by JULIET WATERS

The therapeutic memoir recently received a double blow with James Frey’s too-tall tales of rehab and J.T. Leroy’s truck-stop prostitute hoax. But veracity has never been the only problem with this genre. Falling Through the Earth, Danielle Trussoni’s memoir of growing up as the favourite daughter of an Italian-American Vietnam vet, is a good example. Even if every word of the story is verifiably true, sometimes other questions remain. Like, why are we being told this story in the first place?

Now, Trussoni is a hugely gifted and skilled writer with a vivid sense of place, a sharp ear for dialogue and a strong sense of character. Her story of growing up half in love with her brutal, mean-spirited, drunk, womanizing, cheap, selfish, extremely narcissistic father is a haunting one. But the reason we’re given for why we’re reading this story is so unsatisfying and simplistic that it comes close to ruining the book.

We should read this, apparently, because we need to know that war messes up not only soldiers, but their families. There isn’t a blurb on the back of this book that doesn’t point that out as the urgent reason why we need to read it, and now, because in case you didn’t know, men are coming back from the war.

Problem is that Trussoni creates suspicion in the very first pages that there’s a whole lot more going on in this narrative than the war. Daniel Trussoni, after whom Danielle was named, was a tunnel rat. A job that involved crawling through webs of tunnels to root out and kill Vietnamese guerrillas, it was considered one of the most dangerous assignments in Vietnam. It was also, however, an assignment that was given only to volunteers. It was a near-suicide mission, taken usually because it bumped up the pay, but just as often because the volunteers were crazy risk addicts. You start to suspect that Daniel Trussoni was already more than a little damaged going into the war.

The pre-war Trussoni might have been significantly less nasty a character than he comes off as in this book. But his family history, with its hints of Mafia involvement, and the Trussonis’ reputation as hard-living blue collar Italian-Americans, hints at heartbeats of darkness even before Vietnam happened. This isn’t to suggest that Trussoni Sr. was somehow responsible for his post-traumatic stress syndrome, or that his mental and emotional problems were any less devastating because of the mysteries of his character.

But the truly interesting story here is not how Daniel Trussoni fell victim to the war, but how his daughter survived his extremely negligent and abusive parenting. And by “survived” I don’t mean standard memoir fare, like at what point she learned to distinguish between pity and love and gather the strength to walk away from the father whose love she desperately craved etc., etc. Rather, at what point does a young single mother raised by a Midwestern Italian-American man contemptuous of education, contemptuous of women, contemptuous of life, crawl out of the tunnel her father crammed her into, and decide to write as well as she does?

Because this is not the kind of writing that springs out of nowhere. This is the writing of someone who’s worked hard on developing her talent. Hard enough to raise suspicions that she’s far more interesting than her father, whose story rises like a massive shadow blocking out what little light she casts on herself.

This story cries out to be re-written as fiction. There’s too much mystery, too much tragedy, too much complexity in the relationship between a talented daughter and a tormented father for it to be well served by the limitations that the therapeutic memoir imposes: the facile answers to the whats, the wheres and the whys that are so often, in the end, impossible to answer.

Falling Through the Earth: A Memoir by Danielle Trussoni. Henry Holt. hc. 256 pp. $30.95