Clint Edwards grew up in rural Utah with two Mormon parents and despite the church placing emphasis on the importance of the family unit, his father was married four times throughout his life and his mother was married three times. His father was the one who first initiated a break-up with his mother, and his lack of financial support for Clint and his brother when they were kids led his mother to work three jobs just to keep food on the table. Working all the time wore her down to the point where Clint couldn’t handle her emotional volatility and he moved out when he was fourteen. He finished high school living with his grandmother who was the only person in his life who offered stability.
His father had an incurable dependence on opioid painkillers that left him going from doctor to doctor just to get his (often fake) prescriptions filled. His father’s life was a sad slide deeper and deeper into drug addiction until he reached the point of no return and died before reaching his 60s. He spent many years gaunt and blurry-eyed and altogether absent from Clint’s life. His father’s addiction was very painful for Clint to experience, a heartbreaking sentiment he expresses through his writing.
Ultimately, this is a story about mental illness, as Edwards has spent his life learning to cope with his severe anxiety and his obsessive compulsive disorder. As a kid, he struggled with making friends and had difficulty in school when taking tests or participating in group activities. He had physical symptoms like headaches and sudden bouts of diarrhea that often left him both socially and emotionally paralyzed. His ever-present sense of worry never let him feel comfortable in his own skin even when he was alone.
Through it all, he developed a variety of strategies for coping with his anxiety and in a brief passage at the end of the book is able to share these strategies with his son. He also comes to realize that his parents each suffered from similar mental illnesses as himself and is able to find a sense of compassion for them as two individuals simply doing their best with the tools they had. It’s a beautiful, full-circle moment of him being able to offer the parental stability to his son that his father and mother never could for him.
Anxiety is something we can all relate to, and while we might not experience such severe symptoms, there are many elements of his story that offer us opportunities for connection and empathy. His writing is eminently engaging and offers countless truthful moments of joy and sadness that leave his readers wanting more. He is an honest and relatable narrator and his stories are poignantly relatable.