If one image could sum up “The Same Dead Songs: A Memoir of Working-Class Addictions” (j.new books), it might be that of author Dave Newman’s life-long friend, Anthony, standing outdoors with his face to the window of the Trafford home Newman shares with his wife and young children. Anthony is outside looking in — completely inappropriate, but not so much menacing as pathetic, lost to booze, drugs and aimlessness.
The image recurs several times in the 159-page memoir, which is set mostly over the course of a couple of days as Newman attempts to gracefully navigate Anthony’s repeated intrusions.
The context is Newman’s struggles with his own working-class insecurities, economic and otherwise. He grew up in Irwin, Pa., his youth marked by fistfights and drinking. He was the first in his family to graduate from college; at the time the main action of the book took place, perhaps a decade ago, he was a published small-press novelist, but his resume also included stints as a college professor, truck driver, and unemployed person, among other roles.
Newman, 52, now teaches writing at the University of Pittsburgh’s Greensburg campus. He came up a few years behind Anthony, an older kid he admired. But things changed.
“A lot of the things that other people grow out of or lessen or move away from, kind of all of his failures, he pulled back into vice and just wanted to stay hammered all the time until it was just detrimental to everybody in his life,” said Newman in an interview. “And he was — for a while — like showing up at my house all the time. I go to the door and his face will be pressed to the glass window and things like that.”
The memoir’s title references the classic-rock radio tunes Anthony insists on dashboard-drumming to as Newman drives him home after a long, booze-soaked evening (and morning).
But “The Same Dead Songs” is suffused with Newman’s knowledge of all he shares with Anthony. “If you’re working class, you understand that no one understands you,” he writes. Elsewhere, he adds, “I come from a culture that blames themselves for everything.”
Being working-class, in other words, is about more than the kind of job you do, or how much you earn.
“I think it's how you perceive yourself and how the world perceives you when you go through these things,” he said. “Like even if you're doing well in college classes, you might not know the proper behavior or etiquette or how to approach your teachers. And so I think you just kind of carry the weight of whatever the working-classness was.”
Newman is the author of seven books, including the novels “Raymond Carver Will Not Raise Our Children” and “East Pittsburgh Downlow,” as well as the collection “The Slaughterhouse Poems.”
In “The Same Dead Songs,” he revisits favorite themes, especially the travails of writing from a working-class perspective. He writes that he was asked to leave a master’s program because the professor said writing poems about being a janitor didn’t require that level of education. And Newman writes that no one wants to publish fight stories — even though, as Newman proves, the psychology of fighting is as rich a literary vein as for any other activity.
He also writes about how reading saved him — his discovery, as an adult, that books could open whole new worlds, and be a way to travel through this one. Newman writes enough about reading that his own readers might recognize it as a compulsion in itself.
Newman proudly called reading “the best kind of addiction.”
“Definitely, it's always on my mind more than writing,” he said. “I’m always wondering — how am I going to find time to read? Where am I going to find the space to read? How can I not be rude to people by saying, 'Look, I'm reading here' as I'm like on the bed and someone comes in, wants to tell you about their day?"
Anthony, Newman writes, reads too. That it doesn’t seem to provide him the same solace or direction is one of his book’s little tragedies.
