Monday Musing

Eat Only When You're Hungry ~ by Lindsay Hunter, 2017, literary fiction (Florida), 224 pages

This one's about a father who searches for his addict son while grappling with his own choices as a parent (and as a user of sorts).  It follows 58-year-old Greg as he searches for his son, GJ, an addict who has been missing for three weeks.  Greg is bored, demoralized, obese, and as dubious of GJ’s desire to be found as he is of his own motivation to go looking.  Almost on a whim, Greg embarks on a road trip to central Florida, telling himself it's a noble search for his son.

So we go with Greg on a tour of highway and roadside, of Taco Bell, KFC, gas-station Slurpees, sticky strip-club floors, pooling sweat, candy wrappers, and crumpled panes of cellophane and wrinkled plastic bags tumbling along the interstate.  This is the America Greg knows, one he feels closer to than to his youthful idealism, closer even than to his younger second wife.

As his journey continues, through drive-thru windows and into the living rooms of his alluring ex-wife and his distant, curmudgeonly father, Greg’s urgent search for GJ slowly recedes into the background, replaced with a painstaking, illuminating, and unavoidable look at Greg’s own mistakes ― as a father, as a husband, and as a man.  Eat Only When You’re Hungry is a study of addiction, perseverance, and the insurmountable struggle to change.

Musing (okay, pondering)

I went browsing for another book in the Crown Center library and noticed this one.  It looks like we've had this one on our shelves since May of 2019, but I don't remember ever seeing it.  (Of course, that's not a difficult thing to imagine when many, many books on are the shelves and shelves and shelves of books, right?)  So I signed it out and brought it home with me.