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My Childhood in Pieces

A Stand-Up Comedy, a Skokie Elegy

Author Edward Hirsch
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Hardcover
$29.00 US
| $39.00 CAN
Knopf
On sale Jun 03, 2025 | 288 Pages | 9780593802823
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From the award-winning poet, dark comic microbursts of prose deliver a whole childhood, at the hands of an aspiring middle-class Jewish family whose hard-boiled American values and wit were the forge of a poet's coming-of-age.

“My grandparents taught me to write my sins on paper and cast them into the water. . . . They didn’t expect an entire book,” Hirsch says in the “prologue” to this glorious festival of knife-sharp observations. In microchapters—sometimes only a single scathing sentence long—with titles like “Call to Breakfast,” “Pay Cash,” “The Sorrow of Manly Sports,” and “Aristotle on Lawrence Avenue,” Eddie’s gambling father, Ruby, son of a white metal smelter, schools him and his sister in blackjack; Eddie’s mom bangs pots to wake the kids to a breakfast of cold cereal; Uncle Bob, in the collection business, is heard threatening people on the phone; and nobody suffers fools. In this household, Eddie learned to jab with his left and cross with his right, never to kid a kidder, and how to sneak out at night.
    Affectionate, deadpan, and exuberant, steeped in Yiddishkeit and Midwestern practicality, Hirsch’s laugh-and-cry performance animates a heartbreaking odyssey, from the cradle to the day he leaves home, armed with sorrow and a huge store of poetic wit.
“Amazingly original. . . . It’s an aphoristic autobiography that reads like a stand-up routine but feels like a series of Kafkaesque punchlines in pursuit of a perfect pierogi. There is something dizzying and delightful about his presentation here—a book-length series of brief prose vignettes (usually running anywhere between two to 10 lines) that relate Hirsch’s childhood and family history in Skokie, IL. Told with such exuberance, precision, and wit, each vignette feels almost like a perfect poem or piece of eternity. [My Childhood in Pieces] is so charming and compulsively readable that readers will find it hard to put down.” —Library Journal (starred review)

“The triumph of My Childhood in Pieces is that it is able to capture a specific Jewish American experience not only in content but also in form. . . quick, dead­pan. . . yet concentrated with life. . . . Perhaps the microchapter that best serves as an ars poetica is “Conversation with My Mother”: “My mother was heating a can of chicken soup on the stove. ‘You really shouldn’t make fun of me,’ I said, ‘you’re my mother.’ She barely turned her head. ‘Don’t be so sure, kid.’” . . . My Childhood in Pieces commemorates a family’s survival with the same tough love used to survive it.” —Jewish Book Council

“Hirsch shares memories of his Illinois upbringing in fragmentary bursts . . . A mosaic of the author’s coming-of-age among a large Jewish family in the 1950s and ’60s. . . readers will be rewarded by this evocative family portrait.” —Publishers Weekly

“Bada bing, bada boom! Hirsch . . . channels the voices and personalities of his Chicagoland Jewish childhood to create a memoir composed of jokes and short vignettes, one setup-and-punchline after another . . . sometimes silly, sometimes off-color, often Yiddish-flavored, with a penchant for puns and dad jokes that never quits. . . . A unique recreation of a great life in a largely vanished world!” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“An intimate series of sparkling snapshots—delving into Hirsch’s history feels like getting caught eavesdropping with your ear stuck to the wall.” —Catherine Cohen, author of God I Feel Modern Tonight, actor/comedian and co-host of the podcast “Seek Treatment”

“For decades, Edward Hirsch has wielded one of American poetry’s most unforgettable voices. To have him apply his big brain and wicked wit to a memoir is a major literary event. Hirsch mines his upbringing with both the verve of David Sedaris and the literary pedigree Joyce brought to his portrait of the artist as a young man. Part standup, part wail from the bowels of Skokie, My Childhood in Pieces is an instant classic. Buy this book!” —Mary Karr, author of Cherry, The Liar’s Club
EDWARD HIRSCH, a MacArthur Fellow, has published nine previous books of poetry, including The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems and Gabriel: A Poem, a book-length elegy for his son. He has also published seven books of prose, among them How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry, a national bestseller, and 100 Poems to Break Your Heart. He has received numerous prizes, including the National Book Critics Circle Award. A longtime teacher, at Wayne State University and in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston, Hirsch is now president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He lives in Brooklyn. View titles by Edward Hirsch

About

From the award-winning poet, dark comic microbursts of prose deliver a whole childhood, at the hands of an aspiring middle-class Jewish family whose hard-boiled American values and wit were the forge of a poet's coming-of-age.

