End of Summer - Softcover

Potts PhD, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0615564100 ISBN 13: 9780615564104

Publisher: WordCrafts Press, 2011

Synopsis

A young boy. An old man. And a journey of the heart.

A middle aged man, Jeffrey Conley, has obsessive interests, including a fascination with death and the process of dying and a fetish for the sound of a woman's heartbeat. His wife, Lisa, encourages him to get help. His psychologist diagnoses him as having Asperger's Syndrome, a mild condition on the Autism spectrum. When his granny dies, Jeffrey returns to Tennessee for her funeral, and then walks the same field he walked with his granddaddy as a child. On that cold, late November day, Jeffrey walks toward The Thicket, an outcropping of trees and vines from the woods adjoining the field that crossed the fence and are invading the field. In that special place he and Granddaddy would sit and talk as Jeffrey swung on vines or sipped cola. The middle aged Jeffrey looks back to that time, to the summer of his ninth year, an idyllic year and a terrible year, a year of joy, a year of loss and grief. Will Jeffrey Conley be able to discover and understand his struggles by this journey back into his past. While remembering Sunday dinners with relatives, hunting rabbits with his granddaddy, or visiting the town square, Jeffrey rediscovers pain and the worst loss of his life. Will he be able to make sense of his life, his past, his obsessions, his faith? Or will he sink into despair, The Thicket becoming a place of pain rather than redemption? That is the fundamental problem of the book.

About this title

From the Author

As a person diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome as an adult, I often look back to childhood for the origin of my quirks and obsessive interests, as does Jeffrey in End of Summer. All authors bring themselves and their past to their books, and this book is no exception. Most of the characters are based on people I knew as a child. My parents are still living, as is not the case with Jeffrey's parents in the book, but I wished to focus on Jeffrey's relationship with his granddaddy. Jeffrey is me and his quirks and obsessions are my quirks and obsessions--the one difference is that he is more polite than I was as a child. Perhaps he is an idealized me with the quirks, but without some of the rougher edges. Of course many of the details in the book never happened and even the events that happened are "fictionalized."

The process of writing the book was fascinating. I wrote the first draft staying at the Weymouth Center in Southern Pines. I had written about ten pages before I came there for ten days--and by the time I left the first draft had been completed. The field behind the Weymouth Center reminded me of Granddaddy's field--outcroppings of trees, whose tangled branches formed "rooms." The experience was magic, one of being in Jeffrey's shoes and walking through that field as an adult. The images came like video in my mind, and I described what was replayed. The good and bad moments of childhood came like a flood--I now understand why writers drink. It is to deal with the emotional overload that inevitably arises from writing. Yet those Weymouth memories are among the best of my life. I came away with a better understanding of how Asperger's Syndrome had affected my life from my earliest memories onward. I truly enjoyed writing this book, and hope those of you who read it enjoy as much as I did writing it.

From the Back Cover

A deeply moving and passionate book, Michael Potts' End of Summer is a poignant literary novel about childhood and memory. This is contemporary Southern fiction at its best. In textured language and with heartfelt attention to detail, Potts' nuanced portrayal of rural life in southern Appalachia and a young boy's initial encounter with death reminds us that life at the economic margins can be culturally and spiritually rich, and that even as absences and losses sometimes damage us, these can also strengthen and redeem.
- Michael Colonnese, Ph.D.
Author of Sex and Death, I Suppose
and Temporary Agency

About this edition

• Publisher: WordCrafts Press
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0615564100
• ISBN 13: 9780615564104
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 264