8: A Memoir

By Amy Fusselman

Counterpoint Press, $17.00

Amy Fusselman's second book 8, just like her first work The Pharmacist's Mate, packs an amazing amount of brutal, funny revelation into 90 minutes of breezy reading. Her tools, wielded with total confidence, are nonchalant, ironic humor, her own life as a mother, hipster, and survivor of childhood rape, and potent metaphors involving a monster truck called Grave Digger and an aging Beastie Boy called Adrock. Fusselman arrived on the lit scene when she won a contest in darling local humor mag McSweeney's, which called, preciously, for works dealing with electrical engineering on boats. She submitted part of what would become The Pharmacist's Mate, a memoir about her struggle to get pregnant while her father was dying that tangentially involved her father's experience as a pharmacist's assistant on a World War II Navy boat. The resulting work was a slim, unassuming memoir that managed to be both goofy and heartrending, a book that many people have started reading again immediately upon completing.

Fusselman's new book is rather less focused than Pharmacist's Mate, but no less powerful — or goofy. 8 finds her living in Manhattan with two kids, and while most of the narrative, recounted in nonlinear mini-chapters, is about raising her children and learning to ride a motorcycle, the book's purpose and backbone is her adult struggle to break free from the man she calls "my pedophile."

Fusselman is nothing if not deadpan (her one-liners are frequent and virile), but her blunt sentences hit like flower pots to the skull — she describes her experiences as a parent, spouse, one-time figure skater, and victim of child rape all in the same precise and dry voice. There is a sort of triumph in the way she doesn't allow the pedophile to make her break stride, even as she confronts and forgives him head on in the book's most devastating passage. Required reading for any fan of monster trucks, white-boy rap, or the small victories of the human spirit. — F.R.