San Francisco Chronicle: “a study in the power of inexhaustible candor…
…it’s hard not to be taken aback, then captivated, by the bluntness, Payne’s unwillingness to shy away from not only the difficulties in the story being told, but also in the act of trying to tell the story. This dynamic burns starkly and powerfully through all of “Barefoot to Avalon,” a book that is, as much as anything, a study in the power of inexhaustible candor… like the best memoirs, it’s about something far harder to pin down, something unspecific and ineffable in the way time moves and lives fade, the moments that none of us can get back…Payne’s writing is loose, confident and snappy, and he has a rare ability to distill enormous scope into a single sentence, sometimes a single image…He gives us the ambiguities of real life, a story that is sometimes hard to take but always worth it.”
–Lucas Mann, San Francisco Chronicle
