David Senra

You'd best be ready to stake your claim and not let go because, quote, they were not going to give it to you for free.

You would have to risk and to pay.

His love of living, the intensity of his presence, his engagement in the day and his dominion over his family made him a unique male figure in my life.

He was exciting, scary, theatrical, self-mythologizing, bragging.

He was like a rock star.

And what you realize when you read this book is every single experience that Bruce encounters, he pulls into his work.

There is no separation between him and his work.

And so he talks about what he learned from his family and how it influenced his work.

There is a strength, fear, and desperate joy in all of this hard spirit and soul that naturally found its way into my work.

We push until we can go no further, stand strong until our bones give way, reach and hold until our muscles fatigue, twist, shout, and laugh,

until we can no more, until the very end.

Now, what is masterful about the storytelling in this book is he's describing his family.

I didn't understand this till I reread everything.

And a huge part of the book is just this disastrous relationship that he has with his father.

And so the beginning is describing his life, describing his work.

The second half of the book is the toll that all of this took on him because he tried to bury it and never dealt with it.

I'm 25 pages into this book.

And he starts describing something that I didn't know affected him too.

So he says, I don't know where this started, but a serious strain of mental illness drifts through those of us who are here.

Seemingly randomly pick off a cousin, an aunt, a son, a grandma, and unfortunately, my dad.