by Hannah Ryder
February 21, 2023
Hannah Ryder holds an MFA from Savannah College of Art & Design. Her writing and photography can be found in Great Lakes Review, Port City Review, Qua Literary and Fine Arts Magazine, and Tangled Locks Journal. She serves as an Associate Creative Nonfiction Editor at West Trade Review. Find more at hannahryder.com.
I'm Never Fine: Scenes and Spasms on Loss by Joseph Lezza; Vine Leaves Press; 294 pgs.; $17.99
Joseph Lezza tackles parent death and moving forward in his debut essay collection I’m Never Fine: Scenes and Spams on Loss. The only child of a strong Italian immigrant mother and a loving, hardworking father, Lezza had to face the inevitable when his father was diagnosed with aggressive cancer. Split into three sections—Prognosis, Pathology, and Paroxysm—the collection takes readers along on a journey of realization, grief, and moving forward. With a skilled hand, Lezza weaves a portrait of a person who is decidedly never fine.
Readers navigate through loss and death with Lezza, peering over his shoulder as he recalls a lifetime of memories. Grief stories can drag in darkness, but Lezza isn’t afraid to dip into the light, letting his dry humor buoy the sadness without undermining it. That is not to say that some pieces are heavier than others; “Food Fight” outlines the procedures and medicine that have become part of the Lezza family’s new normal offset with fond memories of chili dogs and soda. “It’s written into my code,” Lezza says about his father’s order, but later realizes his mistake in retrieving the food: “The cream soda Dad can’t have. The cream soda Dad specifically asked for despite carbonated beverages filling the topmost bracket of his post-Whipple ‘no-no’ list.” Cancer changes the little things that feel routine and shakes a family’s foundation.
“How to Shave Your Dying Father” operates in the same way, juxtaposing the familiarity of the past and uncertainty of the present. Lezza writes, “Without knowing how, I am four feet tall, just barely able to see over the edge of the vanity,” remembering how he watched his father ritualistically shave. Now, the roles have reversed: “We’ve switched places again, but not much else has changed,” Lezza explains. “One of us is helpless. The other, desperate to help.” While the subject matter is serious and is owed its moments, Lezza refuses to remain in the bowels of sadness.
It’s through the humor that readers get closer to Lezza and are drawn in with the tone of familiarity. “I count on the good, no matter how much it makes me sound like a T.J. Maxx affirmation,” Lezza admits. His witty observations give readers a small break in the medical jargon-heavy chapters: “I didn’t personally see the imaging, but without his tumor markers up to 4,000, I imagine it looks something like a nighttime descent into Las Vegas,” Lezza says of his father’s PET scan results. This balance makes for a fully realized collection of grief.
It's hard not to feel the crushing loss of Lezza’s father. We are introduced to a hardworking man whose dreams for his family eclipse all but his kindness. A jack of all trades, Joseph Lezza, Sr. was a fan of cars and family, the former of which is described in “There is No Butter in Italy,” which connects father, son, and machine as Lezza drives his father’s Oldsmobile Jetfire. Lezza finds the automotive magazine article his father gave in 1996. “Over the course of four pages, my father spoke to me through an interview I’d since forgotten, one he’d given from the driver’s seat nineteen years ago,” Lezza shares. As he got more comfortable piloting his father’s car, he became as connected to the car as his dad had all those years ago. “For the first time in two long spins around the syn, sitting in that driver’s seat, I felt a connection, current running directly to Dad that I was determined to chase wherever it led.”
It's through revisiting old hobbies and dreams that Lezza reconnects with his father’s memory. On a trip to his parents’ favorite Italian hilltop hotel, Lezza realizes that he hopes to see his father waiting for him, though he knows the absurdity of that deep-seated hope. It’s a universal experience, the reflex and hope that one might turn the corner, pick up the phone, or reach an Italian mountaintop and see their loved one again. It’s a muscle that must unlearn its instinct.
The forms employed throughout shake up expectations as Lezza incorporates poetry, screenwriting, travelogue, letters, and the popular video game, The Oregon Trail. The variation with which Lezza writes keeps the reader on their toes. While the format may change, the writing is reliably strong. Each piece treats readers to vulnerability, humor, sadness, and even a dash of hope.
Perhaps what makes this memoir so readable is the fearlessness with which Lezza stares down the barrel of his own life. Lezza speaks with a frankness that does not shy away from intense sadness; instead, he uses that frankness to fully realize grief and how it feels to lose a man whom Lezza imagined was invincible and whose love was the emotional backbone of the family. Love is an integral theme throughout. The heaviest-hitting essay lies in the middle in “The Space Between the Tenses.” It gets down to the nitty-gritty, the jarring shift of having two parents to just having one. The honesty sings off the page, starting with the first line: “The last words my father ever heard from me were a complaint that he wasn’t dying fast enough.” While the entire collection examines how one person’s death can change a family, this essay is one that lays bare who Lezza is as a human.
In the titular essay, Lezza insists he isn’t fine. There are a million truths to his state of being, but “fine” fails to describe the journey of watching a parent pass. Lezza’s voice is strong and authentic, approaching familial death with skill, showing us that grief brings many strong emotions, but fine might be the most overrated of them all.
©2023 West Trade Review
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A Trek Through Life, Death, and the World with Joseph Lezza in I’m Never Fine: Scenes and Spasms on Loss
NONFICTION REVIEW
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