The Sparkling-Eyed Boy: A Memoir of Love, Grown Up

By Amy Benson

Book Overview

The Sparkling-Eyed Boy is so full of color and light and life. -- Brad Land, author of Goat

The theme of summer love, in Amy Benson's hands, grows up: The Sparkling-Eyed Boy searches out the fault lines of adult nostalgia and desire. The achingly intense adolescent summer days that Amy Benson and the sparkling-eyed boy spend together on the remote shores of the St. Mary's River of Michigan's Upper Peninsula are at the complex emotional center of The Sparkling-Eyed Boy. For her, summers meant returning from her home in Detroit to a three-month idyll on much-loved family land, owned for generations, and to a heady culture of teasing, testing local boys. For him, this land is the place he was born, where he'll later find work, marry, and stay: and she was the one he had loved.
Can you pinpoint that moment? When you made a choice before you even knew that choosing was possible, or the terrifying nature of choices? The Sparkling-Eyed Boy, with its heart-stoppingly erotic -- and yet wholly imagined -- scenes of illicit love, its searching riffs on love as possession, love as pain, reads like a friend's deepest secrets, shared.

"The Sparkling-Eyed Boy is so full of color and light and life. This is truth of the most profound sort; truth revealed in the artful and lyrical sensibility of Benson's words and memory. She is dancing with us: not leading, but simply asking us to watch her move and take what we will. Benson shows us here what the memoir can and should do -- destroy and resurrect itself over and over. Benson is doing exactly that." -- Brad Land, author of Goat

"The great pleasure and triumph of this memoir is Amy Benson's ability to make the familiar new again as she explores the country of first love. Over and over I found myself surprised by the unexpected twists and turns, peaks and abysses, of her journey. And also by her lovely, fiercely intelligent prose." -- Margot Livesey, author of Criminals

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 061843321X
• ISBN13: 9780618433216
• Release Date: May 2004
• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Length: 179 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.4" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

My "best of all"

Someone recently asked me my favorite book of all time, and i said this one!! I know, that may sound "shallow," as in why didnt i choose some classic, something much longer, or a much 'harder read.' This book just moved me, stayed with me, and has the largest amount of wonderful quotes that i refer back to time and time again. I guess i'm a romantic, but i love the style of writing, and i also had a summer home 'at the shore,' and can SO relate. I keep this book to re-read, and have given copies to friends. I think every woman who has loved a man, needs to read it. Treat yourself!!

There are good things here for you

It is maybe surprising, considering the comparatively few people that live above the Mackinac Bridge in Michigan, that there have been a bunch of books by younger writers in the last few years about and from Michigan's Upper Peninsula (mostly poetry--see Catie Rosemurgy, Cynie Cory, Jonathan Johnson, and Beth Roberts, for starters). This is--as far as I know--the only recent memoir about the place, and it's more a sort of extended meditation than a memoir proper. Still, it is lovely and engrossing. She's conscious of herself as a tourist (both of the place and of the boy, and of her own memories, even), and this is a tour I think you'll want to take with her. Be aware that it does take some liberties with the form (it's absolutely lyrical and likely nearly poetry at times, as the reviews above allude to--and it's not exactly a memoir of things that happened), but this book is rich and good and well worth your time.

amazing book

"The Sparkling-eyed Boy" inhabits the same reserved space in mypersonal text-map as Billy Collins' poetry. Or imagine David Eggarsin his more lyrical moments. Benson manages to take plain languageand do wonderfully beautiful things with it. This is from the end,describing life/personhood/existence:"That is my problem: I have been looking shard by shard, but standback and I will have the whole, fluid mosaic. But I'm afraid thereis no perspective from which we can view every angle of a moment, ayear, a life, or the life of another. And there is no answer if Ihave to answer the question myself."Yikes! This hits exactly right! When I am at a loss for words, thebest I can do is quote from people much more skilled with language.Benson has given me a lot to say. :-)This is a 'small' but big book, read it carefully. This is not tosay that it's difficult to read, more that the prose has subtlebut significant power. Maybe my sense of this comes with particularresonances with my own life -- I also recall midwestern lake summers --but Benson makes these personal memories relevant in a way that shouldintersect with anyone reading her book. It's most worthy of theKatharine Nason Prize. I'm really looking forward to readingBenson's future work.

A lyrical and dazzling book

This is truly a wonderful book. Each of its sections is a lyrical essay on place, time, the burden of choice and the elusive nature of personal identity. Not a page goes by without a line or two of startling beauty and truth. Also, for someone who has experienced the part of America where lakes are seas and forests stretch north to the Artic Circle, reading "The Sparkling-eyed Boy" was a bittersweet reminder of that dazzling land.

smart, sad, strange

This is a beautiful book. It's much different from Ted Conover's books (he selected it for a prize), which are terrific but more journalistic. SEB is a very personal story, told through a series of chapters or essays (and occasional fantasies) that don't necessarily follow one to the other. While I wouldn't necessarily say that this is an "experimental" book, it's definitely playing with the "normal" way of writing a memoir. After awhile you understand that a larger story is unfolding, but that it's about much more than just Benson's first love. It's about a place and time that has become mythical for her as she's grown up and away from the people and places that formed her. It makes me think of my own brief summers at the Jersey Shore, a place I haven't been back to in years but that I still remember in a strangely sad, hazy way as having been important. It seems like a particularly American story to me, where class and mobility and property and wealth and education are all tangled up and it's difficult to know where you fit in or where you'll end up or why. A complex, lovely book.