Customer Reviews

Some Things That Meant the World to Me

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What a wonderful book this is. Additionally, as a clinical social worker and marriage and family therapist I was very impressed with the clinically accurate portrayal of Rhonda, the protagonist. Rhonda is a 30 year old man who suffers from 'depersonalization' which is one of the more severe symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. When someone suffers from depersonalization they can go into what is considered a fugue state or see themselves or parts of their body as 'other'. As part of his disorder, and also as an homage to his resiliency, Rhonda has an inner child that accompanies him from time to time. He calls this child 'Little Rhonda'. He also has an older Rhonda as a friend, nurturing and loving towards him, who he calls 'Old Lady Rhonda'. Both of these Rhondas help him to come to terms with his present life in relation to the trauma he suffered in the past.

One of the ways that Little Rhonda shows Rhonda his past life, is through a glass-bottomed dumpster with a trap door. Rhonda can climb out of the dumpster into his past and is able to see and question what occurred when he was a child. Little Rhonda also travels with Rhonda back to Arizona where he grew up. Rhonda is searching for his home which he believes is the source of evil. Little Rhonda challenges Rhonda's beliefs and tries to help him with his reality-checking. Old Lady Rhonda doesn't ask questions. She nurtures Rhonda unconditionally. She gives him food, love and money and, together, they relax and watch Wheel of Fortune. She is the nurturing mother he never had.

Rhonda's background is horrendous. His mother is an alcoholic who drinks 'Tcha-bliss' (Chablis) all day when she is at home. However, she often disappears for days or weeks at a time, leaving Rhonda with her horriby abusive boyfriend, Letch. Letch physically and sexually abuses Rhonda in their home and in order to integrate what is happening in his life, Rhonda blames the home for what is occurring. He sees his house as a desert landscape, stretching and filled with animals. In his own words, "I couldn't concentrate on anything except their warfare in our stretched, sandy house, as they screamed throughout the desert that was everywhere: a cactus had sprouted next to the TV, a dove perched on it; animals flying, slithering, crawling, running all around our desert; animals, livid and terrtorial". (p. 85)

The book goes back and forth in time and place, from Rhonda's childhood to adulthood. It starts off in the present with Rhonda saving a hooker who is being beaten in San Francisco. Rhonda spends the night with the hooker and something occurs so that the hooker mocks and humiliates Rhonda rather than being thankful that Rhonda is her savior. The book then takes the reader to Rhonda's childhood in Arizona and to his time as a teen-ager in a psychiatric hospital where he meets with a supportive psychiatrist over time. The psychiatrist does his best to challenge Rhonda's belief that his house is the source of all the bad things that happened to him.

I can't say enough positive things about this gem of writing. It takes the reader on a flight so dark and frightening that it could have been to difficult to make the journey. However, the author puts in just the right amount of humor and enough soothing so that we can take the journey with Rhonda.

I loved this book! An amazing, wild, and humorous ride through the streets of San Francisco's Mission District. The book is filled with brilliantly illuminated imagery as we see the world through the main character's eyes. Following Rhonda, a 30 year old man who is trying to find a life far away from the craziness of his youth in Phoenix, we watch him learn how to make friends and let himself be loved by a tough man who drinks warm beer and a dreaming old woman who yearns to leave her husband and be on Wheel of Fortune.

Rhonda's view of the world is unique and definitely different from ours; he remembers his childhood house as a symbolic object with drifting rooms that stretch farther apart the rougher his home life got. And he sees a dirty dumpster as a portal into which he can dive down to view his past life. These images are used intelligently and sparingly and are balanced by Rhonda's wild life of saving prostitutes from being beaten up and trying to date beautiful women. And also by his unflinching honesty into all parts of his life.

I couldn't help but fall for the fragility of Rhonda, a young man who has a humor and intelligence that is all his own. An astonishing book and especially since it's Mohr's debut.

I absolutely loved this book. Lost a full night of sleep reading it as it simply could not be put down. The warped world of the hero (a debatable title), Rhonda, starts out comfortably and safely enough, but veers sharply into very, very unfamiliar - and unstable - territory. Gorgeous, surefooted prose provides necessary ballast for Rhonda's quickly disintegrating perspective, letting you see far more than the first person narrative lets on. A very cool trick that brings to mind the protagonists in The Butcher Boy and even A Clockwork Orange - totally off-kilter yet somehow fully relatable and sympathetic. The fact that this writer manages to pull off a character so desperate to verify his own identity that he literally digs through a dumpster for a magic trapdoor into his memories, all without losing a moment's plausibility, is flat out amazing.

Ultimately this is a redemption story, a man coming to terms with his fractured past while doggedly attempting to build a future. One of the fun things that separates this book from so many other stories and novels with similar themes is the flat-out unique world Mr. Mohr drops his Rhonda into, a nightmarish Mission district in San Francisco peopled by characters you'd love to see yourself...from across a street. Rhonda's Bloomsian tour of that part of the city, the bars and taquerias, back alleys and thundering gentrification efforts, is simply a blast to read. Gush, gush, I can't wait to read the next thing from this clever writer though it'll surely entail another night of lost sleep.

