As of tonight, the official book giveaway is officially live. It’s simple, if you are an Instagram user just search for @eddiebrophywriter and find my post about the contest. Share that post on your Instagram and make sure to tag me in it. You instantly qualify for the contest. To increase your odds of getting a free copy if you post about the book on Facebook or Twitter and share your screenshot? You are much more likely to get picked. What do you get? You will get a copy of the book; I’ll get to get rid of some of these damn magnets my wife bought for it and the option to have a copy signed. I know, I know…. too good to be true, right?
I am also going to start working my ass off to get these into local libraries in the area. I can’t emphasize enough; I just want the book to be read. I know this pandemic has been a nightmare for so many people, especially economically. I am so proud of this book and if there is an interest for it? I’d love to have every opportunity to just get it in people’s hands without them being unable to purchase one. So, check out my Instagram (its still public, for the time being) and lets just have fun with it. God knows, the world has enough scaring us so hopefully this can be something to take you out of it even if only for a short time. You know what else you can do? VOTE! Election day is November 3rd if you are a registered voter? Make sure you get out there and do your duty as an American citizen! Don’t let this glorified bully and dog shit human being scare you into thinking that you don’t have a constitutional right to vote his tyrannical ass out of a job he never deserved to have.
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Despite the Celtics being eliminated from the playoffs and my inability to comment to someone on Instagram without feeling like someone with dementia struggling to leave a comprehensible reply (I’m 33 and yet technology is something that completely baffles me)…this morning started off well. Ryder managed to sleep until five in the morning (yes, this is early but its not three or four a.m. early) and my wife made me “pigs in a blanket” for breakfast. I put this in quotes because what I was raised to call pigs in a blanket were created using breakfast sausages rather than hot dogs. I remember hosting a WrestleMania party in the first year of my wife and I dating and she asked me if I had any requests for snacks that night (my wife cooked and provided snacks that would have fed over thirty people despite their only being three people in attendance-this is her illness) and I said sure thing…”pigs in a blanket.”
When they were ready and she put them out on the table, I remember holding one up and looking at her with so much indignation and asking, “what the hell is this?” She just snickered “Uh, a pig in a blanket?” My oldest sister and I joke about this regularly. Any time she would host an event she would have a tray of “pigs in a blanket” which would baffle the shit out of anyone who came across it. Like I had experienced with my wife, my sister was frequently teased for trying to pass off a breakfast sandwich wrapped in cheese and a crescent roll off as a popular game day snack. In a sort of sad and pathetic way, we had rationalized that our parents had normalized pigs in a blanket being made this way even though it was not what it was believed to be. That has become the best analogy to describe our childhoods. We never questioned the authenticity of things, if we were told hey x = y then it was what it was. Does that make sense? I am still on Instagram. I must be careful with it. It can be a slippery slope. I can get a little post happy. I chock this up to a two-year absence of any social media and humans in general. I do interact with people, but primarily immediate family (which is small) the parents at my son’s school, and the small group of friends I frequently text with. Being the stay at home parent is pretty isolating though, then add a global pandemic and subsequent lock down and you tend to go a little stir crazy. I have a tendency to overthink literally everything I do, that becomes even more daunting with social media because I try to watch my language and my disgust with our current administration…but then I wind up cussing like a sailor and passionately writing diatribes about politicians and a glorified snake oil salesman. I think I’ll give it a certain amount of time with the promotional efforts for the book and then try to see where I’m at with it once I start to feel like alright, this thing (save for people outside of my bubble in the world) has reached as many people as its realistically going to…now the rest is all wishful thinking. Its hard not to be so pissed off about the state of the country and the complete lack of accountability shown by the decision makers who are touting things such as “law & order,” “family values,” and “religious freedom” as things this country is in desperate need of while they are breaking the law, stealing from the poor, engaging in deplorable behavior with staffers, and pandering to religious fanatics while laughing behind their back about what malleable and vapid idiots they are. I am somewhere in between being terrified about a potential doomsday scenario in which the country gets swallowed up in one giant explosion, and feeling a kind of backup generator of optimism kicking in and proudly owning today’s issue of the New York Times thinking this might be it for the quasi president of the divided states. If I start to get annoying on Instagram feel free to tell me. I have SO many god damn thoughts (is this a symptom of being bi-polar? No seriously, I don’t know if it’s because I’m crazy or isolation and being a stay at home parent has turned me into the excited dog when you come home after work) and frankly I know how insufferable it is to be around me…I’ve had to live with me for 33 years. God, how the hell does my wife do it? Alright. Total mind dump of a post. I was starting to feel anxious and didn’t want to post another three things on Instagram just to get this anxious can’t hold it in anymore flood of thoughts off my chest. How are you all? Everyone hanging in there. If you are reading this, take care of yourself and your family and its ok to feel like nothing is ok.
