The Peril of Remembering Nice Things
A Memoir
Unsparing and expressive, the moving memoir The Peril of Remembering Nice Things explores the pernicious roots of Southern heritage.
Jeffrey Wade Gibbs’s absorbing memoir The Peril of Remembering Nice Things recounts his father’s troubled life and ultimate suicide alongside Gibbs’s conflicted feelings toward his Southern heritage.
In 1996, Gibbs’s fifty-nine-year-old father, Robert, sat on the railroad tracks and waited to be killed by an oncoming freight train. His death ended a paradoxical life; intelligent and independent-minded, Robert was an alcoholic mired in a codependent relationship with his mother, Nell. At the time of his father’s suicide, Gibbs was teaching English in Japan. He was “deeply and profoundly shaken” by the news, but he also felt that Robert’s death seemed inevitable.
Creating a rich flow of facts, memories, and conjecture, Gibbs details his father’s upbringing in the context of family and regional history. As the matriarch of the Gibbs family, Nell exerted fierce control while exhibiting passive-aggressive and combative behaviors. Yet beyond Nell’s “demonic force” was a woman who had been whipped by her mother as a girl for playing with Black children and who had weathered the economic and emotional instabilities of her marriage to a drunken, itinerant husband. The book further chronicles horrific incidents of racial brutality in Georgia and Florida, including the 1921 torture and lynching of a Black man, John Henry Williams, along with other Klan-involved murders and the violent resistance to the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
Though the memoir is threaded with painful recollections, its sense of character and place is keen and vibrant. Gibbs conducts informal interviews with his relatives to discuss their recollections of past events, conveying personalities with depth, as with that of his Aunt Nancy, whose engaging and garrulous tenacity was complicated by her penchant for using racial slurs. Speaking with a “thick Southern twang,” Nancy interjected emphatic “Yeah!“s into certain statements like the “yip of a small but valorous dog.” And while Gibbs laments his father’s self-destructive tendencies, he also remembers Robert’s love of cooking, fishing, and reading, as well as their walks together along quiet roads lined by “giant live oaks heavy with Spanish moss.”
This descriptive resonance extends beyond the Southern landscape to Gibbs’s home in Istanbul. Now married to Delal, a Kurdish activist, Gibbs parallels her family’s continued persecution in Turkey with American racial injustices. Wonderful glimpses of meals enjoyed in a “tiny Kurdish village,” spent savoring “warm crisp flatbread” and chilled yogurt beneath “stars like a spray of glittering glass,” flesh the book out further.
The book’s expansive, measured pace is centered around dense impressions and emotions. Gibbs notes the postsuicide anguish of going through his father’s personal effects, finding an “empty vodka bottle,” “his old checkered shirts,” and a plastic bag filled with postcards and letters sent by Gibbs from Japan. With vulnerable candor, Gibbs also confides his need for weekly therapy sessions to manage lingering family trauma, and he contrasts a culture of sweet tea, barbecues, loquacity, and lore with the more tangled white Southern legacy of slavery, segregation, and the peculiar internalization of loyalty.
Unsparing and expressive, the moving memoir The Peril of Remembering Nice Things explores the pernicious roots of Southern heritage and a family’s generational disconnect and cohesion.
Reviewed by
Meg Nola
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
