Book Review: I Will Be Complete by Glen David Gold

I wanted to like this one. I really enjoyed Carter Beats the Devil (fiction by the author) – the writing, the storytelling style, the character development – and assumed that would translate into enjoying this memoir. Unfortunately, it did not. I just could not engage with the story/writing. It felt jumpy, skipping from topic to topic in a way that I found difficult – not so much difficult to follow (it’s not unclear) as difficult to feel connected to, for reasons that I cannot put my finger on.

I am a fan of memoirs – I find people’s life stories endlessly fascinating, particularly when they are written by writers with vivid imaginations who have lived more than a lifetime’s worth of experiences, as is clearly the case here. But for some reason I just struggled with the book page after page…

It may be the difficult story itself, frankly. I fall into books, especially when they are written by talented writers – and make no mistake, Gold is a VERY talented writer. As such, his story hurts to read, and it may well be that I was just not in the right frame of mind to read that much brutal honesty.

Honestly, I never even got past the abandonment – it is entirely possible that the story would have proceeded at a different pace at that point, but the foreshadowing and the style just couldn’t keep me in this one long enough to get there. It may be a case of wrong-book-at-the-wrong-time; I enjoyed Gold’s fiction enough to give it another go in the future. There’s a LOT going on in this one, and it may just not have resonated at the right frequency just now.

My review copy was provided by the Penguin First to Read program.