When I saw Steve Rushin’s 2017 memoir Sting-Ray Afternoons, I wondered why the world needed the childhood memories of a gen-X white writer guy from Minnesota. Being a gen-X white writer guy from Minnesota, of course, I devoured it — and laughed more often than at any book since The Last Catholic in America.
Recognition played a part, no doubt; Rushin even went to a Catholic grade school with almost the same name as my own Catholic grade school, just ten miles to the northeast. Most of all, though, what made Sting-Ray Afternoons work is what makes any memoir work: an eye for the bridge between specific details (his five-kid family refer to themselves as “one redhead and four shitheads”) and the broader picture.
Rushin’s style, to which he returns in the new sequel Nights in White Castle, is to repeatedly telescope back and forth between his own life and the broader forces shaping the American experience.
I reviewed Nights in White Castle for The Tangential.