“My grandparents taught me to write my sins on paper and cast them into the water. . . . They didn’t expect an entire book,” Hirsch says in the “prologue” to this glorious festival of knife-sharp observations. In microchapters—sometimes only a single scathing sentence long—with titles like “Call to Breakfast,” “Pay Cash,” “The Sorrow of Manly Sports,” and “Aristotle on Lawrence Avenue,” Eddie’s gambling father, Ruby, son of a white metal smelter, schools him and his sister in blackjack; Eddie’s mom bangs pots to wake the kids to a breakfast of cold cereal; Uncle Bob, in the collection business, is heard threatening people on the phone; and nobody suffers fools. In this household, Eddie learned to jab with his left and cross with his right, never to kid a kidder, and how to sneak out at night.
    Affectionate, deadpan, and exuberant, steeped in Yiddishkeit and Midwestern practicality, Hirsch’s laugh-and-cry performance animates a heartbreaking odyssey, from the cradle to the day he leaves home, armed with sorrow and a huge store of poetic wit.

Reviews

“Amazingly original. . . . It’s an aphoristic autobiography that reads like a stand-up routine but feels like a series of Kafkaesque punchlines in pursuit of a perfect pierogi. There is something dizzying and delightful about his presentation here—a book-length series of brief prose vignettes (usually running anywhere between two to 10 lines) that relate Hirsch’s childhood and family history in Skokie, IL. Told with such exuberance, precision, and wit, each vignette feels almost like a perfect poem or piece of eternity. [My Childhood in Pieces] is so charming and compulsively readable that readers will find it hard to put down.” —Library Journal (starred review)

“The triumph of My Childhood in Pieces is that it is able to capture a specific Jewish American experience not only in content but also in form. . . quick, dead­pan. . . yet concentrated with life. . . . Perhaps the microchapter that best serves as an ars poetica is “Conversation with My Mother”: “My mother was heating a can of chicken soup on the stove. ‘You really shouldn’t make fun of me,’ I said, ‘you’re my mother.’ She barely turned her head. ‘Don’t be so sure, kid.’” . . . My Childhood in Pieces commemorates a family’s survival with the same tough love used to survive it.” —Jewish Book Council

“Hirsch shares memories of his Illinois upbringing in fragmentary bursts . . . A mosaic of the author’s coming-of-age among a large Jewish family in the 1950s and ’60s. . . readers will be rewarded by this evocative family portrait.” —Publishers Weekly

“Bada bing, bada boom! Hirsch . . . channels the voices and personalities of his Chicagoland Jewish childhood to create a memoir composed of jokes and short vignettes, one setup-and-punchline after another . . . sometimes silly, sometimes off-color, often Yiddish-flavored, with a penchant for puns and dad jokes that never quits. . . . A unique recreation of a great life in a largely vanished world!” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“An intimate series of sparkling snapshots—delving into Hirsch’s history feels like getting caught eavesdropping with your ear stuck to the wall.” —Catherine Cohen, author of God I Feel Modern Tonight, actor/comedian and co-host of the podcast “Seek Treatment”

“For decades, Edward Hirsch has wielded one of American poetry’s most unforgettable voices. To have him apply his big brain and wicked wit to a memoir is a major literary event. Hirsch mines his upbringing with both the verve of David Sedaris and the literary pedigree Joyce brought to his portrait of the artist as a young man. Part standup, part wail from the bowels of Skokie, My Childhood in Pieces is an instant classic. Buy this book!” —Mary Karr, author of Cherry, The Liar’s Club

Author

EDWARD HIRSCH, a MacArthur Fellow, has published nine previous books of poetry, including The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems and Gabriel: A Poem, a book-length elegy for his son. He has also published seven books of prose, among them How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry, a national bestseller, and 100 Poems to Break Your Heart. He has received numerous prizes, including the National Book Critics Circle Award. A longtime teacher, at Wayne State University and in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston, Hirsch is now president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He lives in Brooklyn. View titles by Edward Hirsch

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