Book Review: "Stories I Tell Myself: Growing Up With Hunter S. Thompson"

Juan F. Thompson's memoir, “Stories I Tell Myself: Growing Up With Hunter S. Thompson,” is an honest, clear-eyed, and compassionate telling of a quiet son and his relationship with the complicated, tormented genius of his father Hunter.

I listened to the audio book, read by Juan Thompson, and recommend it to anyone familiar with the work of Hunter, or interested in a story about what reconciliation can look like. It is tough, painful, and loving.

When I went off to college, away from the all seeing eyes of my parents, I experimented rather liberally with all the drugs and booze I was afraid to do at home. I felt free to become the person who wasn’t afraid. When a fellow freshman on “the quiet floor” gave me copy of Hunter S. Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas”, I knew who I wanted to become. The legend, or public persona of Hunter was both brilliant and uncontaminated: an explosive journalist/writer of American culture and politics. He was also drug fiend and alcoholic. He made the use and abuse of just about any illicit substance look great.

I read all his books as fast as I could. Like many other young, impressionable college students, I found my deity. I tried to look, talk, drink, smoke and write like him. My efforts were performative at best. From my vantage point, he made it look easy, and I thought if he could do it, so could I and then some. His larger than life personality inspired and ignored the reality of how my behavior, as his, often did more harm than good. That particular form of blindness is intoxicating.

Hunter’s persona ultimately consumed him through the disease of alcoholism. His great American writing voice gurgled, sputtered, and stuttered into nothing more than a mumble of his past self. His later work was sporadic and middling at best. He was burned out. After a series of chronic, and increasing, health issues related to a lifetime of drug and alcohol abuse, Hunter took his own life at 67. It was the way he wanted to go, so there’s that.

Juan is unflinching in his simple telling of his father’s alcoholism and drug addiction. It isn’t romanticized or downplayed, it simply was a part of his father’s life. By sticking to a just the facts telling of his father’s dangerous excesses, Juan is responding to his father’s grandiose version of the same issue. Where Hunter was explosive, Juan is a serene, loving noise cancelling storyteller. What remains is the love between a father and son, and a deep appreciation and acknowledgment of  Hunter’s contribution to the world. Suffice to say, it’s complicated.

I’m glad I heard it from Juan himself. There can be tenderness amid the explosions. This story is worth a read or listen.