Worst among them is Nick Pappas — tall, dark and handsome as the narrator’s mother likes her men, though also the blowhard, bully, boastful, coward, drunken, narcissistic, womanizing, wife-beating, child-beating, child-molesting stepfather of the narrator.  Yet despite all there is to despise about the man, the reader is acutely aware of him as a human being. Nick Pappas is human all too human, as is every character peopling these pages. We see their flaws, foibles and failings. We see their humanity in all its fullness — hard working, heartbreaking, sorrowful, tragic, belly-laugh funny at times, pitiful, embarrassing and, yes, occasionally even admirable, even loveable, even kind and good-hearted and fun-loving.

          This I think, above all, is Brenna’s achievement here.  He is not settling old scores — and god knows there were scores he might well have wanted to settle if he’d a mind to.  But no, he is exploring — unsparingly, unflinchingly, but above all fairly, with balance — the humanity of a group of people born into and continually creating a kind of hell in which they thrash around without a clue how to get out.

          But Brenna did get out.  He lived to tell the tale — and what a tale it is!

          Anyone who has read any of Duff Brenna’s powerful novels — there are six of them, powerful tales of American rural and working class life that have been lavished with praise by most major American newspapers and translated as well into several other languages – will glimpse some of the sources in this memoir.  To get a sense of the novels, think Jack London, Mark Twain, John Steinbeck, but chiefly the voice of Brenna himself.  To get a sense of Dancing For My Mother, read the excerpt  posted here and I think most will agree it’s pure Brenna and pure America, too — an America you don’t see so often as close up and personal as this.

          Our country tears of thee!  Brenna has looked it dead in the face and brought it all back home to show us how a big part of our country lives and what it tries to survive.  Some don’t survive. We can be glad that Brenna did.