If Anyone Asks, Say I Died From the Heartbreaking Blues by Philip Cioffari

If Anyone Asks, Say I Died From the Heartbreaking Blues by Philip Cioffari is a nostalgic journey into a specific time and place. A novel this personal can be limiting for the reader, but Cioffari's hero's transformative experience is moving and universal.

The day Hunter turns eighteen is also the night of his Senior Prom. His date is the girl of his dreams. Beginning in the morning as his job takes him across the hot beach sand, fearful his date would see him hawking orangeade, he holds huge expectations that it will be a very special night.

Little did he know it would be a night of rejection and of finding love, of fear and heroism, an episodic journey from childhood to manhood.

Music and movies ground the novel in a specific period. I loved, for instance, his description of the sound of the sax in Harlem Nocturne as "the hollowed-out echo of a soul's longing."

Poetry is a part of Hunt's life. He is friends with a homeless man whose academic career was lost to "wine and Irish whiskey." Hunt stops by to hear the man's latest rewrite of T. S. Eliot's Hollow Men. Hunt and Johnnie Jay banter phrases of The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock while wandering the nighttime city streets.

I noted similarities to The Catcher in the Rye: the New York setting, the teenage protagonist's episodic encounters across a varied landscape, hanging out in bars and getting a beating, the deceased brother. But whereas Holden is unable to act on his vision of saving children from the realities of adulthood, Hunt takes selfless risks to protect others several times over.

I was intrigued to know more about Cioffari's motivation for his novel and invited him to contribute his thoughts.

*****

Nostalgia and its Benefits
by Philip Cioffari

One way of looking at nostalgia is that it is a strategy for whitewashing the past, of remembering only the good things. The way, for example, folks of a certain age talk about the good old days. Of course the truth of the matter, if we take a sober look, is that the good old days were in fact a mixture of good days and bad days. Each moment we live through has its share of stress, struggle, highs and lows. We can select which side of the equation we want to emphasize. To some extent, it’s a matter of conscious choice. But not, I think, completely so.

When I look back upon the period of the late fifties/early sixties, the time period of my novel, If Anyone Asks, Say I Died From the Heartbreaking Blues, I have a generally warm feeling for both the age and the setting, the Bronx, where I grew up. But if I step back a moment, I realize that the era was also an emotionally turbulent one for me. I mean that in the sense of the growing pains we all suffer through in the process of figuring out who we are and what our place is in the world. So to write a truthful book I knew I had to present both the joys and sorrows of coming of age at that time.

Childhood (including adolescence) is a flame that throughout our lives, no matter to what advanced age we live, burns inside us. I choose the verb burn advisedly because I don’t think any one of us makes it through that period of our lives without experiencing a significant amount of hurt. The extent to which that affects the way we live thereafter varies with each of us. I know, for me, it colors a lot of what I do and think. It works its way into my writing in various ways, sometimes pushing my stories to the darker side. With this novel, however, I wanted to take a lighter approach, to present our growing pains in a more amusing, if not outright comical, manner.

So I chose senior prom night, which also happens to coincide with my main character Hunt’s eighteenth birthday, making the day and the event doubly significant. The story unfolds over that twenty-four hour period. Romance, heartbreak, recovery, new beginnings—all make an appearance.

Among the many influences on the story I would mention the music of that period as one of the strongest. I spent a lot of time listening to old records, each with its particular memories attached, and I chose song titles for the novel’s four sections: Try the Impossible; In the Still of the Night; Shake, Rattle and Roll; and Earth Angel. 

The movies of that era were another influence. Rebel Without a Cause, The Wild Ones, East of Eden, Some Came Running, King Creole (an early Elvis film), Singing in the Rain, Marjorie Morningstar—to name but a few. I loved the strength of both the male and female characters—their ability to rise above adversity, their hope and resilience.

Perhaps the strongest of my influences, though, were literary ones: the passion of the Beats in their poems and essays, the works of Tennessee Williams and Graham Greene and Carson McCullers, among others. But if I had to choose one particular work it would be, most assuredly, The Catcher in the Rye. It’s a novel I cherish as much now as when I first read it. What strikes me most about it is the way Holden offers help to those he encounters throughout the story. Though he is trying to manage his own problems, which are significant, though he has this tough exterior that he shows to the world, he never fails to extend a helping hand to those in need. That ability to rise above one’s own burdens to help others is what I see as my main character’s strongest virtue.

Which brings me to that other side of nostalgia I alluded to earlier—the unconscious side of it. As a species, we are continually drawn back to the past. Whether it is a disguised yearning to return to the warmth and safety of the womb, an anchor to hold onto during unhappy periods in our lives, a way of enhancing the present moment, or simply a chance to relive our experience with people and places no longer available to us, nostalgia serves many purposes.
In the most positive light, it’s a way of bringing our lives full circle, of preserving and relishing our most significant experiences, reminding us of all the good things that have made us who we are.

*****

I love a good memoir, fictional or nonfiction. Cioffari's is rooted in a specific time and place, and yet readers will recognize the timelessness and universal human experience so beautifully rendered.

I received an ARC. My review is fair and unbiased.

IF ANYONE ASKS, SAY I DIED FROM THE HEARTBREAKING BLUES
by Philip Cioffari
Livingston Press/University of West Alabama
Pub Date 14 Feb 2020
ISBN 9781604892383
PRICE $24.95 hardcover (USD)/$17.95 paperback