Little Failure: A Memoir

“On Rubenstein Street, I had my first love,” my father says. “Right over there.”

Twenty-six million died on the Russian side in World War II, nearly 15 percent of the population.

“His posture has improved so much,” my mother says of me. “He’s unrecognizable. His walk. It’s like he’s not my son!”

My mother, her ambition stifled, channeled away by history and language, has given birth to my own. The only difference is: I have no God, no family myth, to cling to, no mythmaking abilities beyond the lies I tell on the page.

One is cautioned by the better critics never to write about photographs. They are an easy substitute for prose, a hackneyed shortcut, and, besides, they lie like all images do.

My father sports his STRIPED BASS CONSERVATION PARTICIPANT cap, a new Banana Republic jacket, and swish sunglasses, looking surprisingly Western by way of eastern Queens. Only the combination of black socks and leather sandals betrays him as a true native of this land.

With each new adherent I am crossing the line from unclubbable fruitcake to tolerated eccentric.

This is the creed I have made for myself: Day Zero. A new start. Keep the rage in check. Try to decouple the rage from the humor. Laugh at things that are not sourced from pain. You are not them. He is not you. And each day, with or without my parents’ presence, my creed proves to be bullshit.

And then it occurs to me: If to my father I am an object of love-hate, both a best friend and an adversary, to my mother I am not even a person.