I Wouldn't Normally Do This Kind of Thing by Marshall Moore

I Wouldn't Normally Do This Kind of Thing by Marshall Moore

What do you get when you mix a father with severe PTSD after barely surviving the Vietnam War, a self-proclaimed clairvoyant mother with anger issues and no filter whatsoever, rivers of booze, an awkward but academically gifted son, and a daughter with a hidden disability and a mile-wide rebellious streak? This is going to get messy. Then throw in a generous helping of domestic violence, some good old-fashioned small-town Southern homophobia, and the kind of dark family secret that makes headlines. You've got all the makings of a complete, blazing disaster. Literally: Marshall Moore got into the groundbreaking North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics, the nation's first residential STEM-focused magnet school, as a means of escaping a hometown and a childhood he otherwise might not have survived. He then set it on fire. And then the story gets really complicated. I Wouldn't Normally Do This Kind of Thing is a memoir about a family cosplaying normalcy in Southern suburbia in the seventies and eighties: shocking, hilarious, appalling, bizarre, and. actually true.

Marshall Moore is the author of four novels (Inhospitable, Bitter Orange, An Ideal for Living, and>The Concrete Sky) and three short-fiction collections (A Garden Fed by Lightning, The Infernal Republic, and>Black Shapes in a Darkened Room). His work has appeared in>The Southern Review, Litro, Storgy, Passengers Journal, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Asia Literary Review, The Barcelona Review, and many other journals and anthologies. He is also the co-editor of three academic books on the pedagogy of creative writing and publishing. He holds a PhD in creative writing from Aberystwyth University. A native of eastern North Carolina, he lives in Cornwall, England, and teaches creative writing and publishing at Falmouth University.