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A Personal History
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
September 2006
On Sale: September 5, 2006
208 pages
ISBN: 0374299196
EAN: 9780374299194
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Memoir
Jonathan Franzen arrived late, and last, in a family of
boys in Webster Groves, Missouri. The Discomfort Zone is
his intimate memoir of his growth from a "small and
fundamentally ridiculous person," through an adolescence
both excruciating and strangely happy, into an adult with
embarrassing and unexpected passions. It’s also a portrait
of a middle-class family weathering the turbulence of the
1970s, and a vivid personal history of the decades in
which America turned away from its midcentury idealism and
became a more polarized society.
The story Franzen tells here draws on elements as varied
as the explosive dynamics of a Christian youth fellowship
in the 1970s, the effects of Kafka’s fiction on his
protracted quest to lose his virginity, the elaborate
pranks that he and his friends orchestrated from the roof
of his high school, his self-inflicted travails in selling
his mother’s house after her death, and the web of
connections between his all-consuming marriage, the
problem of global warming, and the life lessons to be
learned in watching birds.
These chapters of a Midwestern youth and a New York
adulthood are warmed by the same combination of comic
scrutiny and unqualified affection that characterize
Franzen’s fiction, but here the main character is the
author himself. Sparkling, daring, arrestingly honest, The
Discomfort Zone narrates the formation of a unique mind
and heart in the crucible of an everyday American family.
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