What do You think about The Same River Twice: A Memoir (2003)?
This book is well written, with beautiful analogies and metaphors throughout. I appreciate his writing. The storyline flips back and forth between his days as a drifter and his current situation, with a pregnant wife. I found it hard to relate to a protagonist who spent much of his life wandering around aimlessly--including the present moment, when his wife his expecting while working full time, yet his primary goal in life seems to be disappearing on walks and thinking about things while unemployed. With so little grounding this character to anything, I found it difficult for him to hold my interest either.
—Bonnie Jean
In his memoir The Same River Twice, Chris Offut takes us on parallel journeys of both mind and body. In two interweaving storylines, we follow young Offut, as he travels the United States hoping to find a calling, and older Offut, a seasoned, settled, soon-to-be father. Each Offut thinks a lot, about a great many things, from the mundane—where am I going to sleep tonight?—to the profound—why am I here? Using present and past tense shifts to distinguish between narrative threads, Offut weaves a literary tapestry of descriptive prose, balancing his contemplative contemporary self with the naïve, questing, and reckless personality of his youth. This is honest writing, rife with startling metaphors and lyric intensity. We may not entirely feel comfortable with where Offut takes us emotionally, as some of his thoughts are downright distasteful in their human-frailty nakedness, but his willingness to write uncompromisingly about his life, feelings, fears, etc. earns our trust and, ultimately, admiration.
—Abe Brennan
