Born in rural British Columbia, Bechard was torn between his perpetually fighting parents. While his father, Andre, taught him to race trains, fish for salmon, lie, and fight, his mother introduced him to healthy eating, spirituality, and reading. Between Andre's tall tales and the books he devoured, Bechard developed a hyperactive inner life, convincing himself it was him against the world. Then his mother reveals that Andre was a bank robber and remains a dangerous man. Bechard can't fathom his affable father as a bad person, nor can he understand why the police seem to be pursuing him. His mother moves him and his brother to Virginia, where he fights classmates and practices cursing. Restlessness eventually drives him away from home to stir up trouble of his own, making him increasingly curious about Andre's past. Bechard's memoir, to be published simultaneously with his novel Vandal Love, is a coming-of-age story of lost innocence, violence, and tenderness by a writer obsessed with the man who influenced him the most but was there the least.--Fullmer, Jonathan Copyright 2010 Booklist

In the opening pages of Bechard's memoir, we learn that his duplicitous, bank-robbing father, Andre-to whom the bulk of the book is devoted-committed suicide "in a house empty but for a single chair.on the outskirts of Vancouver." Begun just three months after his father's death, Bechard's story is the result of "seventeen years of rewriting," and the process shows in the prose, which vacillates between that of a pretentious, if talented, young writer, and an adult whose understanding of his troubled youth has been refined by years of reflection and searching. Nevertheless, Bechard powerfully evokes the ever-present tension between the author and his parents ("Our family always seemed on the verge of disaster, and then the danger passed, and very little changed."), as well as his own struggle to emulate and escape his father. At once a quest to uncover the details of Andre's life-including his real name (Edwin), the town in Quebec from whence he came and the family he left there, and a criminal record that led one of Andre's sisters to remark, "‘Il ne faisait rien a moitie.'-He didn't do anything halfway."-Bechard's story is also one of personal discovery, and a teasing out of the function of memory: what it keeps, what it loses, and what it saves. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.