Goosetown is a story about recovering times in our lives that have nearly vanished. We realize we can't remember everything about our past. We search for signs and symbols to jar our recollections. Joyce Dyer weaves her story around the shadows that remain of her first five years. Her uncle, the self-proclaimed mayor of Goosetown, accompanies her as they travel to unearth lost years. She takes the reader on an erratic and unpredictable process. Is the excursion a wild goose chase or can she really find home?
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About the Author
Joyce Dyer is director of writing and professor of English at Hiram College in Hiram, Ohio. She is the author of three books, The Awakening: A Novel of Beginnings, In a Tangled Wood: An Alzheimer's Journey, and Gum-Dipped: A Daughter Remembers Rubber Town. She has received numerous awards for her writing, including a 1997 Individual Artist Fellowship from the Ohio Arts Council and the 1998 Appalachian Book of the Year Award.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Personal history at its absolute best,
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This review is from: Goosetown: Reconstructing an Akron Neighborhood (Ohio History and Culture) (Hardcover)
Perhaps there is no mystery quite so tantalizing and yet in the end so unsolvable as that of one's own identity; that nagging question that is always nibbling at the very edge of one's consciousness: Who am I?Because although the subtitle of Goosetown, Joyce Dyer's slim third volume of memoirs, is Reconstructing an Akron Neighborhood, this is no straightforward sociological study and careful researching of an inner city area which has nearly disappeared. Not by any stretch of the imagination. What Dyer is really doing here is continuing what she began in those other two books. Like so many memoirists, she is simply still trying to figure out who she is. Trying to remember those first five years of her life may be an impossible task, but in the course of seeking out those years, she learns some dark secrets about her Haberkost grandparents, whose intermittent rages, long silences and disappearances she now understands as early signs and inklings of mental illness and probably hereditary dementia. This is a book filled with mysteries - grandfathers and other relatives who drank, a mother who was distant, a loving aunt who filled that gap, an uncle who was perhaps a better father than her own. Family ghosts, skeletons and characters abound in Goosetown, making it a difficult book to put down. Indeed, I read it in just a couple of sittings in a single day. While Dyer does fulfill the promise of her subtitle in providing a history and a good picture of the physical geography of what was Goosetown (now mostly gone), she dwells at much greater length on the inner geography of her own extended family. There is her stern and forbidding grandfather, August Haberkost; her cousin Eddie, killed by a car at five; her loving and maternal Aunt Ruth; and her cousins Paul and Carol. But most of all there is her Uncle Paul, twice widowed and the self-proclaimed "Mayor of Goosetown," now an octagenarian who assists her in her quest to find again the old vanished neighborhood, and also gently teaches her about more important things, like forgiveness, and knowing when to just let go of the past. Dyer is, it seems to me, unflinchingly honest in this look at herself and her family. She was equally honest in her portrayal of her father in her previous memoir, Gum-Dipped: A Daughter Remembers Rubber Town. And yet she accuses herself of holding back certain things about herself in her writing. "I don't lie, exactly, but I keep things hidden." She hints at secrets she has yet to share, things she hasn't "the courage to talk about." But she knows the danger of this. "Words held inside can be as fatal as internal hemorrhaging," she writes. "I have no idea what damage my secrets have already done to me." Because of comments like this, I suspect we have not heard the last from this exquisitely talented memoirist. I hope I'm right. Because Goosetown, her best book yet, continues to spin out that common thread that connects us all as imperfect, fallible human beings. There is a connection between writer and reader here that can only be found in writing of the very highest caliber. More, please, Ms. Dyer. - Tim Bazzett, author of PINHEAD: A LOVE STORY
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Missing Years,
By
This review is from: Goosetown: Reconstructing an Akron Neighborhood (Ohio History and Culture) (Hardcover)
Joyce Dyer is searching for what she considers her "missing years," those first four or five years of life of which few people can salvage many reliable memories. Dyer does remember a few things about when she lived in Goosetown, an Akron neighborhood, but she wonders if her memories are more akin to the product of someone else's stories or of the few old photographs of herself in Goosetown settings she has studied. Now, along with her elderly uncle, Dyer is traveling the streets of her old neighborhood in search of buildings and street corners that might help her recover memories of a time and place she barely recalls."Goosetown: Reconstructing an Akron Neighborhood" is as much about Dyer's reconstruction of what she knows about her family as it is about reconstructing the old neighborhood. She finds, despite how little Goosetown now resembles the area she remembers, that the buildings, homes and other physical markers from her youth point her toward truths about herself and her family she never expected to learn. Goosetown may no longer exist, but what it can teach her about her family will change her forever. Joyce Dyer, in effect, had two sets of parents. Joyce's mother reacted badly to her birth and was never able to fully accept, or fill, her role as mother to the little girl, and her father dealt with the problem largely by ignoring it and getting on with his own life. Luckily, Joyce's Aunt Ruth (her mother's sister) and Uncle Paul were there to give her the love and guidance she did not always get at home. Joyce spent as much time with Ruth and Paul as she spent with her own parents, and she became as much a sister to their son Paul as she was his cousin. She was also close to her young cousins Carol and Eddie, although Eddie was struck and killed on a Goosetown street when he was just five years old. Now, all these years later, it is her 89-year-old Uncle Paul, a man who has outlived two wives and jokingly calls himself the "Mayor of Goosetown," who accompanies Dyer on her quest. Paul is there to answer her questions and to put what she learns about her Haberkost grandparents into its proper perspective. Some revelations are triggered by the neighborhood's geography; others come from her study of public records, family letters and diaries; and still others are mined from the memories of relatives. What she learns about her family's history of alcoholism, depression and its tendency to suffer from Early-Onset Alzheimer's explains to her much about the family skeletons she had never really understood. Near the end of "Goosetown," Dyer hints about the skeletons still in her own closet and what remains to be said if she is ever to tell the whole truth - all the things she keeps inside at the risk of her own well-being. Perhaps what she has learned about Goosetown and her family will make it easier for her to reveal the rest of her story. I hope so.
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