I Wouldn't Normally Do This Kind of Thing: A Memoir

by Marshall Moore

What do you get when you mix a father with severe PTSD after barely surviving the Vietnam War, a self-proclaimed clairvoyant mother with anger issues and no filter whatsoever, rivers of booze, an awkward but academically gifted son, and a daughter with a hidden disability and a mile-wide rebellious streak? This is going to get messy. Then throw in a generous helping of domestic violence, some good old-fashioned small-town Southern homophobia, and the kind of dark family secret that makes headlines. You’ve got all the makings of a complete, blazing disaster. Marshall Moore got into the groundbreaking North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics, the nation’s first residential STEM-focused magnet school, as a means of escaping a hometown and a childhood he otherwise might not have survived. He then set it on fire. And then the story gets really complicated. I Wouldn’t Normally Do This Kind of Thing is a memoir about a family cosplaying normalcy in Southern suburbia in the seventies and shocking, hilarious, appalling, bizarre, and… actually true.

Marshall Moore is the author of four novels (Inhospitable, Bitter Orange, An Ideal for Living, and The Concrete Sky) and three short-fiction collections (A Garden Fed by Lightning, The Infernal Republic, and Black Shapes in a Darkened Room). His work has appeared in The Southern Review, Litro, Storgy, Passengers Journal, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Asia Literary Review, The Barcelona Review, and many other journals and anthologies. He is also the co-editor of three academic books on the pedagogy of creative writing and publishing. He holds a PhD in creative writing from Aberystwyth University. A native of eastern North Carolina, he lives in Cornwall, England, and teaches creative writing and publishing at Falmouth University.

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir

251 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 19, 2022

About the author

Marshall Moore is the author of several books: The Concrete Sky (Haworth Press, 2003); Black Shapes in a Darkened Room (Suspect Thoughts Press, 2004); An Ideal for Living (Lethe Press, 2010); The Infernal Republic (Signal 8 Press, 2012); Bitter Orange (Signal 8 Press, 2013); A Garden Fed by Lightning (Signal 8 Press, 2016); Inhospitable (Camphor Press, 2018); and I Wouldn't Normally Do This Kind of Thing (Rebel Satori Press, 2022). With Xu Xi, Moore is the co-editor of The Queen of Statue Square: New Short Fiction from Hong Kong (Nottingham: Critical, Cultural & Communications Press, 2014). A collection of his short stories (Sagome nere) was published in Italian by 96, rue de-la-Fontaine Edizioni, in 2017. With Sam Meekings, he has coedited two academic books on the subject of creative writing: The Place and the Writer: International Intersections of Teacher Lore and Creative Writing Pedagogy (Bloomsbury, 2021) and Creative Writing Scholars on the Publishing Trade: Practice, Praxis, Print (Routledge, 2021).

Forthcoming:

Blood and Black T-Shirts: Dispatches from Hong Kong's Descent into Hell 2019-2020 (Camphor Press, 2023);

Love Is a Poisonous Color (Rebel Satori Press, 2023), short story collection no. 4;

and a third coedited academic book that will focus on the concept of creative practice.

As of 2020, he lives in Cornwall, England, after more than a decade in Hong Kong and several years in the outskirts of Seoul.

Note from MM 8 Aug 2022: I'm listed as the author of short stories that appear in a few supernatural anthologies, and the links connect to my account. I suspect this is another writer with the same name. No disrespect to whoever this might be, but we're not the same person.

Reviews

[Alison Frost · Rating 5 out of 5]

“For some people, survival is the achievement.” Spoiler alert: Marshall survived, and, I believe, thrived. It took a while, as it does with late bloomers, but his coming of age/coming out story is a story for all of us. If you are from the Crystal Coast, there are sections of this book that read like home. I still get homesick occasionally and today is one of those days after reading of places
last visited 20 years ago. It’s a beautiful area, worth a visit. His survival, that moment that I experienced so recently, made me put the book down for a day to wrestle with those emotions too. In confronting himself and his past, he forces the reader to do the same. The chapters are brief, written with the clarity that comes from an experienced author, and his stories so real, you feel as if you are there with him. Kudos, Marshall, and thank you. I wish your story were more unique, but your talent is making this book worth every moment spent with it.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

In my opinion this is Moore's strongest work to date. In a departure from the usual (and wonderful!) fiction and dark magial realism, this is a non-fiction memoir of the author's early life. It's shocking and heartbreaking, and, honestly, just as dark and fucked up as his fiction. And it may contain just a hint of magic beneath the surface. He delves deep, turns over every rock, allows no fig leaves to cover the uncomfortable parts. It's a no-holds-barred look at the broken people that shaped his early years, with some of the clarity that adulthood and years can bring. All brought to the page with his trademark searing wit. Highly recommended.