About the Book
In 1992, Timothy Dyke moved, at 28 years old, from a suburb of Houston, Texas to the most population-dense, residential district in Honolulu, Hawai'i where he began teaching Lord of the Flies and a book called Multicultural Perspectives to high school students in English classes at the largest private school in the country. His journey across the ocean to establish himself in a new home coincided with journeys of self- discovery. As he tells stories from memory, Timothy becomes TIM, and his mode of narration becomes TMI. Too much information. TIM tells tales about the literal and figurative ghosts that haunt him. While he aims to understand the difference between contemporary fiction and trauma dumping, TIM confides in his reader about secret histories and the events that have led to his self-acceptance as an asexual teacher with eye trauma and an irrational fear of the original Willie Wonka movie. Backbends is Timothy Dyke's "memoir with lies in it." The writer aims to tell a life story while simultaneously questioning ways that stories told from memory will wander into fictional terrain. Concerned with definitions of truth and questions of what it means to write honestly about personal history, this book weaves anecdotes, horror tales, and self- deprecating humor to create a tapestry of memory and a catalogue of perceived reality. Informed by youthful summer camp experiences, multiple viewings of Hitchcock's Psycho, and regrettable encounters with a predatory yoga teacher, TIM tells his story without fear and with only a little bit of regret. Everyone who lives has stories to tell. How do we know, though, which of our experiences contributed to who we have become? How do we know how to trust our own recollections? If we talk about the difficult situations we have lived through, are we forcing audiences to listen to our confessions? Do these confessions lead to absolution? Backbends asks readers to reflect on what it means to render a life story out of the inevitable distortions of memory.
Review :
Meet TIM: a gay, asexual poet who reveals TMI, loves reading, lives with parrots and a chain-smoking prank-driven ghost; who engages in smart conversations with his prep academy students about trauma-dumping in contemporary fiction, has had surgery on his left eye at least five times, has a hard time forging a relationship with his father and seeking approval from his mother, was terrorized by Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory but loves Psycho, and who has written a memoir that might be anti-memoir.
Fueled and enriched by its honesty, Backbends asks intelligent questions about the craft of storytelling, in this case, autofiction, that hybrid genre comprised of stories - lived and recollected and imagined - we tell ourselves so as to bring us closer to the truths "even if they are not real." Told in a series of memory-fueled vignettes and anecdotes in which the author often found himself "negotiating between trying to say the right thing and trying not to say the wrong thing," this book reaffirms Eduardo Galeano's dictum that we, all of us, are made of stories.
R. Zamora Linmark, The Importance of Being Wilde at Heart
***
A brave, fearless book that asks us, again and again, what it means to write truthfully. "We all have stories we could tell five hundred times," Timothy Dyke says, "and never get right." Yet the will to focus our memories and keep trying is at the heart of remembrance. It isn't about reliving pain, but about witnessing it in order to push back against despair.
-- Manuel Munoz, The Consequences
***
Timothy Dyke is a writer who has the ability to change the way you see reality, and he wields this power with such delicate care and humanity.
This book, which doesn't so much blend genres as create its own category of creative non-fiction, offers stories that are somehow deeply philosophical and challenging while also being tasty page-turners. Beautiful, terrifying, heartbreaking, and so funny.
I will be thinking of this book for a very long time.
-- Lee Cataluna, Flowers of Hawai'i, People You Meet at Longs
***
In Backbends, a filamentous work of autotheory, Timothy Dyke is discomfited by the possibility-no, certainty-that narrative distortion is inevitable. Whether these distortions are attributable to personal flaws (a botched eye surgery, for instance) or generic ones (like "trauma dumping"), though, are at the philosophical core of this book. Through vivid encounters with cigarette-smoking ghosts, a predatory yoga teacher, a metaphysical mango expert, and a revolving door of characters at his beloved Makiki Park, Dyke joins-and destabilizes-a genre inhabited by Brainard, Myles, Bellamy, and Lisicky.
-- Lawrence Lenhart, Backvalley Ferrets: A Rewilding of the Colorado Plateau (author), Experimental Writing: A Writer's Guide and Anthology (co-editor)
***
It is well worth your precious time to spend some quiet hours in Timothy Dyke's perceptive, sensitive, and full-hearted world.
- Pamela Rotner Sakamoto, author of Midnight in Broad Daylight: A Japanese American Family Caught Between Two Worlds
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Reading Timothy Dyke's Backbends is like dancing. Or like watching dancing. Or like watching beautiful dancing while a firework display of philosophical revelations goes off in your own brain. It's powerful. You will want to read this book.
-- Frankie Rollins, The Grief Manuscript, The Sin Eater & Other Stories, Doctor Porchiat's Dream
