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In ‘The Broken King' Michael Thomas chronicles his experiences with fatherhood, being Black in Boston, and mental health

The memoir also emphasizes place. While he currently lives in Brooklyn, Thomas paints a vivid, indelible portrait of growing up in Boston from birth through his childhood in the '70s. He writes about dealing with racism, driving a taxi cab, and his love for the Celtics and Red Sox. We met at Pavement Coffeehouse's Fenway location, near where he'd attended a Sox game at Fenway two days earlier. In the book Thomas recalls going to Fenway with his father, also a Boston native, who would keep a scorecard and guide his sons skillfully through the crowded park; later, after his father left the family, Thomas writes, he would attend Red Sox games with white friends who looked the other way when he faced Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up At the coffeeshop, Thomas told me going to the past weekend's game was 'melancholic yet peaceful.' Against the cacophony of usual cafe noise, Thomas admitted that writing 'The Broken King' wasn't as peaceful. Advertisement 'This was different from anything I've written,' said Thomas, a Warren Wilson College MFA graduate and Hunter College English professor. When writing his first book, ' Advertisement In addition, he explained as we sipped our coffee, the book was easier to write in part because it was a novel. He felt comfortable in part because he could refer to the novels of his favorite authors, from Ralph Ellison to James Baldwin to Zora Neale Hurston, as models for his own work. And, he added, he could use the book's main character as a proxy to work out issues, leading the characters through a contained story that he mapped out. . With 'The Broken King,' he was older, the world was moving faster, and the memoir form required him to say goodbye to his fictional proxy. 'That's a habit I had to break,' Thomas said. '[I had to] say what I thought and felt directly without artifice, where the only artifice is the craft on the page or illusion.' He also had to change his writing process. In the past, Thomas said, he would handwrite four or five pages over and over before typing them on a computer. He'd then edit them two to three pages at a time while committing them to memory. But that didn't work with the memoir. 'I had a lot of drafts, let's just say that,' Thomas said. 'Writing the same thing over and over again, finding different currents, eliminating proxy, perhaps at times being more journalistic.' He said it was interesting to lay it all out and see different versions of the memoir and what needed to be added, and what had to be left out — even if he didn't want to leave anything out. Advertisement 'I think I've had a full and strangely absurd life,' he said. In six interlocking sections, 'The Broken King' chronicles the author's experiences with father, his estranged older brother, and his two sons. With each section Thomas traverses memory and the sometimes tricky line between 'empirical' fact and personal truth; a relationship that he said people often confuse. As he was writing the book he had to reckon with his own shifting perspective on his personal experiences because, he said, as you live you change, and so does your perspective. 'One perhaps searches oneself and returns changed, and so the perspective on the self is changed, someone has to search themself again,' he said. 'So, how do you make that be still?' He said it made him question how to talk about an experience when doubting his perspective of the memory. 'Can you capture what you believe is the truth, or when you believe you're being honest about what you think or feel — and let it go before you doubt yourself so much that you have to change it?" he asked. The deepest complexities surround his relationship with his father, a vexing figure in his life. 'I can think about it and I can tell stories about him and me,' he said. 'I can sympathize with him and be angry with him and feel compassion and practice it.' But perhaps the hardest compassion to find is for oneself. 'It's been a lot of time trying to convince myself that I'm not here,' Thomas said. 'And so having read some of this in public and having part of it be published, by having people read the advanced copies and they have real reactions — and they have real reactions— I have to admit that I'm here on the planet and I have an effect on people positive or negative.' Advertisement In the book's final section Thomas writes about struggling with not wanting to live. 'I want to die, but I'm always trying to stay,' he writes. 'In these mercury days, there are too many reasons to live and die. I stay because I don't know what's next. Sometimes all I can do is survive.' Thomas will read at Harvard Book Store at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Aug. 26.