Character Witness

Reviews / Votes

"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 "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 "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