Putting The Pieces Together

At eighty-eight, David Jacobson sits down to do what most of us put off forever: gather every scattered piece of a life and lay them out where they can finally be seen.

He was born in San Francisco in 1937 to two alcoholics who could not stop drinking long enough to keep him safe. By the time he was a boy, he had survived polio in a county hospital ward, stretches inside institutions that swallowed children like him, and the daily, grinding work of raising himself in a house where the adults had already given up. He thought, more than once, about not making it to adulthood.

He made it anyway.

Putting the Pieces Together is the memoir of that survival and everything that came after it, the Air Force years, an African adventure, an unlikely Cold War friendship with Russians, the University of New Mexico, marriage to Glenda (his partner now for sixty-seven years), two children, a career on the early frontier of computing, brothers lost and remembered, a quiet retirement spent making digital art and crossing the country in an RV, and the long, surprising stretch of joyful years in Sun City, Texas that he calls the best of his life.

Told in fifteen "pieces" and illustrated with the author's own original digital artwork, this is a book about the slow arithmetic of a life, how the worst beginning does not have to be the whole story, how strangers and friends quietly save us, and how a person who once counted the days until he could escape his own childhood can look back at eighty-eight and call the picture good.

For readers of Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes, Jeannette Walls' The Glass Castle, and Tara Westover's Educated, memoirs of children who grew up inside their parents' addictions and chaos and walked out the other side with something to say. For anyone who has ever wondered whether the early pieces of their life can still be assembled into something whole.

They can. This book is the proof.