Charlie Pierce is a library. Ask him what New York Met hit the ground ball that slipped beneath Bill Buckner's glove in 1986, he'll tell you Mookie Wilson. Ask him what the name of John Lennon's first band was, he'll tell you the Quarrymen.
Combine his memory with his story-telling talent, and perhaps a bit of
those old Irish roots, and you have a writer of extraordinary ability.
Those who know him say Pierce has an innate talent for sculpting
everyday observations into astonishing stories. His talent has carried
him all the way to Esquire and GQ.
"I think Charlie is probably as fine a writer of sentences of anyone
I've ever met," says David Granger, Pierce's editor at Esquire. "Part of
that is that his mind, his brain, is a repository of a vast store of knowledge.
And he's able to call that up and bring in references, both obscure and
relevant, that just enrich his raw writing ability."
Now Pierce has written a memoir called "Hard
To Forget: An Alzheimer's Story", due out on April 25. It is the
story of Pierce's father's slow slump into a land of forgetfulness and
confusion.
It is the story of Pierce's own denials and fears. And it is the story
of genetic scientists battling to find the causes and a cure for a disease
that affects 4 million Americans and their families.
The genesis of the story came from an article Pierce wrote
about his own family's journey through Alzheimer's Disease. Not only did his
father die of the disease, but so did three of his uncles, and now his aunt
has it.
Pierce saw an opportunity for a book in his Esquire article. But he
didn't want to write just another maudlin memoir that would sit between "'Tis" and "The Rock Says" on bookstore shelves. Pierce put some good old reporting into "Hard to Forget."
"The journalist in me doesn't believe that you should write memoirs
just for catharsis," Pierce says. "If I could combine the first element with
the research into the disease, that way I could make a compelling story out
of it without being gushy."
During the four years of his father's illness, Pierce, like his mother,
remained aloof. He refused to confront the manifestations of Alzheimer's,
and so left it to his wife to make sure his father was safe and taken
care of. He says writing "Hard To Forget" forced him to tackle his own
reaction to his father's diminishing character.
"My dad sort of went flat," Pierce explains. "The difficult part was
realizing after he was dead that I hadn't dealt with it very well. If
grandma has cancer she may be skinny, but she's still grandma. With
Alzheimer's, the person is just gone. The manifestations of the disease
were difficult to take."
The hard-boiled Irish secrecy of Pierce's family made it especially
difficult to deal with the disease. When his father's trip to a florist
in central Massachusetts landed him in upstate Vermont, it was clear to
Pierce that this wasn't the first time his father's sensibilities had lapsed.
His mother eventually told him about his father putting on two pairs of
pants, or buying the same candy dish twice in two days. But Pierce still
refused to confront it, just as his mother chose to ignore it.
"I hope people pick up the book and see that this is the way this
family did it. It doesn't have to wreck the whole family."
Pierce suggests that one reason he feels compelled to write may be the
secrecy of his family. He says writing is a revelatory process; he
tells stories to rebel against his hold-everything-in family tradition. He
also writes because he can't help himself — it's in his blood.
Pierce remembers his grandmother telling him the story of when she went to see John
Stewart Parnell give a speech in the Irish city of Listowel and it
erupted in riot. In her story, Pierce smelled the tobacco smoke, the
poteen whiskey and the wet wool of a hundred overcoats.
"Pete Hamill says that the best thing that reporters do, is we are the
storytellers for the clan," Pierce says. "Ultimately I want to tell
stories because my grandmother had a wonderful time doing it."
The storyteller in Irish tradition is called the seanchai. Like Pierce's grandmother, the seanchai passes on stories orally from one generation to the next. Pierce's talent with words seems so innate, his editor believes he is a descendant of that Irish story-telling tradition.
"There's something of the poet — this incredible heritage that has come
down through hundreds of generations of Irishmen — that has found a
place in Charlie," David Granger says. "It just flows out of him."
Of course, Pierce now could have an entirely different inheritance
coursing through his veins. It could render the seanchai mute.
(For a review of "Hard to Forget," see below)
