Decadence - Paperback

"The genre of memoir is bullshit (as I humbly posit). No one actually lives like they are moving along some grand Freytag's triangle. Rather, we live within isolated instances, specific struggles and victories, which, when compiled, form a narrative."--Richard Kelly Kemick

In Decadence, Richard Kelly Kemick's "accidental memoir of a sort," the author ranges widely through his myriad preoccupations and obsessions--volleyball, municipal landfills, dogs, high school plays, Christmas villages, love--out of which the shape of a unique sensibility is revealed. Reminiscent of the three Davids--Rakoff, Sedaris, and Wallace--these essays accrete into a portrait of a man trying to make sense of a world in which there are no goddamn rules; and yet one in which every action has sometimes profound consequences. A book of intelligence and care and kindness and humour and yearning and the occasional epiphany, Decadence gathers up from the odds and ends of living what makes a modern life--quiet and desperate as it may at times be--worth celebrating.