His recent memoir, "The Other Side of Loneliness: A Spiritual Journey ," begins where many do, at the beginning. Early chapters are filled with his first memories, his childhood in Connecticut and Vermont, and his many loves and heartbreaks. Like his well-to-do parents before him, O'Gorman enjoyed an upbringing that was "spared any existential hazard." He was raised in the 1930s and 1940s, and his was by any measure a comfortable life.
Despite coming from privilege, O'Gorman entered adulthood as an insecure, needy, and neglected young man. The struggle to locate himself amid a painfully withdrawn adolescence was compounded by a stubborn speech impediment. His glowering and distant father, who never approved of his less-than-macho demeanor, didn't help things. Nor did O'Gorman's oddly out-of-the-picture mother, his loyal but crazed nanny, and a lecherous family friend who molested him.
To his credit, O'Gorman never accuses any single character from his past. But he also never fully delves into the reasons for his obsessive and desperate desire to love, and to be encompassed by love. O'Gorman battles his Catholic beliefs, yet flirts with the idea of becoming a priest or a monk. But the voice is too interior and the point of view is too myopic. He reproduces only snippets of dialogue with others and hardly describes any character in detail other than his father.
Meanwhile, the litany of longings becomes tedious. Scenes of him weeping or escaping into the solace of the woods border on the ridiculous.
Likewise, the theatrics of his family relations, too often told in vague abstractions -- one paragraph alone uses "malignant presence," "fury," "catastrophe," "wickedness," "horror," and "abyss" -- feels self- dramatizing, not self-revealing.
The prose itself is also uneven. At times, O'Gorman's language is precise: "Sons crave their father's [sic] praise even if their fathers praise them for the wrong things and for the wrong reasons." But just as often the writing is overwrought, like this hooey describing an early sexual episode: "I carried a sweetness in my loins."
