Lessons and Carols
A review of John West's fragmented memoir on addiction, mental health, recovery, and early fatherhood
And now, for something completely different!
I interrupt this depressing monthly newsletter to write about something other than myself, for once. I know this is called Levi’s Lost Thoughts and all, but every now and then, it’s nice to forget you exist and focus on something else other than your own interior self. Dare I say, um, healthy?
Recently had the chance to read an advanced review copy of John West’s Memoir, Lessons and Carols, which came out on May 1st. As it deals with addiction, mental health issues, and early fatherhood, I couldn’t think of a better book to review for this Substack! I mean, that’s basically all I write about in my creative nonfiction work (and what I struggle with personally on a daily basis, hooray!)
The author, John West, is writer and technologist for the Wall Street Journal where his work has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and won multiple awards. He also holds degrees in music and philosophy and lives in Boston with his partner and daughter.
Here’s how the book jacket describes Lessons and Carols:
“Lessons and Carols is a genre-bending memoir that explores the aftershocks of alcoholism and mental illness through a fresh look at the powers of poetry, ritual, and community. As a new parent, West grapples with his own fragmented recovery and grief for the friends he lost to addiction, asking if anyone can really change, or if we are always bound to repeat the past. Echoing the form of a traditional Anglican Christmas service of stories and songs, West’s lyrical prose invites readers into an unorthodox rendition of the liturgy called Lessons and Carols. Each December, a faithful circle of irreligious friends assembles to eat and sing and re-imagine an old story about love made flesh. In that gathering’s glow, resentments turn to quiet wonder at the ways a better world can appear.”
What I enjoyed most about Lessons and Carols is how it’s told via the use of literary fragments. If you are looking for a clear line between cause and effect, A-Z storytelling, you will not find it in Lessons and Carols. The book is united more by theme and tone than chronology or a desire to show causation. This is purposeful of course, as non-linear storytelling is often a more accurate mimesis of life.
As West says in a piece on LitHub, about exploring his creative process behind Lesson and Carols:
“I wanted it to be fragmented because I didn’t want to allow me or my future readers to be swept up by the verisimilitude and mistake it for reality; I wanted them to know I was eliding. I chose nonlinearity because I wanted to respect the way life—messy and shifting—ignores time, wanders back through memory and reaches out into the future.”
Reading West’s work reminded me of a fatal flaw in my own attempt to write a memoir: My overwhelming need to explain everything so people would really understand me (part of my need as an Enneagram 4). If I was telling you about a church I was a part of, or a girl in the eighth grade I was interested in, I’d start writing a ton of backstory and felt this urgent desire that in order for you to understand THAT, you first needed to understand THIS. West’s memoir reminded me that it’s okay to have gaps for the reader to fill in (even if it still leaves one with some questions). Some in writing call this the iceberg approach—where there’s more below the surface than above.
Memoirs are all about “memories” of course and memories are not reliable. Our memories themselves are fragmented and not chronological. Still, I often found myself wondering, how does John reconcile his youthful atheism with what appears to be an intense interest in religion and then one day the turn to suddenly calling himself a Christian? When did he first get diagnosed with bi-polar episode? How does he stay sober? What was it like growing up queer in the church? What are the life lessons we can take away from this memoir?
Lessons and Carols, a “meditation on recovery” often leaves the reader with more questions than answers. How does one achieve recovery? Why do some make it but others don’t? How are you supposed to reconcile those lost to addiction with any sort of happy ending? But that’s how life is of course. It’s anything but tidy.
John West’s memoir blends the religious with the literary poetic, a for-some-reason-uncommon-but-sorely-missing-genre-of-writing in today’s world. I could see how Lessons and Carols would be off putting to both the religious conservatives and the secular literary, or even the non-literary memoir crowd, but I think it’s hybrid work worth grappling with and applicable to all.
I enjoyed how West is always after the bigger questions in Lessons and Carols. As he writes in one section:
"I can’t remember the other theological fault line—something about what the communion bread and wine really turn into. These kinds of arguments seem impossibly far away, trivial, seen through the back end of a set of binoculars. I can’t get worked up about them. No, what I want to get worked up about are the big things. I want to get worked up about God. About greatness and art.”
I enjoyed reading a work that sidesteps the more obvious questions and plot arc of the memoir genre. Part of me would like to have interviewed John for this post, and yet, another part of me thinks the book stands for itself, that all those basic questions and chronology might be besides the point and belittle the grand mystery of it all.
As someone who also thinks a lot about form and structure of writing, how to make it work, etc., I also found the way West put together his memoir to be rather fascinating:
“Lessons and Carols is built from 163 present-tense fragments, a couple only a sentence long, a few stretching for several pages, most somewhere in between. Each fragment is constructed from a blend of materials. 65 of them contain a quotation from another book. 79 of them contain one of my motifs—like blackberries or birds, to name a couple. 26 of them are written around the theme of parenthood. 78 around addiction and mental health. 38 around loss. And 21 are written around my yearly heterodox reenactments of the Episcopalian Christmas tradition called the Nine Lessons and Carols …I wanted my book to feel like this because this is how my life feels: full of structure and meaning and order, but graspable only if you give up on the idea that things move from beginning to middle to end tidily.”1
God, I love that. It’s something that’s bothered me for so long. How movies and books search for a “tidy” meaning when it’s anything but. That’s not to say everything is meaningless and fatalistic—like I used to think in my twenties—but just that the meaning we find in our lives is harder to come by. And in the end, that’s what good art does or attempts to do—make meaning out of life, even if it’s a bit fragmented and not at all tidy.
Lessons and Carols is available now: https://bookshop.org/p/books/lessons-and-carols-a-meditation-on-recovery-john-west/18707357?ean=9780802882493
https://lithub.com/time-and-materials-on-the-art-of-the-experimental-memoir/
As I’m working on a fictional yet barely fictional book, essentially a memoir that I don’t have to get all the facts entirely correct- I find the idea is something like this fascinating and realizing all the plot holes don’t have to be neat and tidy, my life (and everyone’s) is anything but. Thanks for sharing!
Thanks to Cassie Maines Murray for sharing (ReStacking!) your post. Your description of the way “Lessons and Carols” is put together reminds me of “My Bright Abyss” by Christian Wiman. If you’ve read it, would you agree? I myself have been experimenting on a very small scale with lyrical narrative, braiding life, poetry (and poetic nonfiction), and science/nature. I’m interested to see another example of a longer piece—and of course, the content sounds important and interesting too.