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All Tomorrow's Parties: A Memoir

by Rob Spillman (Goodreads Author)

3.95 · Rating Details · 20 Ratings · 7 Reviews

Rob Spillman—the award-winning, charismatic cofounding editor of the legendary Tin House magazine—has devoted his life to the rebellious pursuit of artistic authenticity. Born in Germany to two driven musicians, his childhood was spent among the West Berlin cognoscenti, in a city two hundred miles behind the Iron Curtain. There, the Berlin Wall stood as a stark reminder of ...more

Hardcover, 400 pages

Published April 5th 2016 by Grove Press

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Jan 12, 2016 Elyse rated it it was amazing

Shelves: netgalley

Update: In case you don't trust my word --(that this book is terrific), ...seems its noticed by 'somebody' other than me. (its hitting the Professional BIG WIG LISTS)....
Its been called out to be one of the.....
"Most Anticipated -Great 'Non-Fiction' books for 2016! (works, for me...I'd loved it!)

This was an engrossing memoir....REALLY ENJOYABLE!!!!!

Rob Stillman is editor and founder of *TIN HOUSE*...
a literary magazine, based out of Portland, Oregon....which has been honored dozens
plus awards f ...more

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Feb 18, 2016 Lolly K Dandeneau rated it it was amazing

"Of course I'm going to jump into the abyss. That's what I do- throw myself into the unknown."

Intimately revealing. The child of musicians who divorced when he was young, Rob grew up behind the Iron Curtain. Eventually he ended up in New York and longed to return to Germany when the wall came tumbling down. Here he chases a life that seemed to be promised from the time he was little and surrounded by the most worldly, creative people. That he became a writer, longs for a Bohemian existence, feel "Of course I'm going to jump into the abyss. That's what I do- throw myself into the unknown."

Intimately revealing. The child of musicians who divorced when he was young, Rob grew up behind the Iron Curtain. Eventually he ended up in New York and longed to return to Germany when the wall came tumbling down. Here he chases a life that seemed to be promised from the time he was little and surrounded by the most worldly, creative people. That he became a writer, longs for a Bohemian existence, feels he doesn't quite fit in anywhere and hungers for that 'other world' follows. Coming of age with artistic surroundings it seems going back to where he started is where the soul and heart of his life is anchored, but is it? What was he running to? From?
Together with his new wife Elissa, they shuck their American lives for European ones.

"Miraculously, we were doing what we had set out to do. We were Paul Bowles in Tangiers. We were going to go native, write strange novels, and then our artist friends would make pilgrimages to visit us, to get our blessing. My worries about Elissa being able to handle living off the grid shifted to worrying she was getting too into our new life. When not writing, she read Jane Bowles and Virginia Woolf, and would cry over her copies of Two Serious Ladies and Mrs. Dalloway. She was open and vulnerable to the universe, her emotional highs and lows amplified in our simplified life."

Sounds like a dream life for anyone, and admittedly- I am a little jealous of their life together and also of his childhood. "Like most sons I wanted to be like my father. But the desire to be a pianist like him was not met with the desire or discipline to sit down at a piano to bash through countless repetitions of Czerny and Hannon exercises. My father didn't push me, telling me that in time I would find what gave me joy." Even his mother didn't push music on him, this surprised me so much. So often we see parents trying to replicate themselves in their children, forcing them into the same life and it seems his parents were wise enough to know music wasn't his calling. I love this though, " My father was on constant alert for signs of a calling. When I played tennis with him and nailed a forehand winner, he arranged for tennis lessons, hoping this would be like the fateful moment when he'd find the right note in his mother's score." The best parents are guilty of it, hungry to nurture our children's natural talents and feed the fire of their leanings, so to speak. "I felt like I was letting my father down. Where was my spark? Where was my thing?" Who hasn't felt that, especially those with parents we admire?
With children who grew up overseas, it changes you. You're always in-between. I've seen similarities in my own children. The times of Spillman's youth were different from the Europe of today. Strange how our beginnings are vital to who we become, how our surroundings seep into our very marrow."A real artist doesn't need a safety net." He feels, and how lucky for him that his wife loved him enough to brave the unknown and follow his pilgrim soul on his journey to be a real bohemian.
His back and forth between parents is beautifully written about. "Of course I also didn't mention that I dreaded landing in Louisiana. I missed my mother and couldn't understand why she had moved so far away from me. Each time I visited I was afraid to see this person I didn't really know, along with my uncles, cousins, and grandparents, whom I didn't know at all. I felt like a foreign exchange student going off to live with his american family."

"TV was the foreign language they spoke." This struck me as very true. I remember when my children moved back to the united states after living in England and Japan and not knowing who all the celebrities and shows were their peers talked about. Way to feel like a distant ship, like a foreigner yourself. What bonds people is their culture, and like it as not, it seems to be TV here now and then.

I think about the famous writers disillusionment with the seemingly aimlessness that gripped Americans after the war and their hunger to discard the old life for something true, by returning to 'the old world', which sounds absurd and yet somehow made sense. Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein , T.S Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald- and yet it seems Spillman is longing for the same throughout his journey. There is bravery here, that not all of us could embrace.

