The Trouble with Being Born

“The Trouble with Being Born evokes the constricted egotism and materialistic desperation of America’s mid-century. The DeShell family seems incomprehensible, spilling out everywhere as romantic fragments, bourgeois myths, the bric-a-brac of blocked transcendence and dogged calculations. I emerged from the reading with a powerful sense of words struggling, like the characters themselves, to organize contradictions into a life.”

—R. M. Berry

“In his fourth book, Jeffrey DeShell takes on the challenge of writing from inside those familiar strangers whose lives led to his own: his parents. The elegant formal structure of The Trouble with Being Born organizes a thoughtful, heartfelt, and extraordinarily visual (indeed, sensual) querying of histories, subjectivities, and the narrative shapes we give to our lives.”

—Laura Mullen