MEMOIRS OF A FOOL: Volume I

About the Book

MEMOIRS OF A FOOL: Volume One is highly unique.  It highlights the failures of the memoirist, David Renner, rather than his successes.  And as such, it strikes a chord of familiarity in all of us.  From the President of the United States on down, the life of each of us is dominated by failures, many of which begin as successes.  For every triumph in life there is a corresponding defeat, something we might note before we rush in, fools, to our next grand venture. 

Renner doesn’t rush into anything.  He chronicles the inevitable setbacks in his life with a steady, stoic humor.  To him, existence was summed up by the Firesign Theatre in 1971, when they released their signature album, I Think We’re All Bozos on This Bus.  With this thought as his anchor, Renner neither soars with his successes nor collapses with his failures.  He simply glides or stumbles through his paces as the lead actor in a comedy.

There are serious moments in Renner’s story, which he traces back to Transylvania in Hungary, the birthplace of his parents.  There is a dark family secret that he doesn’t learn until, at seventeen, he’s ready to go out into the world.  There is his service in Air Force Intelligence inside Communist territory at the height of the Cold War.  There is the surreal sight of Detroit, where he is living in 1967, on fire during the riots there.  There are the strange days in the streets during the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968.  And there is the decade-long drug addiction and the pain of lost love.  But in this working-class saga the light moments outweigh the heavy ones, and ultimately Renner’s self-deprecating sense of humor brings him success in one important respect, as a human being.      

About the Author

David Renner started writing when he was four.  He drew words in the dirt with a stick.  They were hieroglyphs, pictures.  He remembers rough representations of a pie and a chicken.  He realizes now that he was writing a menu.  And he’s been writing and eating ever since.  “The hunger has always been there,” he assures us. 

Renner, the son of a truck driver/janitor/house painter father and a mother who grew up on a farm, was born and raised in Flint, Michigan.  He was first published, as a poet, in his high school yearbook.  After years of composing edgy, entertaining stories, he's now writing humorous non-fiction.  The present volume is his first foray into biography.  “I’ve always wanted to write the life story of a nobody,” he informs us, “and after struggling to decide on a subject for what seemed like an eternity, it suddenly occurred to me that the perfect nobody was staring at me in the mirror.  And I didn’t have to do any research.”

For someone who considers himself a nobody, Renner has had an interesting, sometimes exciting life.  He’s lived in nine different cities, including Berlin, Germany, and was on the scene for several of the big events of the Twentieth Century, including the construction of the Berlin Wall.  He is also a longtime student of history.  He completed the course work for a Master’s degree in Soviet History at Wayne State University in Detroit, but didn’t write a thesis.  “I hate footnotes,” he explains.  “If you think it’s hard reading them, try writing them.”                    

Renner recently finished a composite biography tentatively titled MICHAEL MOORE, GEORGE W. BUSH, AND ME: The Lives and Legacies of Three Lunkheads.  For more of his colorful and entertaining writing, go to his website at http://davidrenner.net/.