I immediately related to the warped sense of reality that is a by-product of many adolescence lives. In the first chapters of Borkowski’s memoir, he propels the readers directly into the basis of his narrative with a powerful opening sentence, “The human body contains about seven liters of blood.” (1) The combination of leaking blood and the severity of it would make the most jaded person read on. Borkowski contributes a tremendous amount of personal material, creating a cast of characters and voices that help to navigate his terrain. The introduction of friends, family and a few neighborhood characters round out his circle of sustenance and influence. This type of memoir reminds me of the narrative arc of a “hero’s journey”.
Borkowski uses time demarcations coupled with different voices to establish the context of the perspective we are observing. We hear from him as an established respectable adult and a blissfully ignorant youth. The mixture of boredom and obliviousness yields delusions that transport adolescence into adulthood. He states examples with the idea that cops are fake, “Everyone knew not to be afraid of the cops, who came out only at night. They were fake cops carrying fake weapons loaded with fake ammunition.” (2)
That being said on close reading I found the some chapters to be a repetitive. Particularly the repetitive creed (paraphrasing here “it wasn’t a big deal, don’t think about it” from both parents. Perhaps by doing this he accomplishes the mirroring of his parental dictates and emphasizes to the reader how powerful and insidious their message was.
For those who haven’t experienced an event(s) that absolutely and totally alter a person’s life, embed the event into their identity and revise their life’s trajectory, you must be aware that there is definitely a “BI” “before” the “incident” and “AI” an “after” the “incident”. Borkowski establishes this by the end of the first chapter. The imagery of Borkowski’s collapsed lung and the surgery that followed “like the surgery to repair my collapsed lung, which required doctors to cut me nearly in half, my life seems divided by that one incident.”(6) These two specific time references are intrinsically connected to memoir writing and imperative to establish right away.
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