Book Reviews

Men My Mother Dated and Other Mostly True Tales

Villard, 187 pp., $19.95

Zine author and National Public Radio commentator Brett Leveridge’s collection of essays resembles those little boxes of candy that are called “samplers” — small, sweet, and pleasantly familiar. These writings, many of which have appeared in Leveridge’s zine BRETTnews, are part imaginative family history and part amusing observation of the world as seen through the eyes of a 40-year-old ex-actor from Oklahoma living in New York City.

The first half of the book consists of 26 stories about 28 men (and one woman) that Leveridge’s mother Karen either dated or almost dated before marrying Leveridge’s father Lloyd. Leveridge writes about Karen’s first date at age 14 with Micah Westmore, her near-date with Jack Kerouac, and her brief, infatuated obsession

with Roger Fleming, a young man in her college American history class. “Mom,” as Leveridge refers to her throughout these brief pieces, is indomitable and good-hearted, a sexy innocent with the kind of positive attitude that one imagines could only have existed before 1965. She’s capable of guile, as when she wrangles five dates in 18 hours on a bet, but she’s also virtually incapable of harm.

Leveridge treats these stories with charming gravity. Only occasionally — and always at the right time, it seems — does he allow himself an ironic aside, seeming to recognize that irony, of course, is built into the concept of “retro” (eventually, time makes almost everything funny). And so we’re amused, perhaps a little condescendingly, when Mom can’t imagine what would possess Terry Collins, whom she meets at a Judy Garland movie, to break off their budding relationship and move to San Francisco. And we

sense that Leveridge the 40-year-old is tickled as all hell at his mother the teenager who takes the wheel of her boyfriend’s car when he is incapacitated by a nosebleed and blows the doors off of the local drag-race king.

The second half of the book consists of the type of pithy observations on life in the city, advertising, and love that the word “urbane” is perfectly suited to describe. The two-page “My Life Among the Elite” infuses droll self-referential angst into a familiar city scene. “Gay Like Me,” a piece on being mistaken for a gay man, manages to be both social commentary and self-deprecating humor. And Leveridge’s B-movie reinterpretation of a certain Saturn car commercial is priceless.

Real life is often as funny and captivating as Leveridge’s stories say it is, but it could never be as neatly shaped as these compact vignettes. Leveridge says in his introduction that these stories are real events filtered through the imagination of his mother’s no-account son. That’s just as well; real events are rarely as interesting as when they’re depicted through someone else’s eyes. Men My Mother Dated and Other Mostly True Tales is an amusing trip through the contemporary zeitgeist as filtered through one man’s Oedipal complex.

This article appears in May 26 • 2000.