A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip ― A Memoir of Seventh Grade

The acclaimed novelist recalls the most difficult year of his life, with all its mistakes, triumphs, sadnesses, and joys: a tale about how hard it is to grow up and how the experiences of childhood shape the adults we become.

At twelve, Kevin is ready to become a different person—not the boy he has always been, who cries too easily and laughs too easily, living in an otherland of sparkling daydreams and imaginary catastrophes, but someone else altogether. A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip follows him over the course of a single school year as he sets out in search of himself: losing old friends and gaining new ones, happening into his first kiss, writing plays and stories, dressing as Dolly Parton for Halloween, booby-trapping his lunch to deter a thief. With the same deep feeling and oddly dreamlike precision that are the hallmarks of his fiction, Brockmeier now explores the dream of his own past, recovering the person he used to be, the friends he had, the hopes he nurtured, the doubts he hid, the secrets he kept, the books he read—everything that was once his life. He has written a singularly candid, daring, and open-hearted memoir that unfolds with the immediacy of a novel and richly recreates a particular time, place, and consciousness, one that every reader will recognize.

KEVIN BROCKMEIER is the author of five novels for adults and two children's novels. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, McSweeney's, The Oxford American, The Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories and Granta's Best of Young American Novelists, among other publications. He has taught at the Iowa Writer's Workshop.