The Sparkling-Eyed Boy: A Memoir of Love, Grown Up [Paperback]

Amy Benson (Author), Ted Conover (Introduction)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 12, 2004

"The Sparkling-Eyed Boy is so full of color and light and life." -- Brad Land, author of Goat

The theme of summer love, in Amy Benson's hands, grows up: The Sparkling-Eyed Boy searches out the fault lines of adult nostalgia and desire. The achingly intense adolescent summer days that Amy Benson and the sparkling-eyed boy spend together on the remote shores of the St. Mary's River of Michigan's Upper Peninsula are at the complex emotional center of The Sparkling-Eyed Boy. For her, summers meant returning from her home in Detroit to a three-month idyll on much-loved family land, owned for generations, and to a heady culture of teasing, testing local boys. For him, this land is the place he was born, where he'll later find work, marry, and stay: and she was the one he had loved.
"Can you pinpoint that moment? When you made a choice before you even knew that choosing was possible, or the terrifying nature of choices?" The Sparkling-Eyed Boy, with its heart-stoppingly erotic -- and yet wholly imagined -- scenes of illicit love, its searching riffs on love as possession, love as pain, reads like a friend's deepest secrets, shared.

“The Sparkling-Eyed Boy is so full of color and light and life. This is truth of the most profound sort; truth revealed in the artful and lyrical sensibility of Benson’s words and memory. She is dancing with us: not leading, but simply asking us to watch her move and take what we will. Benson shows us here what the memoir can and should do — destroy and resurrect itself over and over. Benson is doing exactly that.” — Brad Land, author of Goat

“The great pleasure and triumph of this memoir is Amy Benson’s ability to make the familiar new again as she explores the country of first love. Over and over I found myself surprised by the unexpected twists and turns, peaks and abysses, of her journey. And also by her lovely, fiercely intelligent prose.” — Margot Livesey, author of Criminals

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

While the words "what if" may be the most potent daydream triggers known to humanity, writers usually explore the road-not-taken in the format of fiction. Benson's Bakeless Prize-winning work of "creative nonfiction" comprises some 32 entries relating to the "sparkling-eyed boy" of her teen years, her first big love. What if she'd kept coming back to Upper Michigan to see him every summer? What if they'd become a real couple? What if they'd had sex? What if they'd married? So this is a memoir, then, of what did not happen. As such, it isn't so much about this boy, but about Benson's feelings and her pleasure in writing about them. At times, it's as if Benson is reading over her own shoulder, commenting on her own musings. She writes that she considered suicide once, but then rebukes herself: "This is bad ethics: I shouldn't let the people who will worry about me know this." After describing the boy's form as "thrown into relief" she adds, "what a beautiful phrase, 'thrown into relief.' " She's fond of the paradoxical pronouncement: "It is our own goodness that gives us the power to be terrible." Buried among these uninteresting musings are occasional moments of insight. A friend tells her, "You're pining for something; you're not really pining for him." Benson admits she's right, that she's pining because "it feels good to feel bad sometimes. So much better than feeling nothing." Readers may want a little more from a book, however.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

In this rather self-absorbed, obsessive reworking of her first experience with love, Benson recounts her childhood summers spent on the Upper Peninsula (UP) in Michigan, where she met the sparkling-eyed boy, who lived there year-round. Although she never tells us his name, she precisely details his physical appearance, their halting conversations, and their every encounter from the first moment they met diving off a country dock. She tells of the fraught relationship between UPers and summer residents, who often vied over who had a deeper sense of place. More often, she dithers over the fact that he has married, as though she expected him always to be there, waiting for her. Her memoir is filled with an aching yearning and tinged with an eroticism that seem out of all proportion to the innocent relationship they shared as adolescents. Yet her unseemly obsession also works as a remarkably candid disclosure of what it feels like to be young and in love for the first time. Winner of a prize for creative nonfiction from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, this is a provocative, intense read. Joanne Wilkinson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books; None edition (May 12, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 061843321X
• ISBN-13: 978-0618433216
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,034,092 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars amazing book, June 28, 2004

By 

Brad Garton (Roosevelt, NJ USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Sparkling-Eyed Boy: A Memoir of Love, Grown Up (Paperback)

"The Sparkling-eyed Boy" inhabits the same reserved space in my
personal text-map as Billy Collins' poetry. Or imagine David Eggars
in his more lyrical moments. Benson manages to take plain language
and do wonderfully beautiful things with it. This is from the end,
describing life/personhood/existence:

"That is my problem: I have been looking shard by shard, but stand
back and I will have the whole, fluid mosaic. But I'm afraid there
is no perspective from which we can view every angle of a moment, a
year, a life, or the life of another. And there is no answer if I
have to answer the question myself."

Yikes! This hits exactly right! When I am at a loss for words, the
best I can do is quote from people much more skilled with language.
Benson has given me a lot to say. :-)

This is a 'small' but big book, read it carefully. This is not to
say that it's difficult to read, more that the prose has subtle
but significant power. Maybe my sense of this comes with particular
resonances with my own life -- I also recall midwestern lake summers --
but Benson makes these personal memories relevant in a way that should
intersect with anyone reading her book. It's most worthy of the
Katharine Nason Prize. I'm really looking forward to reading
Benson's future work.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A lyrical and dazzling book, June 19, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: The Sparkling-Eyed Boy: A Memoir of Love, Grown Up (Paperback)

This is truly a wonderful book. Each of its sections is a lyrical essay on place, time, the burden of choice and the elusive nature of personal identity. Not a page goes by without a line or two of startling beauty and truth. Also, for someone who has experienced the part of America where lakes are seas and forests stretch north to the Artic Circle, reading "The Sparkling-eyed Boy" was a bittersweet reminder of that dazzling land.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars smart, sad, strange, June 7, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: The Sparkling-Eyed Boy: A Memoir of Love, Grown Up (Paperback)

This is a beautiful book. It's much different from Ted Conover's books (he selected it for a prize), which are terrific but more journalistic. SEB is a very personal story, told through a series of chapters or essays (and occasional fantasies) that don't necessarily follow one to the other. While I wouldn't necessarily say that this is an "experimental" book, it's definitely playing with the "normal" way of writing a memoir. After awhile you understand that a larger story is unfolding, but that it's about much more than just Benson's first love. It's about a place and time that has become mythical for her as she's grown up and away from the people and places that formed her. It makes me think of my own brief summers at the Jersey Shore, a place I haven't been back to in years but that I still remember in a strangely sad, hazy way as having been important. It seems like a particularly American story to me, where class and mobility and property and wealth and education are all tangled up and it's difficult to know where you fit in or where you'll end up or why. A complex, lovely book.