The New York Times: “… a brave book with beautiful sentences on every page…”

BAREFOOT TO AVALON

By David Payne

294 pages. Atlantic Monthly Press. $26.

In 2000, David Payne’s 42-year-old brother, George A., died in a highway crash while helping the author move to North Carolina. The accident is the impetus for this fine memoir, not its subject. Although Mr. Payne recalls that horrific event and the terrible grief in its aftermath, he dives headlong into dissecting, with raw candor, his family’s troubled history. There were boarding schools, luxury cars and coveted Wall Street jobs, but these signifiers of the “good life” were ruined by financial failures, intractable resentments, failed marriages, infidelity, suicide, abuse and addiction, and alcoholism (including Mr. Payne’s). He also traces the harrowing effects of George A.’s bipolar disorder and the brothers’ complicated, fraught relationship. This is a brave book with beautiful sentences on every page, but there’s nothing showy about it. Mr. Payne writes with the intensity and urgency of a man trying to save his own life.

–CARMELA CIURARU, The New York Times

Read here.

Charlotte Observer: David Payne’s Reading Riveting…

It’s always a risk to invite my husband along to a reading. Most of the time, he’d rather be watching the Panthers or re-runs of “L.A. Law.” But last week, we were both in for a unusual treat at Park Road Books.

Hillsborough’s David Payne was reading from his memoir about his brother’s death,“Barefoot to Avalon,” and it turned out to be a riveting and enlightening evening…

The memoir, reviewed Sunday on the Observer’s book page, is fantastic. I give it unrestrained kudos.

— Dannye Romine Powell

Greensboro New & Record: “… perceptive, beautiful and passionate…”

News & Observer: “…stylistic bravura…existential wallop…”

“…a riveting meditation upon a family’s accursed history… what gives these biographical particulars their existential wallop is Payne’s raw, sustained intensity. Reading Payne can feel like a near-physical experience, of being swept along by sinister forces that in different ages have gone by such names as original sin, melancholia, madness, and most recently, brain chemistry.”

— John Murawski, News & Observer