Perishable: A Memoir [Hardcover]

Dirk Jamison (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 2006

Fascinatingly disturbing, this memoir chronicles seven years in the life of a distinctly unordinary American family. In 1973, Dirk Jamison's father started having a midlife crisis that never ended, and after purposefully losing his construction job, he moved his family to a ski resort and started feeding them from dumpsters in an effort to reject money and all its trappings. They were never homeless, never desperately poor, but they lived on garbage. While Jamison struggled with adolescence, he faced a father who valued freedom more than anything, an overweight Mormon mother, and a cruel sister who delighted in physical abuse. Hilarious and horrifying, this heartbreaking account tells the strange story of the anti-American dream.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

At first glance, it appears Jamison's 1970s Southern California childhood was an unending disaster. His father searched garbage Dumpsters for food, spouting anticapitalist rhetoric. His overweight Mormon mother tranquilized herself with boxes of cupcakes and long telephone conversations with her sisters in Utah. His older sister beat him bloody when she wasn't brooding and planning her escape from the madness. Yet Jamison tells the outlandish story with such grace, humor and style that it feels almost normal. His father, declaring himself "Aark, the Heathen Scavenger," heads out on his first Dumpster diving expedition when Jamison is a boy. His mother looks at Jamison and "gives a long shrug. 'I don't know what he's talking about. I don't know what he means. Where's he going? Do you know what he's talking about?' And so on." Although Jamison, as a boy, was an astute observer of adult life, he's not reflective and doesn't search for any deep psychological underpinning for the craziness around him. Rather, he tells his story with purpose and humanity, letting it illustrate issues surrounding family, truth, compassion and, though it's hard to fathom, beauty. (Apr.)
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Review

"Compelling."  —Utne Magazine

"Engrossing and poignant, you'll want the childhood to end but the words to continue."  —Franz Wisner, author, Honeymoon with My Brother
 

"A wicked, wonderfully crafted memoir. . . Recollections in a fresh voice—with sharp teeth."  —Kirkus Reviews 

"Compelling."  —Maclean’s
 

"An intensely relatable picture of the roads we travel into adulthood."  —Bookslut

 "This month’s must-read memoir."  —Zink Magazine

"As humorous as it is heartbreaking"  —Baltimore City Paper

 

"Engaging."  —Pages

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Chicago Review Press (April 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1556525990
• ISBN-13: 978-1556525995
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,515,944 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Frank, well-written memoir of a most unusual dysfunctional family, June 10, 2006

By 

Debra Hamel (North Haven, CT) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Perishable: A Memoir (Hardcover)

The title of Dirk Jamison's slender memoir Perishable is a reference to the most striking oddity of the author's childhood, that his father--a man for whom the notion of responsibility was anathema--undertook to feed his family of five for a number of years by "trashing," taking recently discarded food prised from dumpsters home to the family dinner table. This was a lifestyle choice rather than necessity. Able-bodied but unwilling to waste his time on a paying job, the author's father saw eating trash as a means of gaining free time: "More trash means less work. Less work means more time." But his enthusiasm for jars of expired pickled eggs and the like was not shared by the rest of the family. The elder Jamison's bizarre take on life was coupled with a selfish abdication of parental responsibility. But his father's instability, if perhaps the worst of what the author endured growing up, was not the whole of it. Jamison's mother was the better parent of the two, but she brought her own problems to the familial mix. Now "slinking off to cry with slabs of chocolate," now refusing a knee operation because she was sure it implied temporary amputation of the affected limb, Jamison's mother, the author explains, was not so much crazy as stupid: "'Ma'am, are you insane?' is the question that nobody ever asks. But I can see that question in their eyes, and it's a misdiagnosis I'm always grateful for. Much preferable to the actual problem, which appears to be staggering stupidity." There were also the regular abuses of Jamison's Mengele-esque older sister and, in the author's adolescence, the in-retrospect-inappropriate attention of "Scoutmaster Gary," the Mormon overseer of a series of Church-sponsored activities in which Jamison took part. In short, the author's home life was unstable, and his father's mode of parenting arguably a form of abuse. Jamison and his siblings lacked dependable adult figures who were capable of making rational decisions on behalf of the family.

Jamison tells the story of his unusual childhood in spare, unflinching prose. Neither sentimental nor self-pitying, the author approaches his subject with something like journalistic dispassion. He is startlingly frank. This is most admirable not when he is detailing his family's failures but rather when he confesses to poor behavior of his own during the period. In the end Jamison's remarkable account of his peculiar upbringing is probably more universal in its scope than he intended. My guess is that a lot of readers will find much that's familiar in the book, their own imperfect familial relationships here writ more extreme. Thus Perishable isn't merely a good read. It may help you laugh at your own crazy relatives.

Debra Hamel -- author of Trying Neaira: The True Story of a Courtesan's Scandalous Life in ancient Greece (Yale University Press, 2003)

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars What a find, March 30, 2009

By 

Arusticat (Waltham, MA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Perishable: A Memoir (Hardcover)

I was browsing the biography section of the library today and ran across Perishable. It sounded familiar - like the story behind a recent documentary about a father that "drops out" from a professional career and takes his kids out of school so they can live on a beach and surf. Well, this ain't it. This is probably the dysfunctional version of that story.

I read the first 75 pages in the library and then took the book home where I finished it - about 3 hours total and probably the most amusing 3 hours I have had in years.

Not only is it a great story but it's a well-told great story.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The yin and yang of a dysfunctional family, April 13, 2008

By 

M McVey (Oakland, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Perishable: A Memoir (Hardcover)

Funny, absurd, and heartbreaking moments abound in this memoir, which offers an incredibly dispassionate account of being raised, on the brink of poverty, by a freeloading father and codependent mother. In a surprising and original way, the extreme differences between his parents seem to operate like yin and yang forces that converge into the strangely sane wholeness of Dirk's own mindful and even compassionate perspective on his parents and his past.