Gorgeous memoir, one of the best I have read in a long time. Those of us who read Tin House know who he is, and are likely chomping at the bit to get their hands on this but it stands on it's own, even without knowing a thing about Tinhouse or Spillman. There may be a little Rob in all of us. Fantastic read! ...more

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Apr 07, 2016 Anne Martin rated it really liked it

Shelves: netgalley-arc

Rob Spillman has -so far had a fascinating life. Born to American expats on Fullbright scholarships, he was born and raised in Berlin at the time of the iron curtain. He came back to the U.S. with his divorced parents and lived in many different places, looking for "home". When the Perestroika got rid of the travel limitations and the two Berlins could be reunited, of course, Spillman wanted to go back. That is what he did in the very early nineties. It is quite hard to describe Berlin after the ...more

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Mar 20, 2016 Susanna rated it really liked it

Shelves: memoir, coming-of-age, music, nonfiction, tin-house-workshop

I eagerly awaited this book, because I'm such a fan of Tin House, and I've heard Rob Spillman talk about what he looks for in a story or essay, so my expectations were high. The more I knew about the book, the more I wanted to read it -- I too sought something more from my existence through art as a young person, I too suffered through parental vagaries, I too have a connection with Germany, and I too found my path through punk music and its offshoots.

The book took a while for me to get into -- ...more

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Feb 21, 2016 Greg rated it really liked it

In reading Rob Spillman’s coming-of-age memoir, I was reminded of something one of Don DiLillo’s characters said to describe another person in the recent New Yorker short story, “Sine Cosine Tangent.” “The vivid boy, she whispered. The shapeless man.” Indeed, Spillman seems to have had a vivid boyhood, characterized by living part time with each of his separated musician parents. He seems to have wanted to believe that his closeted gay father was a far more compelling figure than his mother, who In reading Rob Spillman’s coming-of-age memoir, I was reminded of something one of Don DiLillo’s characters said to describe another person in the recent New Yorker short story, “Sine Cosine Tangent.” “The vivid boy, she whispered. The shapeless man.” Indeed, Spillman seems to have had a vivid boyhood, characterized by living part time with each of his separated musician parents. He seems to have wanted to believe that his closeted gay father was a far more compelling figure than his mother, who was, after all, just a mother. With his father, he looked forward to road trips designed to feed his running fantasies; and living in Berlin, Aspen and Upstate New York—all exciting places peopled by all sorts of fascinating artistic types. Conversely, he found living in Baltimore with his mother to be stifling and looked forward to nothing more than escaping just as soon as possible. Both parents loved Robby in their own ways, but each maintained a certain distance from him, a situation that ultimately left him far too much on his own searching for an identity.

Using alternating chapters that give the narrative a sense of simultaneity, Spillman follows his childhood; and his later search as an adult for a bohemian writing lifestyle in Europe, patterned after Hemingway or Kerouac. Driven primarily by anecdotes, the narrative is both intimate and engaging. What Spillman fails to recognize throughout the memoir, however, —and only seems to come to terms with in the final pages—was that he was a perennial outsider who adopted several powerful coping mechanisms. He ran to escape. Although a talented runner, he never realized any of his running fantasies. One of the most troubling and curious anecdotes was his decision to leave his wife while she was obviously experiencing a medical emergency to go for a run through the rubble of East Berlin. He read widely and was obviously moved by what he read, but one gets the sense that this was another way to escape things he did not like, such as boring part time jobs. And most troubling of all, he aspired to being a great writer himself (probably influenced by his artistic father), but never really engaged with it. Instead he did things that actually interfered with it like drinking and partying to excess. Although a man known to like a party, Hemingway once said about writing, “All you have to do is write one true sentence.” Spillman wrote a whole manuscript for a novel that he later realized had no true sentences, so he discarded it.

Although the memoir is replete with colorful anecdotes and does not shrink from the truth, it can be frustrating to read because, filtered through the lens he creates, one sees a young man who was given far too little guidance and allowed to make far too many wrong turns and to venture down far too many blind alleys. He flunked out of college and had three major automobile accidents to mention just two. Clearly, he seems to have been prone to adopting risky behaviors that occasionally panned out, like electing to live in East Berlin prior to unification, but just as likely did not. Knowing that he landed on his feet in the end is a relief and a testament to his intelligence, perseverance and guile.
...more

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Mar 15, 2016 Rachel rated it it was amazing

I have never read a book quite like this one. I wanted not just to travel to the time periods and places Rob Spillman was living in, but to be in his shoes and inhabit his experiences. His lively, enrapturing prose made that nearly possible. Spillman has incredible insight; here is someone laying bare for you many of his youthful aspirations, mistakes, and acquired knowledge, always with the intent of expressing to the reader that a true artist’s calling, the chasing of a dream, is never easy, b ...more

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Mar 06, 2016 Geeta rated it liked it

Shelves: 26-in-2016

I read this in galley via Netgalley, so I don't know how much the Kindle changed the formatting and how that affected my reading of it.

Spillman uses the occasion of living in post wall, pre unification East Berlin to reflect on his life from his birth to musician parents in Berlin (West), their split, his early childhood in Berlin, the return to the States, and his constant search for home. Neither of his parents seem able to provide this; home, he believes, is Berlin.

He returns as an adult wi ...more

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About Rob Spillman

Rob Spillman is Editor and co-founder of Tin House, a sixteen-year-old bi-coastal (Brooklyn, New York and Portland, Oregon) literary magazine. He is the 2015 recipient of the PEN/Nora Magid Award for Editing as well as the 2015 VIDO Award from VIDA. Tin House is the recipient of the 2015 Firecracker Award for General Excellence and has been honored in Best American Stories, Best American Essays, B ...more

More about Rob Spillman...

Books by Rob Spillman

Fantastic Women: 18 Tales of the Surreal and the Sublime from Tin House

Gods and Soldiers: The Penguin Anthology of Contemporary African Writing

Tin House 64: Summer Reading 2015, Vol. 16, No. 4

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