The power of having a little hope

The disaster memoir is now an American literary genre all its own. There are the writers who tame their pasts with humor, such as Mary Karr, whose ribald account, “The Liar’s Club,” sent up a childhood in a swampy Texas oil town that would have stopped weaker spirits dead in their tracks. There are those who turn socially taboo ordeals -- Alice Sebold’s “Lucky,” an account of her rape as a teenager -- into high literature. Some, like Russell Baker in “Growing Up,” write of hardscrabble childhoods as the prelude to great achievement.

Then there are the writers who have simply survived. In “The Los Angeles Diaries,” James Brown shows what an achievement that can be.

Brown’s nakedly brutal account of the ravaged childhood that leads him to a troubled adulthood is human, intimate and as painfully riveting as staring over a precipice Brown has thrown himself into and watching him crawl his way out. And for Brown, it’s still a tough story to talk about.

“I was worried I’d be nervous,” Brown says with a touch of apprehension, as he drives down the Hollywood streets where he drank and abused drugs as a child. Brown has lived a lot at 45, and he looks straight at you with watchful, intense eyes, as he begins the back story behind “The Los Angeles Diaries.”

Some bleak facts dot the map. His mother goes to jail. His budding movie star brother shoots himself. His sister dives off a bridge into the bed of the L.A. River. Brown struggles through life as the promising young writer of such novels as “Lucky Town,” while moonlighting as a raging alcoholic and drug abuser and wringing another generation of pain from his wife and young sons.

But Brown’s still alive. He walks out of the restaurant and climbs into a big red pickup truck for a drive down Hollywood Boulevard, pointing out the Frolic Room, where he once drank himself into a stupor. He drives past the Pantages Theatre, past the racy lingerie shops and the sandwich board lady (“Date a Movie Star”), then turns down a side street and points out the dilapidated rooming house his brother was moving into before he killed himself.

“I think that faith is a type of strength, to understand that your life can be worth living,” Brown said, adding, “even if it doesn’t seem like it at the time.”

Mother in prison

The story of Brown’s childhood begins when he tags along with his volatile mother as she inexplicably lights an apartment building on fire near their house in San Jose. Brown is 5. He waits in the car. When his mother comes back, she takes him to San Francisco for shrimp cocktails at Fisherman’s Wharf and buys him a folding foxhole shovel as a present.

The fire kills an elderly woman. Soon police appear on their doorstep. Authorities are never able to pin the fire on his mother. But they imprison her for tax evasion and Brown’s father discovers she has bankrupted the family.

When his mother gets out of prison, she walks out on her husband and takes the children to Los Angeles. There the kids are left to fend for themselves on the streets of eastern Hollywood. At 9, Brown begins smoking marijuana. His older brother and sister are also drawn to drugs and alcohol.

He dabbles in heroin and burglary at 14, but it fails to provide much of an escape. One night, Brown’s mother comes home with alcohol on her breath and he tells her he wants to go live with his father, a construction worker still in San Jose. For a few years, he experiences regular meals, school attendance and the camaraderie of working with his father. He loves to lie in bed at night and listen to his father’s tales of laying railroad tracks and fishing for salmon in the Oregon wilderness.

This, Brown writes, “has much to do with why I am still here and my brother and sister are not.”

“My father gave me something I never had before -- unconditional love,” Brown said. “He also taught me a way to live where you could work and feel good about yourself, because you had earned it.”

Brown launched a semblance of a normal life, going to college, marrying and having three boys. His sister, Marilyn, became a wife and mother. His brother, Barry, co-starred with Cybill Shepherd in the ill-fated “Daisy Miller,” directed by Peter Bogdanovich, and had another starring role in “Bad Company,” with Jeff Bridges and John Savage.

But Barry, faced with a career lull punctuated by roles in B movies, caved in to drinking and despair. Just before his final exams at San Francisco State University, Brown got a call from his stepmother: His brother, under the influence of alcohol, had shot himself.

“They don’t think about the wreckage they leave behind,” Brown said. “It’s something you have to deal with the rest of your life. My sister saw my brother’s death as a kind of betrayal. He was killing what we had, the love we had as siblings, when he killed himself.”

Brown made progress as a writer but found it hard to keep a grip between binges. One day, as a Bay Area university English teacher, he was well into a long lecture on Huckleberry Finn when a student reminded him that he had taught the material the week before.

He disappeared for days on drinking sprees. (“If that’s not bleak enough,” quips an Entertainment Weekly review, “consider this memoir’s really depressing scenes ... Hollywood script meetings.”)

One morning, he wakes up in his car after driving home in a blackout and steels himself for a confrontation with his wife. Instead, he spots his little boys outside, bundled up with scarves and mittens, twirling around in the first snow of the season, laughing. But he is oblivious to their joy.

At times his misdeeds devolve into slapstick. Once he tried to patch things up with his wife by buying her a potbellied Vietnamese pig that the family fell in love with but he wound up hating, widening the gulf with his wife.

Along the way, his sister, shattered by a stillborn delivery, wanders out of a movie theater to get drunk and is raped in a park. Not long after, she walks to a bridge and dives into the concrete L.A. riverbed.

“When my sister did that I felt betrayed,” Brown said, “and I resolved not to kill myself.”

Rebounding

Instead, Brown bottomed out. He went to a writer-in-residence fellowship in South Dakota but spent the six weeks drinking with Sioux buddies and driving around the state with them trying to score drugs.

“I’m surprised I got back alive,” he said, shaking his head.

He got therapy, detoxed, joined Alcoholics Anonymous. He fell in love with a student and ended his marriage with his long-suffering wife.

“She felt cheated. Very hurt,” Brown said, with evident remorse. “I don’t think I could have gotten sober if I didn’t make a break. It was very bitter. But I was no kind of husband in those years. No kind of man.”

For four or five years he couldn’t write at all.

Then, “I decided I was going to write about what I cared about most in my life, about that which affected me the most, as honestly as I could,” Brown said, adding that he didn’t care if it ever got published.

Brown’s memoir was released last week with praise from fellow writers. Tim O’Brien called it “incredibly moving.” Michael Chabon said it “glows with a dark luminescence.” Janet Fitch called it “heartbreaking ... yet oddly inspirational, the tale of the last man standing.”

Memoirs of downward slides frequently draw cult followings, and even some of the bleakest, like the darkly hilarious “A Fan’s Notes” from Frederick Exley, become cult classics, connecting, perhaps, with readers who suffer their own dark emotions or dysfunctional childhoods.

But there’s a risk, especially in penning a memoir, like Brown’s, that is anything but self-serving. Said Brown: “It can brand you.”

But he has moved on. He is raising his three sons with his new wife and, he said, trying hard to give them a good life. In a sad postscript, the boys’ mother remarried but died a year ago of medical complications 10 days after giving birth to a daughter.

Certainly, these are things that people can’t be expected to “get over.” Brown pulls his truck up, only for a moment, in front of the classic Hollywood Spanish apartment building, with the medicine-pink facade riven with deep cracks, that his brother was supposed to move into. Then he quickly drives on.

“He never moved in,” Brown said, his voice trailing off. “We moved a few things, his typewriter and some clothes. I guess he just didn’t feel like moving anymore.”

If Brown made it here today, a different kind of man, it was out of faith, “to be able to say there is hope, even when things are really dark. If there is that hope,” he said, “there’s a possibility of change.”