If You Knew Then What I Know Now by Ryan Van Meter (review)

143 BOOK NOTES If You Knew Then What I Know Now, by Ryan Van Meter Sarabande Books, 2011 reviewed by Nicholas Maistros In the first essay of Ryan Van Meter’s revealing and intensely personal collection, we are offered a memory: the author at age five in the back of a station wagon with his friend Ben, also five, and introduced as “the first brown-eyed boy I will fall for but...not...the last.” Van Meter goes on to recount the stumbling beginnings of his life as a different kind of boy—holding hands with his friend, confessing his love for him, and finally asking the boy to marry him. They are effortless, simple, these initial moments of self-discovery, until, after little Ben accepts little Ryan’s marriage proposal, Van Meter writes, “suddenly my mother feels very close.” She turns around in her seat and confronts her son—“You shouldn’t have said that. … Boys don’t marry other boys.” And she pressures him to acknowledge— “Okay? Did you hear me?” While this short essay, aptly titled “First,” expressly locates Van Meter’s friend Ben as a first love, the actual “first” here, what acts as the initiation for the retrospective journey the writer, and the reader, are about to take, is the reaction of someone close to him, the first time Van Meter’s queerness is recognized, scrutinized, and corrected, the first time he is made to feel ashamed of who he is. But while this collection delves into notions of identity, shame, and repression, it manages to avoid entirely the trap that too many memoirs have so easily fallen into: this is not a writer who feels sorry for himself; his book refuses to wallow in the hardships of growing up different (though these hardships and humiliations are present and described with unflinching clarity and precision). The subject of this book, conversely, is the people who surround this “odd” young man—relatives, girlfriends, boyfriends, the kids on the baseball team his father forces him to join—and their reactions to him. In the essay “Lake Effect,” Van Meter presents a moment at age eleven in which, surrounded by his father’s friends on a colorado review 144 fishing trip, he becomes fascinated by the image of one man’s shirtless body: “without being entirely conscious of it, I’ve been staring at Jim’s bare chest…the twin circles as wide as dinner plates between his armpits. … His flat belly… his arms, tough muscles like embedded baseballs.” When his father notices and tells young Ryan, in front of everyone, to stop—“Don’t do that”—Van Meter details his mortification with the utmost lyricism : “My shame is solid, and I am immobile under the mass of it; my feet feel prickly like they’ve fallen asleep. All of us sit and wait for something, but it doesn’t seem to arrive.” And while a lesser memoirist would stop there, leaving it at that moment of personal significance, Van Meter goes further, wades deeper into the memory, sifts for the inner workings of the other participants : “I understand now that the men weren’t just looking at me; they knew what kind of boy acted the way I did. What they wanted to find out was what kind of a man my father was.” Van Meter does not seek, however, to finger those who’ve hurt him, to blame and to criticize, though his presentation of such incidents is forthright. In “Tightrope,” Van Meter’s brother , Garrett, finds an old, unflattering yearbook photo of the young man a teenaged Ryan has just gone out with in order to prove to their parents what freakdom may await his big brother. But in the next essay, Garrett is able to find an appreciation for his brother’s differences in a simple yet redemptive, intimate moment—trying on a jacket his brother has picked out for him. Even the book’s title, If You Knew Then What I Know Now, suggests compassion for those who didn’t quite understand him as he came of age. For Van Meter’s look into his past is not one of self-analysis and...