Well, I may not know who Satan is. But the above is the title of the new book from Sara J. Ford: Apparently I Know Who Satan Is: My Fight Against Maturity and Other Irritating Social Norms.
I should say, up front, that I know Sara. I see her almost every week at Circus Juventas. One of her sons is friends with my kids, they’ve been in classes and performances together over the last few years. When we met Sara and C., Sara and her partner were enrolling C is circus school so he’d stop flinging himself off of high objects and breaking his limbs. Not that they wanted him to stop the flinging and the leaping, you understand — they wanted him to learn how to do it without breaking anything. This, right away, tells you something about Sara and her book.
As humorous memoirs go, well, this is one of them. If you like humorous memoirs you will like this one. But even if you don’t generally like the genre you may want to give Apparently I Know a try. Sara’s tone and voice capture something about the haze of memory that memoirs often try to obscure. After all, in writing one’s memoirs it makes sense for the writer to, you know, make sense of things. To present the reader with a coherent narrative. Or at the least a sequence of linked events. Sara presents us with events in which she, as the narrative lead, is often a bit adrift. In “Shrink Wrap, Diet Cokes, and a Kazoo,” for instance, we hear of her experiences as a balloon-deliveryperson, in which she remains bemusedly on-task through circumstances others may have abandoned.
Apparently I Know is funny, charming, and completely un-depressing. There’s no angst here, no dark secrets. And we don’t need them — everyone’s life is befuddling enough as is. This collection of essays reflects that truth. And it shows that adulthood eventually sneaks up on us all.
