The More You Hate Me - by Andy Smart (Paperback)

About the Book

THE MORE YOU HATE ME is a memoir-in-essays that examines the Andy Smart's experience with his father's suicide and the layered influence of the film Full Metal Jacket on both men.

Book Synopsis

On June 15, 2007, Staff Sergeant Jeff Smart shot himself in the head in his backyard. The end of his life was eerily similar to that of a character in his favorite war movie, Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket. This is a son's memoir of rediscovering a film and a father he thought he knew so well. Throughout the book the author confronts the lasting influence of FMJ on his attitudes, his diction, his responses to trauma, and, without fail, his relationship to his father's memory. Ultimately, Andy Smart meets numerous versions of his dad in his nonfiction debut. Some are cinematic, others invented from memory, still others-inchoate and ephemeral-that accompany his daily experiences. The result is not simply the disillusionment of a son but the evolution of a boy into a man-and the often brutal process of defining what a man is. THE MORE YOU HATE ME is the true story of a father who couldn't face the truth of his life story and a son who had no choice.

Review Quotes

"Family violence is the subject of many memoirs but I've not seen a book examine the nuance and indeterminacy of gun culture as it slips between the walls of the house next door. Smart's narrative unfolds against the back drops of Hollywood and the NRA-America's twin churches-where death is advertised in bright colors. At home the darkness streams down. This is a must read. I'll wager you can't put it down."

-Stephen Kuusisto, author of Planet of the Blind

This astonishing memoir, The More You Hate Me, is not about guns, though guns play a pivotal role. It's not about the movie Full Metal Jacket, though that text is an essential litany of the manhood and art in it. It's not about baseball or booze or the soldier's prayer though each of those pieces fit perfectly into the puzzle of this gripping narrative. In the end, this memoir is about a father's betrayal of a son he had no idea how to love. And it is achingly and beautifully about the son's attempt to understand and to live the coded language (and violence) that happens inside that ignorance. It is also a study in the resilience one must sustain to survive a parent's suicide, the heartbreak of carrying those forever questions, and the practice of continuing to Be inside and outside those rich and terrifying memories. This is a memoir of trying one's damnedest and against considerable odds, becoming the good son.

-Anne-Marie Oomen is the author As Long as I Know You, winner of the AWP Sue William Silverman Award for Creative Nonfiction 2021, and three other award-winning memoirs, including Love, Sex and 4-H.

Andy Smart knocks more than a few bodies down with this searing memoir of family and guns and the always complicated relationship between fathers and sons. Told in a torrent of urgent, fresh language, here is a voice that will bang around in your head long after you put the book down.

-Robert Lopez