He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new memoir, High Holiday Porn, and reported the following:
Page 99 has a break in the middle separating it into two scenes. The first half is about my struggle with school work and exams— something I dealt with through the end of college— and how the only way I could succeed was with my mother’s undivided attention through the studying process; without it, I was helpless to even the slightest distraction. The second half is about finding a psychologist, which was a way my parents urged me to handle the problems I was facing at school. Therapy wasn't the most helpful for me as a teenager because I never knew what I was supposed to talk to my therapist about. And talking in general made me nervous. My understanding of clinical therapy and how it worked was based on what I saw in television and films— neurotic patients lying on couches, talking about sex or their relationship with their father in frank and biting words— the only instructions I was given was that I could talk about anything, which really isn't helpful for a kid anxious about talking in the first place. And so, I often felt like I was supposed to get the therapist to like me, to make him laugh or think I was interesting, which, obviously, didn’t help me solve much.Visit Eytan Bayme's website.
High Holiday Porn as a whole is about my obsessions — with sex, porn, drugs, being cool, avoiding school work— and how I handled, or attempted to handle, or flat out succumbed to them in disastrous glory. Page 99 probably isn't the funniest or most exciting in the book, but in a sense it lives up to Madox Ford’s statement in the way it progresses from problem to an attempt at finding a solution. Is the “quality” of the whole revealed? I’ll let the reader decide that.
My Book, The Movie: High Holiday Porn.
Writers Read: Eytan Bayme.
--Marshal Zeringue
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