This summer, there’s exciting news for all of us here at Ooligan: we recently acquired a fantastic memoir by Allison Green that deals with youth, growth, travel, sexuality, literature, and trout.
The story hinges on a roadtrip Allison took through Idaho to retrace (roughly) the route taken by Richard Brautigan, his wife, and his daughter that he describes in his 1967 novel Trout Fishing in America. As Allison and her partner, Arline, drive east toward the Sawtooth Mountains, her story expands outward and backward, exploring her own past and family history as well as Brautigan’s life and the women—largely silent in his works—who occupied it. Allison’s story is about looking at the past with the knowledge of the present. It is about reconciling the desire to worship our heroes and the need to admit their imperfections. It’s a reflection on the urge that we, the living, feel to find real evidence of the people that have made us who we are—the ancestors we barely knew, the writers who changed the way we thought—and the sort of holiness that we assign the places they visited, the objects they touched.
Although we’ve only been working on this manuscript for a short time, I have to admit that I am completely in love with it. I hope that you will be, too.