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Confessions of a Left-Handed Man: An Artist’s Memoir. Peter Selgin. University of Iowa Press. http://www.uiowapress.org. 194 pages; paper, $19.95.

Peter Selgin, winner of the 2007 Flannery O’Connor Award for his collection Drowning Lessons, is an accomplished storywriter, novelist, and nonfiction writer. But unlike many accomplished writers, he seems to have had no burning desire to write as a young person and found his footing in the trade late in life, and even then somewhat by default after limited successes as an artist, an actor, and a musician. It is clear from his collection of autobiographical essays, Confessions of a Left- Handed Man, that Selgin is one of those artistic types whose creative batteries are always charged, but whose ability to harness that energy came only with maturity. The key to understanding Selgin’s quirky, desultory personality, and thus the key to understanding his equally quirky, desultory memoir, comes in the final essay, “The Swimming Pool.”

By the end of the book, we find Selgin divorced, alone, and living as a writer-in-residence in Middleville, Georgia (home of Flannery O’Connor). Somewhat at peace with this working solitude, Selgin feels satisfied, if not exactly happy, to rise early, write through the morning, eat simple and somewhat acetic meals of fitness bread and vegetables, and finally, walk a couple of miles to the small-town pool, “an old-fashioned cement pool. . .just rough concrete poured sometime during Prohibition.” The spare quality of the pool suits Selgin’s sense of discipline: “Without discipline there can be no deep or lasting pleasure. Maybe I feel this way because as a child I wasn’t sufficiently disciplined, and now as an adult I’m forced to make up with grim determination for that which my parents failed to give me.” If Selgin’s parents failed to give him discipline, they did not fail to give him a family worth writing about. The biographical details of Selgin’s family life read like the origins of superhero or a James Bond villain.

Born a sinister twin—literally, with a dexterous look-alike brother George—and being raised by an absentminded but ingenious inventor, polymath father from Italy (a former employee of the U.S. State Department), his hot-blooded but indulgent Sophia Loren-esque mother who only speaks broken English, and his doting grandmother who speaks no English at all, it is clear from the get-go that Selgin simply had no chance at being ordinary. As residents of a WASPish small town in Connecticut (specifically selected by his father to conduct experiments in secret), Selgin’s exotic family seems alien, though also warm and loving. In the essay “Dagos in Mayberry,” the author remembers with pity the ordinary food the other ordinary children were fed by their humdrum parents: “While George and I were being weaned on diluted vino rosso, they drank cow’s milk and Kool-Aid with dinner, which they called ‘supper,’ and which would typically feature such ghastly bland items as cucumbers, and which they ate at an absurdly early hour.”

In the title essay, “Confessions of a Left-Handed Man,” Selgin shows how difficult it is to get a clear picture of yourself when you are always looking in a mirror, as his brother looks exactly like him (though they are far from identical): “George and I grasped at anything we could to set ourselves apart from each other…. George took on the role of bookworm, while I in turn seized upon my left-handedness as my most distinguishing trait, in spite of my grandmother doing her best to repair what she saw at worst as a freak of nature.” Though Selgin himself rejects any idea that he is somehow biologically determined by his sinister physiognomy, Selgin has to admit that he represents all of the homespun myths about left-handers: artistic, accident-prone, sickly, depressive—“Coincidences, I’m sure.” And yet, through the course of Selgin’s childhood, sibling rivalry runs wild as Selgin attempts to outdo his brother. When George gets a girlfriend, “I made sure to get a better—anyway a prettier and...

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