America is a driven country. There are no other countries on earth with as many "Type A" personalities in their populations, all competing for the excesses that come with overachievement. Failure simply isn’t an option. Those that do fail quickly find themselves tarred by the double-edged brush of personal disgrace and obscurity.
Writing professor Josh Giddings accounts for his lifelong dereliction in Failure: An Autobiography. It is a searing portrait of a man unable to live up to his own and others' expectations of him, and the overwhelming guilt that consumes him.
It’s a great premise. Giddings writes from deep within the pit of his solar plexus, where he stores the gnawing ache of his insecurities. From his early childhood through his days at the exclusive Exeter Academy, Giddings jabs at his soft underbelly with his incisive wit, showing him to be a young man a bit too full of himself, yet unable to assert himself enough at his studies to merit attention from the Ivy League.
Throughout his adolescence, Giddings allows his protruding mutability to interfere with everything from losing his virginity to risking the comfort of his staid, upper middle class life for the pursuit of a writing career. For all of his rebellious talk and high-mindedness, Giddings repeatedly springs the traps that cage him into a life he doesn’t believe he deserves.
Giddings admits his adolescence was an exercise in living the life of the mind. In his immature, pseudo-intellectual view contains a disdain for the mundane, as he engages what he believes is the far more superior world of the classics, especially the classic languages of Latin and Greek. Yet Giddings points to a strange irony of his youth. Even though he finds himself above most people, he plays lackey to those students of more refined backgrounds.
Article comments
1 - Gordon Hauptfleisch
Well-written review of a fascinating read.