Skipping Through the Graveyard in My Puke-Stained Suit: Growing Up in 1970s Rural Pennsylvania

by William S. Repsher

Rural Pennsylvania in the 1970s was a meeting ground between past and present. William S. Repsher details what it was like to be raised in a working-class family of seven, from his staunchly Irish-Catholic grandmother, to his saintly, lapsed-Protestant mother, and his hellraising oldest brother who taught him the evils of smoking by pinning him to the basement floor and blowing smoke rings in his face. While most lessons weren't that harsh, the book details the innocence of the time, fading into the looser reality of the decade as he navigates his teenage years at the turn of the 1980s. Guilt, anger, revenge, vomiting (and other bodily functions), death, discovery and eight tracks. It's all there. After living 30 years in New York City, Mr. Repsher felt an urge not just to define his childhood but to shed light on a place that's rarely written about, positively or negatively. In some respects the book is nostalgic, but he also hopes to crawl inside the nostalgia and drag out some of the more embarrassing and dark memories that grew less comforting with age. As New York City reveals so many hard, emotional truths about the people who live there, Mr. Repsher hopes to do the same for the place where he was raised.

295 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 5, 2017

About the author

In my picture, I'm sitting on my bed back in Fountain Springs, home from New York, winter of 2013. Every night from about 1977 onwards found me doing something creative on that bed. At first, it was reading, horror novels by Stephen King, shortly followed by books about Vietnam and rock stars, branching into Kurt Vonnegut, Hunter S. Thompson, William S. Burroughs. It occurred me to start writing, like those guys, but I soon realized while I loved reading them, their voices were not mine. All the while, I had my trusty pair of Radio Shack Nova 40s headphones on and was absorbing the bedrock pop and rock music of the 1960s and 70s.

I found my voice in college, writing Friday humor columns for the Penn State newspaper in the mid-80s, growing into a failed novelist in my 20s, followed quickly by moderate success writing essays and music reviews for NYPress, the free weekly that came to challenge the Village Voice in the 1990s. Concurrently, old pal Jordan Hoffman invited me to write humor and music pieces for his nascent webzine, Leisuresuit.net. I had great fun and learned much of what I needed to know as a writer at both places. Later, I started my own blog, Positively Catherine Street, which I still write today. I found it hard to work within the constraints of the "normal" publishing world, which says as much about what an idiot I am as it does the strange, rigid systems of that industry.

It occurred to me earlier this fall that over the years, I had written enough interesting pieces about growing up in rural Pennsylvania in the 1970s that I could make a book from those pieces. I thought it would be 100 pages or so. It was ... in my Microsoft Word document. (Little did I know 12-point font and more liberal paragraph spacing would translate into 300 book pages!)

So, here it is. I feel good about this book. A long time coming, a lot of stuff delved into, some funny, some deeply embarrassing, some heartbreaking. I tried not to hold back. I tried to be honest. If I don't report to work on Monday, could someone please contact the authorities?

Reviews

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Erik found this for me... the author is a few years older than me and is from North Eastern PA -- near Shamokin and Mt Carmel -- which is where my mother is from. The memoir goes year by year with an anecdote story, each of which is sort of a stand alone essay, yet all together they do form a lifetime of stories. I found some things I related to -- dentists not using novacaine, hanging out in graveyards, Yuengling, and lots of mentions of small towns I am familiar with and ultimately Penn State. Being a few years older and male -- I didn't have a whole sense of relating to growing up in the Coal region -- and yet there was enough familiar and iconicly PA that reminded me of my parents and my roots that I really enjoyed this.... and probably, ultimately more than I thought I did... I think this one will stick with me.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

A memoir about a working class upbringing in rural Pennsylvania. Being from Long Island, I'd sometimes find myself passing through the seemingly endless PA countryside en route to somewhere else and wondering what life was like in those little towns, most of which seemed to have been built for a few hundred more people than still occupied them. Repsher's book tells the story of some of those lives. I especially liked the chapters about working at the factory. My favorite, though, was the one about visiting his maiden aunts who all lived together in a nearby town. That setting was like something out of Dubliners.

[Jerri Morello · Rating 3 out of 5]

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[Mr. B · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good stories, fair writing.