“A Memory of Fictions (or) Just Tiddy-Boom” by Leonce Gaiter

A Memory of Fictions (or) Just Tiddy-Boom

Leonce Gaiter
Legba Books (2024)
ISBN: 979-8990289901 
Reviewed by Jessica Dickenson for Reader Views (05/2024)

If Ernest Hemingway was black, gay, and writing about growing up in the 1950s, he would have written something like Leonce Gaiter’s “A Memory of Fictions (or) Just Tiddy-Boom.”

“A Memory of Fictions (or) Just Tiddy-Boom” is presented as a bildungsroman and the description is apt. We follow the protagonist Jessie Vincent Grandier from birth as a military brat to his burgeoning adulthood as a Harvard graduate and a failed LA screenwriter. The book is a therapeutic journey of self-awareness as we learn with Jessie how you find your identity in a world that places you in boxes, how you can let your past speak without defining you, and why it all matters in the first place.

Jessie wasn’t supposed to be born. He says that his mother Lulene wasn’t supposed to have any more children after his two older sisters were born, however, she was determined to bear her husband a son. Jessie is named after his father Jessie Vincent Grandier, Sr. and from that moment on, Jessie acts out a terrible dance. As the only son in a family of women, he is marked to perpetually exist under the shadow of his abusive and negligent father. Part of his identity will always be connected to his father who he calls, “the Colonel.” He never meets the expectations his father set for a “boy to have.”

It’s not just his father. Lulene raised him to be tough because she knew she couldn’t always protect him. She dies when Jessie is only eleven and his last chance of self-expressive identity dies with her. Gaiter uses the image of Jessie’s lack of tears from here to the end of the book to show Jessie’s emotional constipation. He must discover who he is amid a minefield of expectations and assumptions.

Harvard makes assumptions about his identity based on the color of his skin. His college roommates make assumptions because of his educational ambitions. His friends make assumptions based on the persona he displays. Boyfriends make assumptions based on their needs. It is only when Jessie can confront all these expectations and the ghost of his mother that he can finally embrace who he is.

There is a Hemingway-Faulkneresque stream of consciousness that makes the book both engaging and a little off-putting. Although the whole book is written in the third person, that is easy to forget since the book is so personal that Jessie and his struggles are your own.