The Trouble with Being Born - Reviews

"In his fourth book, Jeffrey DeShell takes on the challenge of writing from inside those familiar strangers whose lives led to his own: his parents. The elegant formal structure of The Trouble with Being Born organizes a thoughtful, heartfelt, and extraordinarily visual (indeed, sensual) querying of histories, subjectivities, and the narrative shapes we give to our lives."
--Laura Mullen

"The Trouble with Being Born evokes the constricted egotism and materialistic desperation of America's mid-century. The DeShell family seems incomprehensible, spilling out everywhere as romantic fragments, bourgeois myths, the bric-a-brac of blocked transcendence and dogged calculation. I emerged from the reading with a powerful sense of words struggling, like the characters themselves, to organize contradictions into a life."
--R. M. Berry

"In The Trouble with Being Born the parents trade riffs, mother and father telling their stories in short, staccato sentences. Jeffrey DeShell's writing of them gets under the skin, the way parents' "autobiographies" also live under their children's lives. DeShell is a daring, intelligent, hard-eyed, and tenderhearted writer, all of which is abundantly evident in his wonderful new novel."
--Lynne Tillman