39 Years Of Short-Term Memory Loss (2009) - Plot & Excerpts
For a professional writer - much less an award winning professional writer - I have never read a more amateurish book. The final chapter - which you would think would be some sort of conclusion or catharsis - is literally just a description of random news stories he has pinned to his bathroom walls over the years. This book includes phrases like "the next day I reminded him of the nonincident" and at one point he relates an anecdote which he can't remember if he saw himself or read in an unnamed book - both signs of a judiciously edited tome.There is no chronology in the book, leading to weird gaps, repetitions and inexplicable jumps. At the bottom of one page he's talking about a movie he wrote which never got made and the next paragraph on the top page describes John Belushi's funeral with no segue between the two topics and not even a mention that Belushi had died (that's saved for a chapter on Belushi that's a hundred pages later.) Even the layout is haphazard: photos are stuck in on random pages regardless of whether those people are mentioned in that chapter, emails he got from friends trying to source his stories are inserted into the text even though they would be better off as reference material, and the random scripts he includes as examples of his writing are only intermittently worthy of archiving. Basically, I would say that this book is garbage unless you are interested in random stories of freebasing with Jerry Garcia, of which there are a bunch. But people that are interested in SNL - the putative topic of the book - have plenty of better options to read. Tom Davis has some great stories. He's been around the world several times, counted Jerry Garcia among his personal friends and wrote for Saturday Night Live during it's most subversive period. He also did a ton of drugs. Perhaps this is why his autobiography is written in a non-linear format. Davis has some great stories and a remarkable memory for someone that has taken so many acid trips. However, the jumping around is a bit jarring. I prefer my biographies to be chronological, but I guess I'm old-fashioned.
What do You think about 39 Years Of Short-Term Memory Loss (2009)?
Lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of drugs.
—0121fifahd
Way too much of Tom's travel and drug details, not enough SNL.
—kristinsandberg
Very interesting and well written. Funny and poignant.
—jennrocks
