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In an intricately linked series of poetic, short tales set in a 1983 suburb, Greg Bottoms portrays his life as one of two “at-risk” boys as they attempt to learn how to be—and what it means to be—men. By turns funny, disquieting, and moving, Fight Scenes takes an unsparing look at juvenile disaffection and the dark side of white, working-class masculinity. By narrating his experiences with childhood buddy Mark, Bottoms shows how many of America’s young men learn to think about work, sex, weakness, violence, and themselves.
In a pared-down, highly readable style that brings to mind the work of Raymond Carver, Sherman Alexie, and Denis Johnson, Bottoms has created a work of literature that shows how even the most accepted forms of “toughness” can have a damaging, disorienting, and finally dehumanizing effect on everyone, especially kids.
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A taut, powerful memoir of madness, Angelhead documents the violent, drug-addled descent of the author's brother, Michael, into schizophrenia. Beginning with Michael's first psychotic break—seeing God in his suburban bedroom window while high on LSD—Greg Bottoms recounts, in gripping, dramatic prose, the bizarre disappearances, suicide attempts, and the shocking crime that land Michael in the psychiatric wing of a maximum security prison. A work of nonfiction with the form and imagery of a novel, Angelhead enables the reader to witness not only the fragmenting of a mind, but of a family as well.
"A tour-de-force memoir. . . . Bottoms writes like a poet, he writes like he is on fire."—Esquire, Book of the Year, 2000
"Angelhead is a brilliant, albeit inconceivably sad book. The fact that Bottoms survived the ordeal is incredible. But the fact that he could write about it with such pathos and insight is nothing less than extraordinary."—Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"Greg Bottoms has provided a biographical novel about his brother that may be as close as most of us will ever get to knowing what it is to be truly mad. Angelhead is a story nearly as terrifying as the disease it describes."—Psychology Today
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