I Love Rick Bragg

I love Rick Bragg.

I just finished listening to him read the latest book in his autobiographical series, The Prince of Frogtown, and I gotta say I love Rick Bragg. He writes so well, so evocatively that I was torn, caught in an emotional cyclone as I listened. I laughed (at the part of the story that started "There are no happy endings to stories that begin with the phrase 'then we found a case of dynamite' I very nearly had to pull off the road for safety's sake) and I cried. I also had a monster case of penvy.

This third book circles back to his first, the extraordinary All Over but the Shouting, and fills in the gap in that motherloving memoir tour de force by telling the story of his father. Bragg was inspired to do this by his father's death but more significantly by his own late in life marriage and the stepfatherhood it brought. When a man gets a boy of his own he thinks of the boy he was and one cannot do that and not consider his father. So he went on a journey and used the journalistic skills that won him a Pulitizer Prize to get to know the man he did not know, except for a few brief memories, in life.

I, for one, am astonished at his bravery. His family, and his career (at least in part), had been built around one telling of his life. To dare to tear that all down, to make the monster who loomed so large instead a small, flawed man must have taken a load of guts. What he discovered and how he learned how to love differently makes for a gripping listen. Yeah, I know he's married, yeah, I know he lives 5 states away and yeah, I got a big ole soft spot for Southern boys with accents who love their mommas but I gotta say I love Rick Bragg.