by JULIET WATERS

Since I started reviewing books, I've donated, recycled, sold, lent and given away roughly a ton of memoirs. Amazingly few have stayed in my bookcase. This is mostly because I live in a small apartment, but I can't think of one time I've ever regretted a memoir I've purged. Memoirs are kind of like the garage sale of writing. People set out their lives for us. We take what seems appealing or useful to us at the time, but almost always they end up back out there in the dance of the discarded.

I've always held on, however, to Jim Knipfel's first memoir, Slackjaw. If ever I'm forced to move into a closet and can only bring one, this would be it. Then, after I'd made that lofty decision, I would slip his most recent memoir, Ruining It for Everybody, in the pocket of a coat or something. Fortunately it's very small.

Slackjaw is the story of a young punk writer from the Midwest who lives through a series of highly debilitating experiences. A progressive blindness took most of his vision away, a brain lesion brought on seizures and bouts of suicidal manic depression, and chronic alcoholism didn't make things much better. But as one reviewer pointed out, of all the things he'd survived, "the worst of it was probably going to college in the '80s." Knipfel is brilliantly scathing about the culture he grew up in. As I wrote when I reviewed Slackjaw, it's the story of someone going so psychically numb in an unbearable place and time that actual blindness and madness come off as subtext.

Slackjaw has remained in my bookcase for all those years as an example of writing that can be excruciating and dark while managing to be highly readable and funny. Since its publication, Knipfel has written another critically acclaimed memoir, Quitting the Nairobi Trio, about his six months in a mental hospital, as well as a novel, The Buzzing. As a career columnist for the New York Press, Knipfel really is the best of this media where the best usually move on to the so-called better. Ruining It for Everybody is, however, a moving on of sorts.

What has always distinguished Knipfel from the other misanthropic wannabes is the courage of his cynicism. In writing a memoir about surviving a tragic life, the temptation - if self-pity has been avoided - is to find the silver lining, to refer to some kind of spiritual strength that has evolved. You know, write that ending that allows the reader to smile, take solace and then comfortably recycle. Knipfel has never allowed his readers that luxury. "Whenever I hear the word ‘spiritual,' I reach for my revolver," he tells us in the first sentence.

But Knipfel is, above all things, honest. He can't avoid noticing that success and maturity has changed him. Blindness, alcoholism, epilepsy and mental illness will always be part of his daily struggle. Other things like loneliness, poverty and failure are simply just not there as much. He seems to have a remarkable girlfriend, a graphic artist as funny, perverse and loyal as he is. He writes what he wants for a living. The days where his mission in life was to afflict the comfortable are, if not over, at least not as driven. The terror of being happy because he might become like the complacent masses he abhors is harder to maintain. Now that he's accomplished some serious goals and been loved, happiness creeps in more and more often despite his obvious efforts. The day has come for Knipfel to take his socks off when he walks in the sand.

Ruining It for Everybody feels very much like the last memoir Knipfel will write. It is dark, funny, but reticently happy. Maybe the Everybody he has ruined it for is his readers. Maybe he will now become discardable. My guess, however, is that more than a few of his readers will find a place to stash this. Hopefully somewhere next to the revolver.

Ruining It For Everybody by Jim Knipfel,
Tarcher Penguin, pb, 235pp, $14.50