“A remarkably clear-eyed search for the deeper and more distant causes of a bad patch that extended itself much too far. The book is taut, sad, and soulful.”
Thomas Mallon, The Millions
Too Good to be True
A Memoir
The most affecting father-son story since Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, this astonishing memoir is a gut-wrenching account of a life at the crossroads. When he was three, Benjamin Anastas found himself in his mother’s fringe-therapy group, a sign around his neck: TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE. The phrase haunts him at forty, when everything around him lies in tatters.
Broke, his promising literary career gone, Anastas is hounded by debt collectors as he tries to repair a life ripped apart by the spectacular implosion of his marriage, which ended when his pregnant wife left him for another man. Anastas’s fierce love for his young son forces him to confront his own childhood, fraught with mental illness, divorce, and the fumes of hippiedom. Charged with rage, despair, humor, and hope, this unforgettable book gets to the core of what it means to be a father.
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