Book Review: If I Knew Then What I Know Now
What Is It: A collection of short essays about being gay, coming out, moving from a small town to the city, family life, and much more.
How I Found It: I’ll start this off by saying that I never planned to form any type of investment in works of Non-Fiction. In fact, I’ve cemented myself pretty damn firmly in the “YA novelist” arena, and this tends to be where most of my focus is directed (and so it tends to make up the majority of what I read). But when I was forced by my university last year to take a Creative Non Fiction class, everything changed--and fast. I found out I actually really liked writing essays and that I sort of had a knack for it. This new found passion and the fact that I was graduating had me on the hunt to read my professors’ works before I left, and so I stumbled upon this: Ryan Van Meter’s If You Knew Then What I Know Now.
First Impression: Van Meter is as charming on paper as he is in person. This is, of course, cheating; most people reading this review won’t have the privilege of meeting Van Meter in person, let alone the privilege of sitting in his class once a week. With that said, the book speaks for itself: the voice is loud, unique, and jumps off the page, sure, but it also feels trustworthy and painfully, terribly honest. Creative nonfiction is hard to play safe--or at least, if you play it safe, it tends not to be as good--but Van Meter has gone above and beyond, writing these essays with his heart on his sleeve, so you feel like you’ve made a new best friend, someone who has sat you down to confess their heart out, and it’s an honor to lend an ear.
The Quick Summary: Growing up gay in the midwest will always be its own unique form of a “coming of age” tale--we’ve all heard it before, and yet each story is unique and, if done right, feels brand new. Alternatively: learning about other people’s lives somehow reveals a lot more about ourselves, and in the hands of a good writer, even the simplest moments feel important.
Favorite Quote: “Hope is a goldfish in a plastic bag of water: the weight of the bag in your hands, how the cold bundle must be cradled to prevent jostling the poor creature inside; the transparency of the bag, how white your hands look through the water, the plastic wrinkles that gather around the ridges of your fingers; the goldfish itself, which isn’t really gold, or just gold--it bobs around and if you’re driving home from the fish store, riding beside your roommate, there’s the inevitable moment when the fish will ease into his surroundings, float to the bottom of the bag resting in the warm palm of your hand, and as the car rounds a curve, you feel the flutter of his translucent tail against your skin through the plastic.”
What It Can Tell Us About Writing: Start with an image. A single word. What comes to mind, and where can that lead? Van Meter starts with the concrete and then spans outward, letting a single moment lead us in a dozen different directions. What I learned is this: when you’re stuck, pick anything--whether it’s in the room beside you or just in your memory--and start describing; soon enough, associations come, and by the time you’ve word vommited on paper, you’ll be able to go back and refine it, to find the common threads between each anecdote and begin crafting. But it all starts with a single image.
Trigger Warnings: Homophobic Language (Not said by the author but to the author).
