There’s so much I want to learn. It’s becoming ridiculous. I have 52 items checked out from the library. I have another 19 on hold. And another 20 to put on hold after that. There’s a book on cooking African food. One on cooking eggs. Just eggs! There’s the bread book. Then there’s all of Blake’s poetry. I can’t even read poems! There’s one on street magic in India. There’s Heidegger’s On Time and Being. One on religion called The Sacred and the Profane. And the shelf goes on. 

The one that has my current attention most (beside the bread book) is a history of the eleven rival cultures of North America. It argues the differences between the states of the puritans, the Quaker state of Pennsylvania, and the states of the mid- and deep south, that existed 250 years ago, persist still today. 

According to its author, I come from the midlands, known for its German farmers who rotated crops, bred livestock selectively, and kept their farms tidy and prosperous. 

Scott McClanahan’s Hill William comes from Appalachia. This is where every man was a sheriff, where blood feuds raged just as fiercely as the Appalachians feuded with the Indians, and where vigilante justice had the day. It’s a coarse place and when the colonies first met to decide what to do about the British, they kept any Appalachians out of the proceedings. 

It sounds like a much more hot-tempered place than the one from which I came.

So when Hill William begins with, “I used to hit myself in the face,” I cringe. And when the narrator says, “I knew pretty girls weren’t crazy about guys who hit themselves in the face,” I cringe again. And again: “O my god I fucked up my face. I fucked up my face. I fucked up my face.” And again: “Goddamnit and I had to go and stay at Motel 8 for the night." 

I didn’t think I would finish reading Hill William, but I did. It won me over, even. There’s something complex brewing underneath the references to Mountain Dew and Superman and Wonder Woman underwear. It deals with child sexual abuse, so trigger warning, but it also weaves that narrative into the therapy that the narrator is going through as an adult. That made it compelling and lifted it above the man-child syndrome that I was afraid that it was going to fall into.