William McKeen is chairman of the University of Florida’s Department of Journalism and author of several books, including the Hunter S. Thompson biography Outlaw Journalist.
FAMILY ALBUM: It’s a terrific story about his trip to Cuba, the home of this parents … the home to which they cannot return.
Carlos is one talented dude. The book reaches out to everyone, not just people of Cuban American heritage. I’m from Indiana and I dug it, for God’s sake.
It’s a book about family. Anyone who’s had a mother and a father will find something of value between the covers. Think of all of those people in your life who died before you could say what you needed to say. Sucks, doesn’t it?
That’s a problem Frias probably won’t have because he’s put so much of his heart into this book.
A few years back I wrote a book about my older children and what it was like to be a long-distance divorced father. In that book (Highway 61) I speak to my family. I talk about a lot of things that I wish I had done differently. I write about all the struggles a father goes through when he’s away from his children. I’ve been writing for 40 years and that was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.
So I really admire Take Me With You because of Frias’s emotional courage. It’s much more than the story of a trip. It’s about this imperfect organism of family.
I did a short profile of Frias in last week’s Palm Reader column in the print edition. There was only so much we could run in the column, so here’s more from our interview (That’s me, in italics):
The hardest thing I ever did was write about myself and my family after years of writing about other people. How was that for you? Was it difficult to go from journalist to memoirist?
“I decided early on that I was going to forget this was about me. I was going to look at me as a character. I wrote it in an honest way and I was writing it as a story.
“I threw my first manuscript in the kitchen sink. It didn’t go deep enough. I needed to do that, in order for this book to be an honest work. That meant that some days, my writing days were sitting there quietly, meditating.”
(Frias works full-time for the Palm Beach Post and managed to write this book without taking a leave of absence. He set aside his ‘writing days.’)
“I kept thinking, ‘This is going to hurt like hell. But I’ve got to do it. It was like tearing off a Band-Aid. I kept thinking, ‘It’s going to hurt, but you have to do it.’ Some days, after writing, I was left in a human pile of emotion.”
“I wanted to be a voice of my generation, the generation born to that generation that sacrificed citizenship and the homeland. It’s an incredible honor to have those people as parents.
“That was my biggest challenge: To look at that audience [of Cuban Americans] and say, ‘We are not a caricature. We have lived through our own holocaust. We have given our lives and changed our lives.’
“I don’t plan to retire off of this book. I just want people to know this story. It gives me shivers, just thinking that this could reach one person.
In Cuba, did you consciously imagine your father in your footsteps as a much-younger man?
“For those whose parents grew up in America, it was different. Their fathers could take them in the car and they could go for a drive, and the father could say, ‘That’s the house I grew up in.’ Imagine not being able to visit the place you came from. This gave me the chance to inhabit my father and see his country – my country. Cuba is the great phantom in our lives.”
By the way, that's Carlos and his daughters taking a dip.
LEARN TO KICK ASS: I don’t know what it is about this generation, the one that’s in college now. The kids can’t seem to do anything without talking to mom and dad first
In my day job as a department chairman, I get tons of calls from moms and dads, asking me to change their kids’ grades, get their kids in class or answer a question their kid is too shy to ask.
Bloody hell. We’ve gone from the Greatest Generation to the Wimpiest Generation.
What the hell is wrong with kids today?
Parents, you need to stop babying your kids. Let them grow up. As a first step, buy those kids this new book by Longwood author Ronald R. Johnson. Assert Yourself and Get What You Want (Wolfgang, $14.95) offers a 30-day makeover for human doormats.
For wimps who don’t know where to start, Johnson offers a script for almost every situation. Your neighbors are having a party and pissing you off? Read Johnson’s suggested lines for you to read – it’s firm, but not threatening.
More chapters detail how to say no – to your spouse, your kids, your friends. Hell, where was this book when I was growing up?
This book is aimed at a wide audience, but those ball-less kids in college could sure use this as required reading.
This article appears in Nov 12-18, 2008.