In 2000, while moving his household from Vermont to North Carolina, David Payne watched from his rearview mirror as his younger brother, George A., driving behind him in a two-man convoy of rental trucks, lost control of his vehicle, fishtailed, flipped over in the road, and died instantly.

Soon thereafter, David’s life hit a downward spiral.

Listen to the interview here.

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.

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.

A followup interview about my New York Times Op-Ed, “Why Group Therapy Worked”

Listen here.

“…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

Two new personal histories, Lucas Mann’s Lord Fear and David Payne’sBarefoot to Avalon, struggle with questions of healing and recovery, refusing to make easy peace with the dead.

Why Group Therapy Worked
By DAVID PAYNE AUGUST 11, 2015 3:30 AM August 11, 2015 3:30 am Comment
Couch
Couch is a series about psychotherapy.

I first entered individual therapy in the late 1980s, in Manhattan. Once a week for six years I strolled happily northward up Columbus Avenue from my apartment to my therapist’s office in the West 90s. Our sessions were a high point of my week…

Read more.

“An unflinching memoir about a violent childhood, mental illness, and scars that won’t heal…”

— Patricia Ann McNair

“Payne has done something astonishing here.” — Betsy Burton, The King’s English Bookstore, Salt Lake City.

Listen to her 2-minute radio review here.