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John Grogan guest blogs!
2009 at 8pm Posted by Rebecca Joines Schinsky
About this time last year, I stayed up late one night to finish John Grogan’s memoir The Longest Trip Home. As I sobbed my way through its final chapters, grateful that my husband was no longer awake to tease me for my emotional reaction to a book, I realized I was finishing one of the best books of the year. The Longest Trip Home left an impression I won’t soon forget, and I am thrilled to welcome John Grogan to guest post here at The Book Lady’s Blog.
Marley & Me was my first book, and as I was working on it during the early morning hours before heading off to my columnist job at the Philadelphia Inquirer, I kept asking myself that burning question all first-time authors ask (or should ask): “Who on earth is going to want to read this thing, anyway?” I believed in the story and my ability to tell it, but it was so personal – the story of my wife Jenny and me starting out as newlyweds with a joyously uncontrollable dog at our side – that I had to wonder if readers would find their way to it. As it turns out, millions discovered Marley & Me, and it became a bestseller and a movie.
And that led to another question, asked by just about everyone I bumped into: “So, what next? How do you possibly follow a phenomenon like that?” Fortunately for me I knew what my second book would be long before Marley & Me was published. In fact, as I was writing Marley & Me, I kind of considered it the warm-up act for the bigger story I knew I was meant to tell: a story very close to my heart because it is about a family very close to my heart. The Longest Trip Home is the story of my childhood, my family, and my journey into adulthood to find my place in the world.
I guess I should start by saying what The Longest Trip Home is not, and that is a misery memoir. So many autobiographical stories detail, even celebrate, horrendous childhoods filled with abuse and neglect and all sorts of deprivation and depravity; mine is not one of them. I grew up in a big, boisterous, loving Irish-Catholic family outside Detroit. My parents loved God, each other, and their four children. Family and faith were what mattered most to them, and they threw themselves into both with admirable zeal. They enrolled us in the Catholic school, made sure we received all the sacraments, decked out the house like a religious-supplies store, and made sure we knew our catechism. We even took summer vacations to holy miracle sites – and somehow managed to have fun in the process.
But like all families, ours had its One Big Issue, and that was the question of religion and faith. My parents were convinced their most important role in life was to raise their children as lifelong, practicing, unquestioning Catholics. My siblings and I, to varying degrees, had other ideas. Religion is supposed to be a healing salve, but in our family it served as the wedge that would divide parent and child. At a young age, I realized I wasn’t quite getting with the good-Catholic-boy program, and with each year I felt a growing disconnect from my parents’ beliefs. Mom and Dad were children of the Depression rooted in a very traditional, some might even say medieval, interpretation of faith; I was being pulled by the social upheaval of the 1960s and early 70s, by Hendrix and Woodstock – and girls in hip-hugger jeans. It made for nearly nonstop comical clashes of values under our snug suburban roof.
And yet I was one of those sons who did not want to disappoint my parents. I knew how important their faith was to them. It wasn’t my faith, but I misled them to think otherwise. Mine was more a deception of omission than commission. I simply allowed them to believe what they wanted to believe about their youngest son. As it turned out, their bountiful blind faith applied to their children as well.
As I was pondering how best to tell this story, I kept returning to a basic three-part structure. My life as a Grogan seemed to fall into three distinct categories: the child growing up firmly attached to my parents’ gravitational pull; the young adult who, with my very un-Catholic wife at my side, finally found the willpower to break free of my parents’ orbit; and the journey to find my way back home again, back to my parents’ embrace, to fix what I long knew was broken while there was still time. I let the book follow this natural division, breaking it into three parts: Growing Up; Breaking Away; Coming Home.
When I was ready to begin writing in earnest, I began with an act of resignation. Literally. I quit my job as a columnist at the Philadelphia Inquirer to work fulltime on my memoir. It was a decision I thought long and hard about. Once earlier in my career, I had walked away from my beloved newspaper column to explore a new job, and realized quickly how much I missed newspapers and column writing. But this time was different. This time I had a story to tell that was more important to me than any I had attempted before. I began rising early and spending long days at my laptop, often while squirreled away in the library at Lehigh University near my home in Pennsylvania.
The process of writing The Longest Trip Home was a journey of discovery in its own right. I’m one of those people who cannot fully absorb or comprehend an experience until I write about it. The act of sorting through life experiences and plucking out those that are most meaningful is the first step of understanding. As I sorted and arranged those moments, examined and remembered them, placed them into context, and then searched for the words to describe them, I slowly saw the tapestry of my life coming into focus. The process was exhilarating, eye-opening, and at times emotionally exhausting. For the first time, I was able to connect the dots, identify the path, see the purpose. Writing this story was one of the most rewarding and fulfilling challenges of my career.
I tend to talk with my hands. And whenever I describe The Longest Trip Home, I find myself making big circles in the air because my journey really was just that. A circle that took me up and outward and far away, both literally and figuratively, from my parents and their values, but eventually brought me right back to where I began. The Longest Trip Home opens in my childhood home outside Detroit with one of my earliest memories – my practical-joker mother waking my brothers and me with a feather as she teased us about neighborhood girls she knew we detested. It ends right back in that same house forty years later with my now elderly parents in failing health and their “baby” a middle-aged father himself. I had grown up, moved on, pushed away, dug in. And eventually found my way back again, back to what matters most – home and family. In the end, I figured out that a family’s love will triumph over its differences if we only open our hearts and allow it to.
Thanks, Rebecca, for inviting me to write a guest post on your wonderful The Book Lady’s Blog. Your love for words and books and stories well told radiates off the page.
Embrace the journey!
John Grogan
Coopersburg, Pennsylvania
November 9, 2009
Visit John’s website and his blog to learn more.
The Longest Trip Home is available in paperback from HarperCollins.
Thanks to TLC Book Tours for arranging this guest post.
Full disclosure: I received an ARC of this book from the publisher last year, not in connection with this tour. I’m endorsing this book because I loved it.
No related posts.
Wonderful guest post! I loved The Longest Trip Home since I could relate to it so much. I’m about the same age as the author and my sister and I are having to help our parents more and more as they age.
I just read this book for the blog tour, and I really liked it. As a fellow non-practicing Catholic of roughly the same generation, there was a lot I could relate to, and I just enjoy John Grogan’s writing. So great to read his guest post!
Great post, I have added this book to my ‘to read’ list and think is will definitely jump a few in the cue. Thanks.
Wonderful post; I have dealt with the same issues in my life and can’t wait to read this book. Thank you!
A truly touching post. This book goes straight to my TBR list .
Gorgeous post! I have yet to read The Longest Trip Home, but it is most definitely going on my list. Thanks much!
Loved the book and loved this post. I grew up Catholic and rebelled against it too. We still have the best laughs about McMass (skipping mass in favor of an Egg McMuffin at McDonalds) and sneaking hamburgers on Good Friday. Oh, and how ’bout those crappy frozen fish sticks every single Friday night?
What fun to read this post after just finishing The Longest Trip Home. Reading it was like a trip down memory lane for me, growing up in the suburbs of Detroit in the 1960′s. And I especially enjoyed the book because it portrayed a happy family, and I think we all need to be reminded that can exist!
Great post, John! and great book
What a great guest post! I absolutely must get this book ASAP. Thanks, John!
[...] John Grogan guest blogged here on Tuesday, and then he made me squee at a decibel only dogs can hear when he posted about me on his blog. [...]
Adorei “Marley e eu”. Fiquei super emocionada. Tambem tive um cão muito louco. Ele desapareceu logo após a morte do meu marido; nunca soubemos o que aconteceu com ele. Sentimos muito a sua falta.