Eagle

"The air, the weather, the landscape, the emotions, [Jackson's] first girlfriend and the gift he buys her, his troubles, his worries, his observations, all help locate us at the time of his youth and remind us of the noteworthy events of our own childhood . . . I Will Not Leave You Comfortless shines and glides beautifully onward with Jackson's eloquent language, his capturing of the subtle nuances, fears and joys of growing up, and his poetic descriptions of those lovely moments of being a child that many of us were fortunate to have experienced."
Jim Carmin, Minneapolis Star Tribune

Jeremy Jacksons swirling memoir is built upon layers of well-chosen detailit remembers the weather, the geography, the history of plowed earth, the coal-smoke taste of coffee and the aching love between the lines of handwritten letters. The result is like peering through a new lens at a familiar hillside, or walking through the pastures of your childhood and discovering they were bigger, not smaller, than you recall. Bigger, not smallernow that is the mark of a generous writer.
Leif Enger, author of Peace Like a River and So Brave, Young, and Handsome

Jeremy Jackson writes about Missouri as the young Hemingway wrote about Michigan: with a clear eye; with hard-edged nostalgia; and (here's the thing) with brilliance. I was going to add that I Will Not Leave You Comfortless reads like fiction, because it's well designed -- but it doesn't read exactly like fiction. And maybe it's because every word of it is absolutely, searingly true.
Darin Strauss, author of Half a Life and Chang and Eng

"In its openness, its lucidity, its leaps of empathy and its quiet perfectionism, this is one of the most daring and affecting memoirs I've read."
Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Brief History of the Dead and The Illumination

"Abundantly evocative and resonant, I Will Not Leave You Comfortless is an elegy to a year in Jeremy Jackson's boyhood life, an elegy to childhood, to innocence, and to a certain kind of rural American life that Jackson brings to visceral existence, here, in the hazy winter light of remembrance and in the sun-glow of memory. This book is what it felt like to be that boy, that year, on that farm, and it is full of the writing that Jackson is known for: beautifully expressive and strikingly lucid prose."
Thisbe Nissen, author of Osprey Island and The Good People of New York

Author Bio

Jeremy Jackson is the author of two novels, Life at These Speeds, a B&N Discover pick, and In Summer, a Booksense Recommends selection. A graduate of Vassar College and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he lives in Iowa City. Jackson is also the author of young adult novels under the name of Alex Bradley, and cookbooks including, The Cornbread Book, which was nominated for a James Beard Award. He writes about food for the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Post.

In His Own Words. . .
Though I was born in Ohio, I grew up with my family on a farm in the Ozark borderlands of Missouri. We raised cattle and hay and had a garden the size of Texas. At various times we had horses, cattle, a pig, sheep, chickens, ducks, and a pony. We ate a lot of these animals, but not the pony. We also had wild blackberries and persimmons and walnuts on our farm. And a pear tree. And we caught fish in our ponds. We ate some of them, too.

For some crazy reason, I headed off to Vassar College, thinking that I would become a writer. Unfortunately, I did. It was all downhill from there, though the sex was good. From Vassar I went straight into the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where I wrote brilliant stories about bunnies, marbles, and a talking mailbox named Ruth. Then I spent a year writing a novel and a screenplay. Then I went and taught English back at Vassar for two years. Being a professor was a mind-numbing experience, though the sex was good. I quit that job and started being a writer full time, which was very much like being a writer part time except that it took a lot more time and I felt much more guilty when I didn't write anything. I moved from Poughkeepsie back to Iowa, which is kind of like moving from the outer circles of hell to the Garden of Eden.


