SINK

A gritty memoir of a childhood spent at the bottom of the food chain.

"Of all the protagonists in this story—both real and imagined—just Joey, the boy, owned an Easy-Bake Oven." In his debut, Thomas announces his unusual approach to memoir in the first sentence: written in third person and including both real and imagined characters. Among the real ones are Popop, Joey's grandfather, and Ganny, who is "better than [Joey's] mother, Keisha, because at least she didn’t smoke crack or do it with men for money in front of the kids…even if he saw her as too much a cross between a punching bag and a robot.” In addition to the violence, chaos, and slovenliness of Joey's home in the Frankford neighborhood of Philadelphia, there were the cockroaches—and they are everywhere, floating up in the cereal bowl, falling from the ceiling, crawling into his sleeping little sister's ear to bite through her eardrum. As for the imagined characters, the author writes about Goku, the monkey boy from Dragon Ball Z—"among the first people, or things, that Joey wished to be rather than deal with his own inadequate body"—and there were many more, as video games provided the only relief in Joey's life from the infinitely repeated lesson that "human survival dictated that a lot of people got hurt for other people to feel good and alive." At least with video games, he was the one doing the beating and killing, the one who got to feel good and alive. Maybe Thomas chose to write in third person as a way of buffering the misery and cruelty recounted here, but in a first-person narrative of a terrible childhood, the sheer persistence of the I can imply redemption.

It takes rare courage to tell a story this harsh and unredeemed. Thank God for video games.