On Tuesday, it will be six years since his last words to me were "You're Crying, CALL YOUR MOTHER!" right before he slammed the phone down on me. I was trying to tell him that I loved him, and he was telling me he was not sorry for what he did. That one call I felt (at the time) was going to define the rest of my life. I believed it so much that I got so lost in alcohol and depression.
Then a little blonde boy who I believed was a nefarious specter reconnected me to another blonde boy. The one everyone thought haunted my house. He wasn't haunting us...he needed his doppelganger to know...kiddo, in the end? You are going to tell a very special story, and when you do? We all make it. I realized that my relationship with my father was going to kill me if I never had the opportunity to talk about it, ask others if they had similar experiences, but more importantly? Everyone deserves to know that their pain isn't weakness or should it be something someone exploits. Its you, pain cultivates but it doesn't define. I am reaching a point now where its a tale of two tunnels....
The one my father left me to climb out of....
and the one my son can't wait to slide down from.
I feel at peace knowing that I said what I had to say and that anyone is willing to read it. I am afraid, but god forbid...if you're reading it? I feel saved. I feel SO MUCH peace...knowing that this book is finished.
My wife had come home from work and took our oldest out so they could have some much needed one on one time, and I took the baby out to see if I could get him to have a proper nap (we had both been up since 3 a.m. and no...he did not nap) and I decided to drive to the hospital that inspired a chunk of the story. While I sat in the parking lot taking these obligatory Instagram ready photos, I started thinking about a million other (non book related) times I had a history with where I was. I immediately remembered doing the thing I never did, and actually going with my friends into the woods on the fourth of July to be a teenager, a delinquent, to drink 40 ounces, and have the time of my life. From what I remember? I did. Of course, I had my headphones on me (I took them everywhere, I became Mr. Walkman through all of high school) and right before a I puked and my buddies Turk and Ryan (this is seriously cute) held my hair back for me (I had REALLY long hair in those days) so I wouldn't get vomit in it...I remember just watching the fire works in Boston and getting lost in Chris Cornell's "Seasons" and thinking about...earlier that day, a friend needed a lift so he tried to hitchhike and this younger guy stopped and pointed at me (I was wearing my coveted Pearl Jam shirt that my friend Ally since brought back into my life) and told them...the only one of you I'd take anywhere is that Eddie Vedder looking dude in the Pearl Jam shirt because he looks like good people.
I remember Turk calling my parents and telling them I was sleeping over his house (his apartment was across from ours) and he fed me Cinnamon Toast Crunch breakfast bars and water and to help me feel better. I am 33, why do I still remember that shit? or the infamous (I say this because most of the people I grew up with are now cops, teachers, social workers, and well....not who they were as teenagers so I have to protect the innocent) TGB DON'T CARE! Printer burning story? God, can any of us remember what it was like to be kids? To have friends? To be horrified to be a kid, or want to be a kid and want to have those friends? As I was driving home with my baby, I just kept talking as if he even cared. Stories upon stories upon stories about...this person and me did this here, we had a shit ton of fun there, this is where this happened or that happened. I think that's why I am so obsessed with people reading my book or anyone I know getting their hands on it. It is barely the tip of the iceberg in terms of my life or what became the fictional version of it...but there are so many damn people who were amazing sources of inspiration for the work. I have so many moments that correlate with songs and so many albums I can't stop listening to because when I start to feel sad, isolated, or alone...all of my friends? They're right there. They're all in that album, in that library of memories, in this book.
I tried for a decade to put so much distance between myself and the town I grew up in. There was just too much pain, too much loneliness, too much anxiety about how much it hated me. I needed to distance myself from it, disown it and the people in it. Then the mother of all irony? I wound up finding the love of my life right where I left it. Then even more ironic? The first book I have ever published? Is about that town.
The book was right in front of me. My kids, my wife, those friends...all of it was right in front of me. Why the hell did I try so hard to run away from it? I guess its easier to run away from something if you can't stop feeling like it never wanted you in the first place than to hang around and even have one part of it say...dude, it was always here and so were you.
