Phoenix: A Brother’s Life

A memoir of impeccable beauty–funny, sad, wise–about brotherhood, family, and the domestic arc of American life since the shiny-bright fifties.

At the edge of the desert, in Los Angeles, J.D. Dolan grew up in the postwar boom of hopeful plenty, in a family not unlike those everyone watched on TV: Mom at home, Dad at work, the kids tantalized by teenage freedoms and adult responsibilities. The youngest of five, J.D.–Jay–found a second set of parents in his oldest brother and sister, whose great advantage was in being far cooler. John, in particular, was his hero, teaching him to fish and shoot, to ride motorcycles, to want to be a grown-up, a soldier, a man.

Such dreams aren’t made to come true, or not for long. Despite all this glorious promise, the Dolans were eventually battered by silence, resentment, misdirection, and, years later, by John’s death in a horrific explosion. In re-creating both expectant childhood and adult regret, Dolan confronts and redeems his family’s complications and failures, and grants literary permanence to a personal history–at once elusive, distressing, and magical–at the heart of the American dream. “This book rises from the ashes,” Mary Karr has written, “and takes a reader with it.”