DUST, A Memoir
THE BEGINNING
Remember my little granite pail?
The handle of it was blue.
Think what’s got away in my life!
Was enough to carry me thru.
— Lorine Niedecker
THE GRAVE
When I first arrive, I wander through Plot #30. A man sits nearby. He’s weeding a grave and crying. I feel I should leave him alone. I should abandon my search for David in case it’s too close to the spot he has already claimed for his grief.
But David is not in plot #30. I find him in Plot #29, Space #7 (organized something like Chapter and Verse). He lies on a hill facing southwest, a hill dotted with majestic trees. Around us are the tombs of many. It’s a populous village of notables. I deliberately chose to place my humble brother among them.
I sit on David’s grave.
May the mothers and fathers
who have lived and died
before us bless this spot.
May the children who are
yet to come revere it.
I spent the holidays in Georgia and decided to read DUST straight through, the whole thing, sitting beside the river that cuts across the land near my father's little shack in the woods. It is, truly, a beautiful and marvelous book. The writing is powerful and polished; in places it almost feels liturgical in its careful and incisive repetition. And what a joy to also learn about a Georgia that simultaneously felt so familiar and so distinct from the one I grew up in. And about your own ambivalences with your mother, your brother, your father. I cannot begin to tell you what a gift it was . . . like it and you had fallen out of the heavens.
—Levi Vonk, author of Border Hacker: A Tale of Treachery, Trafficking, and Two Friends on the Run
My life has been just a little bit enlightened by meeting David, Summer Brenner’s brother and the ultimate subject of this poignant memoir. Through her words I feel that I’ve come to know the man, his idiosyncrasies, his charm, his knack for breaking an awkward silence with sudden bursts of song. When the book was finished I felt as if I’d lost someone close, someone I used to know as a child, reintroduced in his dying days. In learning to know David, I feel like I know a little bit more about Summer, too. Her story is a great tribute, though sometimes harsh as honesty often is, to her father, mother, brother and the people she came to meet in a life centered in the beating heart of a bygone era.
—Stephen Jay Schwartz, Los Angeles Times Bestselling Author of Boulevard and Beat
In this Boomer memoir, Driving Miss Daisy meets One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. With lilting eloquence, Summer Brenner captures the tumultuous fifties and sixties of a genteel Jewish family in Atlanta, with the South’s oppressive segregation and anti-Semitism. The family drama is fraught: the brother is a schizophrenic, the mother a Gucci-clad Medusa, and the father a suicide. After extensive travels, Brenner frees herself in the Bay Area to become “more beatnik than debutante.” Framed by historic events, this is the moving coming-of-age story of a generation.
—James Nolan, author of Flight Risk: Memoirs of a New Orleans Bad Boy
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