Something that I never thought I would get to live is calling my mom the past couple of weeks and asking her why she hasn't finished my book yet. Sure, I am terrified NO ONE is reading it. I am starting to feel like Wayne Campbell in Wayne's World 2 about my upcoming book reading/Q&A on Zoom (Friday October 30th at 7 p.m.)
Alright, so nobody has signed up yet...and I'm not even 100% sure if enough people have read it to merit a book reading....
My mom's endorsement (I know, pathetic) is a huge one. She is taking so long because it is scaring her. She doesn't want to put it down but does because it is disturbing and scary (which she swears is good) and my silver lining? Oh...she's Joey! I mean, I grew up watching my mom on her typewriter swearing to me she was going to write the next great American novel. I was 5 when I would pull up a table next to her with my own typewriter that my father fished out of the trash and mimic her because...I wanted to do what she was doing. Here I am, 33 and I did it! Although....its way less impressive and way more work than I imagined at that age.
The point is...I am 33 and I get to harass my 61 year old mother about MY BOOK. So, that has to count for something right? Anyway, that's my mind dump for the night. I know last night I had a couple. I seriously want to get to work on manuscript six but I want to diligently work toward getting this book reading and obviously getting this book more visible and into circulation. I love the writing part. The promotional stuff? That's less fun. Instagram I think helps...this blog, I don't know. Time will tell I guess. I still wrote a book and I get to talk to my mom about it. That's the affirmation I need to keep reminding myself of. I fulfilled a dream and a mission. That little boy typing side by side with his mom on her typewriter wrote a fucking book. I think she's proud. I hope she is.
To write and to be read are very different animals. To write? Is to be so vulnerable so profoundly naked in the skin of yourself that you don't even feel you deserve to wear. Then there is to be so broken. So damaged and want to be loved or liked.
If you're the ONE person reading this blog. That ONE person following my Instagram or the ONE person who read my book? You get it. Even with my two children in bed. Knowing that my wife is shouldering the weight of a million breadwinners while I shoulder the weight of domestication...we will argue again. We will argue over who is doing what and what that means.
Its an argument that gets SO exhausting to me. She is special. I am special. Yet, I will succumb to the specters of ambition and always fall back into the arms of disappointment. I want to be understood, loved, or acknowledged and I don't even know why anymore. The more I try to promote this book the more fearful I become of how people walk around in my head. That's what the book is, its an invite to my head. I just....I SO badly want to be loved or accepted to the point where I have existential meltdowns about it. One of these days I just hope I figure it out. I can run the streets screaming about how I figured it out and I can grab my boys and hold them so tightly and tell them....What the fuck am I chasing? I only needed you two. I only needed you. Why am I still chasing acceptance? I know what its like to grow up with parents who just gave up. I look forward to the moments when I can run toward my kids and tell them...I need to hold you, daddy did something great today. I hope you love me.
I need them to see me chasing after love. Because it means that I am still trying to impress them.
There is nothing I won't chase or try to be so that they love me.
I have this uncanny ability to build things up in my head so much that it is impossible to enjoy the tangibility of it. I promised myself I wouldn’t do that with the reading. Again, Friday October 30th at 7:00 p.m. I plan to host a ZOOM meeting where I will read my personal favorite portion of the book and then provided people have read it or are interested it will be a glorified Q&A about asking all the questions anyone might have if they read it. In my mind I so badly want to picture it like an old MTV Unplugged special. A very quiet fall evening where I will elegantly decorate my bedroom so it looks like I am Kurt Cobain surrounded by all these stargazer lilies…but let’s be honest. If I even get two people who show up, and the connection doesn’t lag or completely go out…it’ll be a dumpster fire and I will literally be perched on my bed with orange Christmas lights.
That’s the thing about expectations, they’re so fucking detrimental to just being in the moment. I just really want to feel in the moment with this book. I hope people attend; I am eagerly awaiting thirty copies of my book to arrive so I can finally start doing giveaways with them. Simply put, I’ll post something on Instagram or on this site on the blog, and if you share it you’ll go into a lottery and whoever I pick will get a free copy either mailed or hand delivered. Hell, I’ll even offer to sign it or give you a magnet if you so choose. I just want to spend an evening and hang out with people, have great conversations and if the book is largely the focus of those? GREAT! If not? It’ll just be nice to see people. Speaking of Nirvana though? My son picked out the Nirvana shirt I bought for him to wear to school today. When I arrived to pick him up he was singing in front of his classmates how this was his very special t-shirt. That hit me like a ton of bricks. Then before bed? (my wife is working late) he specifically requested to snuggle with the build a bear simba I bought for him when we brought his brother to the photo studio at JC Penny to have his first photos taken. This kid sang about his Nirvana t-shirt because its his very special shirt that dada bought for him, and he wanted to snuggle with the simba his dada gave to him. Maybe I don’t need the book reading to define me, maybe I’ve already had my great unplugged moment? It would still be cool to have a "See if you can spot this one," moment...
