Even So: Stories from an Overpopulated Farmhouse – a memoir by David D Coster

After working on it for a couple of decades, my book will finally be released on May 1st of 2024. Here is the link: https://icecubepress.com/2023/11/26/even-so-2/ It is entitled Even So: Stories from an Overpopulated Farmhouse, published by Ice Cube Press. The book can be pre-ordered now through this link to Ice Cube Press or through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other book suppliers.

The book began originally as a collection of stories about growing up, stories that were intended for my sons, stories that were about a time gone by. I wanted my boys to have a sense of who I was before they came along, and why I was who I was. I could never sort out my relationship with my own father, and I didn’t want that to also be true for my sons. So, I wrote stories. I had plenty of material to work with, growing up in the ’60s and ’70s on a farm in Iowa with nine siblings. The environment was chaotic to say the least, and there was enough daily drama to sink a battleship.

Each of the stories was told in such a way that my sons could deduce why that particular story was pertinent; the moral of each story was not spelled out. The reader had to figure it out. Each story was meant to entertain, too, even if it was a story about a terrible situation or event.

It was only after I had written twenty-five stories or so, all meant to inform and entertain, that I let my husband read them. I could hear him laughing out loud from the other room as he read, and then crying, and then laughing again. Later, as he handed them back to me, he said “First, you’re an amazing writer, and second, this story collection could be turned into a book. Everyone would read it.”

I was surprised. I knew I could be a compelling writer when I wanted to be, but my focus had been on my surgical career when I wrote, and my writing was in the form of medical articles, committee reports, business management recommendations, politics, and the like.

I compiled my stories into one booklet and gave them to my sons to read. They each read them at one sitting, and I could hear them laughing out loud regularly as they did so. Then I gave copies to my siblings, all nine of them, and they too found them hilarious. “You should make this a book!” they all said.

How could a collection of childhood stories become a book, I wondered. There has to be an arc – an interesting beginning, a climax, and an interesting ending. It has to be emotional, filled with both hilarity and tragedy so the reader really takes a ride as they work their way through it. It has to be something that’s hard to put down, something that touches the soul.

I thought about it for a long time, realizing that almost all of the funny stories I told were covering a lot of pathos, that humorous stories had always been a coping mechanism for me for dealing with a difficult childhood. So, I began again, now writing funny stories that exposed their dark core, stories that acknowledged the pathologies in our family. This was really difficult. How do you reveal enough without revealing so much that you risk oversharing? What if something is just too awful to write about? I wrote and I wrote. I added stories and removed stories. I reorganized them so that, although each story stood on its own, the compilation of the stories told another, bigger story, the story of what it was really like to grow up in the middle of nowhere with nine siblings in a house with one bathroom. I wrote about my mom and dad, about my siblings, about the culture of the period and the culture of the farm. I wrote about the struggles of my grandparents, my mother, my father, my siblings, and myself. I wrote about death. And life. I wrote about child labor and physical and emotional abuse. I wrote hilarious stories about the Evangelical church, stories that – without directly saying it – expose its demonic side. I wrote about running machines, nearly being killed a few times, becoming a teenager, learning about sex, and on and on and on.

But it still wasn’t the book I wanted. Once again, I handed it to a few friends to read, friends I could trust. This time the response was different. “You DO know you were abused, don’t you?” was the first comment from one astute reader. “What?” I said. “You were abused. This entire book is about abuse and neglect. No matter how funny you’ve made these stories, at their core is something that is going unsaid, something dark. Whatever it is should be exposed to the light of day.” Others had similar reactions. They couldn’t put the book down once they started it, but they all said “There’s way more to this story than you’re telling – it’s between the lines. You should reach into whatever that is and write about it as well – don’t pull any punches.”

And then, for nearly ten years, I couldn’t write. I would look at what I had done periodically, start pecking away on the computer, and then stop in disgust. I didn’t know the end of the story! How could I write a memoir when I didn’t know how it ends? Year after year, I tried to construct an arc for the book, an arc that, in fact, could not be determined until I awoke one day to the realization that my sons had grown up successfully without any significant scars. I had broken the cycle of pathological familial relationships with which I had grown up. Now I could finish the book! I knew the ending!

But I didn’t know the ending – something was yet to happen that would prevent me from finishing the book for nearly ten more years – something that was the most devastating thing ever.

So, here it is, the gritty memoir I needed to write. Did I tell every story I could have? No. There’s so much more, but this book makes the point I wanted to make. We carry our traumas and difficulties with us. They shape us, but they shouldn’t define us. Looking at life through the lens of victimhood is not a good thing – it’s a lens of weakness. Through the telling of stories, we have the option of reframing dramatic events in our lives, gradually smoothing out the rough patches until, as an older person, we can see it all in perspective. A life is just a life. We each have one, and thus have a story to tell, a story that is rich with the thrill and shit of living a life. Life is lovely and awful all at the same time. That’s how it is. Accepting that can help us face it all with some dignity.