Some Things That Meant the World to Me is the unsettling story of a thirty-year-old San Francisco man named Rhonda, who suffers from depersonalization disorder after a childhood of abandonment and abuse. In between cue-stick beatings, Rorschach tattoos, and botched batches of home-brew wine, he discovers a portal to his past in the dumpster behind a local taquería.

It's often a plot pitfall when storytellers defer to traumatic childhood episodes once the present-tense drama wanes. And this book does walk that line, spending as many pages in Rhonda's childhood and adolescence as in his San Francisco here and now. But Mohr somehow manages to make the past convincing as the main event. We want Rhonda to go backwards, through that trapdoor in the dumpster, no matter how traumatic it gets. The story's structure resembles psychotherapy: a reluctant but fearless inventory of the past in order to piece together some sort of viable future.

If this novel was a boxer and its sentences were punches, it would be all about the jab--that most rapid and relentless of blows, but which is, in fact, a defensive maneuver. Walking another line, Mohr combines the best visceral elements of hard-eyed realism with all the surprises and surreal imagery due a narrator that's both mentally ill and chronically drunk. Hallucinations and nightmares are present, but sparing. Rhonda's depersonalization disorder is never a cheap trick. Imagine Fight Club if you were told about the schizophrenia on the first page, none of the personalities were as pretty as Brad Pitt, and the narrator spent the rest of the book with the gun in his mouth.

The energetic prose and the number of scenes in bars will likely draw comparisons to Bright Lights, Big City or perhaps Less Than Zero. Indeed, Mohr's novel shares traits with the so-called `literary brat pack' of the 1980s: urban aesthetics, self-loathing, an unflinching focus on character which often eclipses narrative. Rhonda, however, is working with a smaller budget, a bigger heart, and deeper scars. Initial reviews of Some Things That Meant the World to Me have brought up Jesus' Son, which is a sound comparison. However, die-hard Denis Johnson fans will find more common ground with his Resuscitation of a Hanged Man--that underrated benchmark for putting the sick back in quixotic.

"Some Things That Meant the World to Me" is a wonderful book. The writing is spare yet expressive; the happenings are horrific yet believable. The writing is not overtly emotional. It's visceral. I found myself trying to suspend belief, to slip into Mohr's world but it's a place I don't willingly go in the same sense I don't purposely walk Los Angeles' skid row. The people and their lives are (or so I tell myself, then murmur a small prayer) too removed from mine. I've recently read Ginnah Howard's "Night Navigation" and Augusten Burroughs' "Dry". One is fiction; the other is debatably a memoir. Both are about addictions, mental illness and healing. I don't have an antipathy to addiction fiction but Mohr's major characters were ALL addicted and neurotic or psychotic or criminal. This made it hard to relate to them. And there was no respite. Books such as "Dry" and "Night Navigation" afforded resting places through the healing or non-using characters. I have to say though just when I felt at my most frustrated with Mohr's book I'd come upon sentences such as, "I wrung my memory, but there wasn't anything besides blackness, and sometimes things were so black they were more than a color: they were a place, a lonely solar system". There were also bursting metaphors that kept me reading. In the end though I felt I was on the outside looking in, the happenings were ultimately too bizarre. I felt excluded or maybe I was just relieved to feel excluded.

When I stumbled across Joshua Mohr's debut novel, I couldn't put the book down. The short chapters, tight prose, and relatable but flawed protagonist Rhonda, compelled me to turn each page. The prose reads eloquently like poetry and I had to force myself to slow down in order to savor each sentence. I highly recommend this book and look forward to more work from this talented young novelist. Seriously, I wouldn't be surprised if we hear more of Mohr in the literary landscape.

This book was imaginitive and heart-warming. It was just one of those rare finds that you can't put down!

For starters, and what is really overlooked so often in editorial book critiques: this book draws you in. It flows, it prompts you to turn its pages, it has believable characters, setting, timing, and a solid story that the author maintains focus on.

The heart of the story has a way of punctuating how sometimes you have no choice in whether an event or unpremeditated action will affect the course of one's life in a blink. How one must nonetheless move forward from sudden change as time cannot be turned back for a second chance, ought not be wallowed in with pity, and can be instructive to the future if examined thoughtfully.

In addition to being well written, the emotion of the story comes across with complete candor; as though Mohr is merely Rhonda's ghost writer, but with the good fortune of an attributed byline. The story is a dark one, and Mohr tackles abuse of many kinds without the hesitation of social tact, laying bare the gamut of human emotion however tangible or comprehensible it may or may not be to the reader. No rose-colored filter on Mohr's pen, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

If I hadn't known going in that this was a first novel, I never would have guessed that was the case. I became interested in the book when I saw the blurb Donald Ray Pollack wrote about it. I read Pollack's book "Knockemstiff" last year, and thought it was very good, though very bleak.

And there's where Mohr improves on Pollack's book. He's written a story about hurt, abused, damaged people, but injected it with heart. Rhonda is an odd, unreliable narrator, but before you've gotten too far into the story, you care about him, and want to know more of what is going and has gone on in his life.

The writing is strong, the characters feel real, and there's a great mix of style (traditional narrative mixed with stream-of-consciousness) here. I highly recommend this one, and am looking forward to Mohr's next book, due out next year. A very impressive debut.

What a crazy story written in just an amazing writing style. The type of writing and story where you can't put it down til it's finished.