When I was a little boy, I had a crush on a girl in my kindergarten class. Whenever I hear it I can remember what being a naive and romantic child sounds like...
When people I know reach out to me after reading this book, they immediately express a profound amount of empathy for Charlie. They want to hold him, grab him by the hand and run away from all the horrors of life, they want Charlie to be a kid, they want him to stay innocent forever. Admittedly, I’ve had a few emotional breakdowns over that. Charlie is a fictional character. He is the product of imagination. While I appreciate those sentiments? I can’t embrace them. Then I talked to my mother tonight, and she tells me that the book is scaring the shit out of her and she has had to put it down because she can’t fathom the things that have existed in my head. They scare her, but then she asked me…But god, how long have they scared you?” My mother then went on to mirror a lot of comments about how much her heart breaks for Charlie but one thing she had to point out. “Yes, this is fiction and these people aren’t real. However, your love for both of your sisters is…and even though those are Charlie’s sisters? Its Eddie Brophy writing about how much his sisters took care of him.” Charlie didn’t have a prayer in the world. People just looked at him and saw someone who came from a failed architecture. They called him a wuss, a loser, and ultimately let the lack of affluence or pedigree define both he and his character. I am not trying to pontificate about the macabre nature of child abuse nor am I trying to sit here and be an indignant writer who doubled down and bet the house on his (likely) only book. When you come from something so horrible? You just assume your life will be better if you have this, that, or the other thing. Then when you get them and nothing at all changes? You create a prison that you will likely die in. I know this because Charlie is me, and I was so fortunate to let him out of that prison. If I die in it? So be it, but not him. Charlie deserves to be loved, to be held, to be cared about, and for people to shed tears for. Its so bizarre, I have two very gorgeous sons who I feel that way about…but then I also have this imaginary son who people seem to love with their whole hearts and its vindicating. Not because its me, but because I was able to take qualities about me and construct such a lovely kid out of those things and show him the tunnel I have spent the better part of twenty years digging for him to crawl through. I may never get out of this prison, but I am rooting for Charlie. The success or reach of this book will define the distance Charlie can put between him and his past. He’s a great kid, and I hope you’ll take the chance to read his story. I am anticipating a shipment of books real soon. I was gong to use them as library donations, but I am hitting so many roadblocks with libraries due to the nature of being an independent writer. So, I plan to do a few giveaways and I’m thinking maybe 5-10 books I’ll give away in a promotional effort. This isn’t about money, and it certainly isn’t about fame. I do want Charlie’s story to be read. So, that’s where I’m at with it. Eddie Brophy has no idea where life is going to take him. However, Charlie’s life is an open book and hopefully the ending is a happy one.
Hurray for the child his makes it through....
This book isn't a memoir. It is a totally fictitious account of my life. Then, at the same time it fucking happened. My mom still hasn't finished her copy. Why? Why the fuck hasn't she finished her copy yet? TOO close to home? I don't know. It just guts me. Man, I put it all the fuck out there. I put myself on the line. Anyone who is anyone can read this now and say fuck this pathetic asshole, what did he think he'd get out of it?
Hell even I don't know. I guess I wanted to make a few friends who would read it and know how fucking real it was. I am so sick of tracking traffic to this blog, to that instagram, or wondering if this book is selling. I am so sick of needing to be special....you know why? She hasn't finished it. My mother hasn't finished this book. Fuck, I have friends who are already refraining from wanting to talk about it so the ZOOM is special for them. Fuck it, I am feeling so lost and empty right now. The shit about the pills, Janet losing her virginity, and who is Destiny's dad..all the rest? it fucking happened. All the hurt and the fucking build your kid up to desperately need a stranger to love him? That is very real. A song brought me to my fucking knees tonight.
If any thing or any one could love me that much? Christ. I would have existed.
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