Character Witness - (American Lives) by Jason Brown (Paperback)

About the Book

Character Witness is a memoir about a son's relationship with his mother, chronicling her struggle with mental illness, addiction, and poverty while exploring how the son's troubles as a young man began to mirror hers.

Book Synopsis

When Jason Brown's mother is arrested for stealing $38,000, he agrees to serve as a character witness for her, hoping to keep her out of prison.

Thus begins Character Witness, a memoir, a chronicle of a mother's struggle with mental illness, addiction, and poverty, and an inquiry into whether we can escape the legacy of the past. Brown realizes that his troubles as a young man mirrored his mother's, and as he chronicles how sexual abuse can pass down through generations--from father to daughter, and later from mother to son--he begins to look for answers about whether people can change.

Brown and his mother share a difficult history, but they also share a common sense of humor and a sense of the absurd. More than simply a recovery narrative, Character Witness centers the necessity of staying with loved ones even in their worst moments.

Review Quotes

"An astonishing masterwork of memoir. Writing with electric intelligence, heartbreaking candor, and deeply moving insight, Jason Brown allows his reader to understand the seemingly impossible: the unspeakable traumas and complications of intergenerational abuse, and how, once spoken, a new life for a family may be possible."--Megan Harlan, author of Mobile Home: A Memoir in Essays

"Jason Brown has a deep, touching, and fresh insight into the abiding attachment and love that family both gives us and subjects us to. Anyone not from a 'perfect' family--that is, anyone--will recognize the stumbles and pitfalls and small triumphs that chart the course of family life. The story proceeds relentlessly, but with a light touch even in its darkest moments. It is told in clear, vivid prose, without affectation or false bravado. . . . Character Witness will stand with the best modern American memoirs."--Tobias Wolff, author of This Boy's Life: A Memoir and Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories

"Jason Brown's work has always had some of the allure of the coast of Maine--vivid and frightening and beautiful. I read his books for the beautiful, amber sense of humor mixed with a lyrical sense of melancholy and fate. Character Witness has all these literary pleasures, along with the pace and tension of a thriller. . . . A gorgeous and harrowing book."--Tom Beller, author of Lost in the Game

"Just start with the first sentence: You won't be able to stop. Character Witness reads like a fever dream. It is a Denis Johnson short story come to life. You feel for his mom; you want Jason to escape: 'this cannot continue; how can it change?' And then the next page happens. Brown's work is consistently fearless, he doesn't blink, can't stop turning situations over in his head. He is a marvelous writer. The last third of this memoir is almost painful in its beauty and the purity of its love."--Charles Bock, author of I Will Do Better and Beautiful Children

About the Author

Jason Brown is a professor and director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Oregon. He has published four books of short stories: A Faithful but Melancholy Account of Several Barbarities Lately Committed, Driving the Heart and Other Stories, Why the Devil Chose New England for His Work (an NPR summer reading pick), and Outermark. Brown has been a Stegner Fellow and his work has appeared in the New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper's, The Best American Short Stories, and The Best American Essays and won a Pushcart Prize.