My Childhood in Pieces

“My Childhood in Pieces reads like remembering itself. Hirsch recounts ‘50s-‘60s suburban Chicago through bursts of memory, dialogue, jokes, stray images, doctored wedding pictures, no one in homeroom listening to announcements, your age in relation to the construction of the Edens Expressway, etc. It’s a lot of fun, gathering steam with a poignance that wallops.” —Chicago Tribune

“This pithy, poignant memoir . . . immortalizes a bygone world in a colorful mosaic of vignettes, jokes, and reflections. The Jewish community of Hirsch’s mid-century youth is vividly evoked. . . . Though cut with loss, the book has a madcap spirit; reading it feels like hearing family stories volleyed across a dinner table where even the ghosts are chiming in with their own versions of events.” —The New Yorker

“Mr. Hirsch subtitles his memoir “A Stand-Up Comedy, a Skokie Elegy,” and he hits both notes. . . . The story unfolds in an almost pointillist style, in snippets of recollections, some only a sentence or two long. The result is a sprawling narrative peopled by an eccentric crew of relatives and friends and quickened with an array of setbacks, successes, disappointments and cruelties told with wit and a few regrets. . . . The comedy flows throughout, as Mr. Hirsch describes people and relates events in a straightforward, deadpan style.” —The Wall Street Journal

“My Childhood in Pieces is a hilarious poignant memoir by a wonderful, generous writer. . . . It’s a collection of the broken pieces, scraps of Hirsch’s youth that he has summoned and arranged for the smelter of the reader’s imagination. . . . The project is to bring the past alive, piece by piece, scene by scene, and for the reader to experience it through young Edward’s eyes, to feel and understand how place, milieu, culture and family shaped him. . . . The book sustains its humor, clarity and smarts, as well as the integrity of its form.” —The Washington Post

“Hirsch recounts his rough-and-tumble Chicago and Skokie childhood in ingeniously distilled comedic bits. . . . Wisecracks, mischief, trouble, arguments, cruelties, absurdities, and deceit are all delivered with a stand-up comic’s precision and a poet’s gift for exhilarating and droll wordplay. This card-slapping, dice-rolling, nimbly riffing, heart-wrenching remembrance is glorious in its pain and love, humor and wonder.” —Booklist (starred review)

“Amazingly original. . . . It’s an aphoristic autobiography that reads like a stand-up routine but feels like a series of Kafkaesque punchlines in pursuit of a perfect pierogi. There is something dizzying and delightful about his presentation here—a book-length series of brief prose vignettes (usually running anywhere between two to 10 lines) that relate Hirsch’s childhood and family history in Skokie, IL. Told with such exuberance, precision, and wit, each vignette feels almost like a perfect poem or piece of eternity. [My Childhood in Pieces] is so charming and compulsively readable that readers will find it hard to put down.” —Library Journal (starred review)

“The triumph of My Childhood in Pieces is that it is able to capture a specific Jewish American experience not only in content but also in form. . . quick, dead­pan. . . yet concentrated with life. . . . Perhaps the microchapter that best serves as an ars poetica is “Conversation with My Mother”: “My mother was heating a can of chicken soup on the stove. ‘You really shouldn’t make fun of me,’ I said, ‘you’re my mother.’ She barely turned her head. ‘Don’t be so sure, kid.’” . . . My Childhood in Pieces commemorates a family’s survival with the same tough love used to survive it.” —Jewish Book Council

“Hirsch shares memories of his Illinois upbringing in fragmentary bursts . . . A mosaic of the author’s coming-of-age among a large Jewish family in the 1950s and ’60s. . . readers will be rewarded by this evocative family portrait.” —Publishers Weekly

“Bada bing, bada boom! Hirsch . . . channels the voices and personalities of his Chicagoland Jewish childhood to create a memoir composed of jokes and short vignettes, one setup-and-punchline after another . . . sometimes silly, sometimes off-color, often Yiddish-flavored, with a penchant for puns and dad jokes that never quits. . . . A unique recreation of a great life in a largely vanished world!” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“An intimate series of sparkling snapshots—delving into Hirsch’s history feels like getting caught eavesdropping with your ear stuck to the wall.” —Catherine Cohen, author of God I Feel Modern Tonight, actor/comedian and co-host of the podcast “Seek Treatment”

“For decades, Edward Hirsch has wielded one of American poetry’s most unforgettable voices. To have him apply his big brain and wicked wit to a memoir is a major literary event. Hirsch mines his upbringing with both the verve of David Sedaris and the literary pedigree Joyce brought to his portrait of the artist as a young man. Part standup, part wail from the bowels of Skokie, My Childhood in Pieces is an instant classic. Buy this book!” —Mary Karr, author of Cherry, The Liar’s Club