review - the guinness book of me

“The Guinness Book of Me”
By Steven Church
(Simon and Schuster)

Most children go through a phase where they are completely enamored by the Guinness Book of World Records; Steven Church never grew out of it. In “The Guinness Book of Me,” Church hauls out his 1980 and 1982 copies, recording the records he idolized as a boy and using them to organize episodes from his life.

The episodes, which cover Church’s life from boyhood to present day, follow no chronological path: a chapter on boys’ fascination with destruction (“Piano Smashing”) leads into a rumination on record holders’ private lives, then to his own severe illness as a small boy (“Commonest Diseases”). Church often imagines himself joining the ranks of his Guinness idols - “World’s Largest Ten Year Old, Biggest Hands for a Child Under Twelve, World Record Holder for Consuming Breakfast Cereal” - as a way of coping with what he considered his own freakish tendencies; his penchant for injuries and discomfort over his massive size are two themes that run throughout. The memory of his brother, Matt, a daredevil who died at the age of 18, haunts most of the chapters, adding a dash of melancholy to an often humorous story. His own reflections on fatherhood bring the story full circle.

The direct, simple prose style used in the book (which Church dubs “creative non-fiction”) flows over the page without distracting accoutrements; this could almost be the tale of any boy growing up in the 70s or 80s. The rites of passage Church experiences with his father and brother (his first knife, hunting, building an x-wing fighter) seem to be parts of an almost universal middle-America boyhood experience – or so my male friends report. Unfortunately, it is precisely this quality that also limits the story; it may be well written, but there's nothing so outstanding or compelling about Church's life that it demands memoir-iztion in book form. The creative use of Guinness book entries is intriguing, but certain chapters have a more tenuous connection than others to their preceding “record,” making the records more of a curiosity of the narrative, rather than a necessary component.

The gimmick of using Guinness entries may at first make this book stand out from other similar memoirs of childhood, but it isn’t enough to pull it from the realm of average.