Not Your Average Memoirist: Six Questions with Jeremy Jackson
by Will Wlizlo

Jeremy Jackson isnt your typical memoirist. He grew up in rural Missouri and had a mostly happy childhood, unspoiled by the drug addictions, abuse, or financial hardship weve come to expect from the genre. His focus, instead, is on the ordinary hard times weve almost all facedthe death of a loved one, the fade of a fledgling romance. And yet he evokes the events with a bittersweet clarity, expansive tenderness, and uncommon wisdom that transforms the everyday into the sacred and the personal into the universal. In I Will Not Leave You Comfortless, Jackson chronicles his unforgettable eleventh year, when he lost more than a girlfriend and a Pinewood Derby race. He lost his innocence.

Here, Jackson talks about unboxing his childhood memories, not seeing the weather, and almost getting married in fourth grade.

Milkweed Editions: In the memoir, you take the freshman composition maxim write what you know to a whole new level. How did you remember the past with such clarity

Jeremy Jackson: I wrote Comfortless in part as a way to discover and understand a fuller version of the familys story than I understood at the time, as a boy. Sort of a write what you know plus write toward what you want to know.

My memory of my childhood is good, but the book creates an illusion that I remember it spectacularly well. Luckily, I had access to a trove of family documents from the time I was writing about. My most important sources included items like my familys daily calendars, my grandmothers journals, and dozens of dated and labeled photographs. But I had many, many more things, like a tape recording of my grandmothers funeral, my sisters journal, notes girls at school had written to me, and the notepad that sat at my grandmothers hospital bedside for months. Additionally, my parents were excellent sources, because they recalled many events that I wasnt even present for.

So my research helped immensely in recreating a fuller version of the family story than I remember.

While writing Comfortless, what was a once-lost childhood memory you unearthed that was especially pleasurable to remember

Theres hardly a page of the book (at least the ones where I am present) that doesnt have some tidbit that I retrieved from the deep reaches of memory. The time our little black cat rode on top of the car to town, for example. Or how I built my Pinewood Derby car backwards that year, and didnt realize it until the night of the races. Buying earrings for the girl I had a crush on. The way my grandmother would give me cut-up brown paper bags to draw or paint on. Pick a page and Ill point out something that I had semi-forgotten but recovered during the writing of the book.

In the memoir, life-changing events like your grandmothers death are presented alongside less weighty memories like losing the Pinewood Derby. As inconsequential as the latter may seem, the experience can be just as memorable as the former. Why do you think everyday experiences loom so large in childhood

Oh, the world is fresher when youre a kid, isnt it Or, really, youre fresher, and the things that are happening to youbig and smallare being etched right into your brain.

Your parents were forced to take care of both their young children and their aging parents. What did you learn about caregiving and family resilience during this time

I think one of the things the book does is show how the generationsof any familymove forward inexorably and simultaneously. One of the structural tensions in the book is the contrast between my grandmothers story (the older generation passing on) and my sisters story (the younger generation coming into maturity). The stories in a family can be both sad and triumphant at the same time. During the writing and publication of the book, I also got married and became a father, so I entered a new life stage, and this made me appreciate and understand my parents roles as the middle generation taking care of both the younger generation and the older generation.

Comfortless is as much a story of your family as it is of everything in your environmentvolatile summer storms, fresh cows milk, wild pink mulberries, the smell of Missouri soil. How does place influence you as a writer and as a Midwesterner

For me, setting is one of the most important and dynamic parts of a story. I love the Midwestern landscape and weather. I lived on the East coast for six years, and I was constantly frustrated that I couldnt get a good view of the sky or horizon through all the trees and buildings. I couldnt see the weather! I couldnt see storm clouds coming, which was upsetting a) because you needed to see them coming so you could be prepared and b) they are beautiful.

In one particularly comic scene, youre standing in the schoolyard, waiting to get married to Toni Renken, a girl in your class. In retrospect, if you could live the crush all over again, what would you do differently

I still find the concept of our semi-arranged playground marriage to be hilarious. A few years ago I talked with one of the girls who helped organize the wedding, and she recalled that she and some of the other girls got into a little bit of trouble over the whole thing. I think the teachers didnt like them playing at being grown ups so literally.

But really, it just wasnt meant to be. You cant force a thing like that.