Confessions of a Left-Handed Man: An Artist's Memoir

Peter Selgin

tet 2011 · University of Iowa Press

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Peter Selgin was cursed/blessed with an unusual childhood. The son of Italian immigrants—his father an electronics inventor and a mother so good looking UPS drivers swerved off their routes to see her—Selgin spent his formative years scrambling among the hat factory ruins of a small Connecticut town, visiting doting—and dotty—relatives in the “old world,” watching mental giants clash at Mensa gatherings, enduring Pavlovian training sessions with a grandmother bent on “curing” his left-handedness, and competing savagely with his right-handed twin. It’s no surprise, then, that Selgin went on from these peculiar beginnings to do . . . well, nearly everything. Confessions of a Left-Handed Man is a bold, unblushing journey down roads less traveled. Whether recounting his work driving a furniture delivery truck, his years as a caricaturist, his obsession with the Titanic that compelled him to complete seventy-five paintings of the ship(in sinking and nonsinking poses), or his daily life as a writer, from start to finish readers are treated to a vividly detailed, sometimes hilarious, often moving, but always memorable life. In this modern-day picaresque, Selgin narrates an artist’s journey from unconventional roots through gritty experience to artistic achievement. With an elegant narrative voice that is, by turns, frank, witty, and acid-tongued, Selgin confronts his past while coming to terms with approaching middle age, reaching self-understanding tempered by reflection, regret, and a sharply self-deprecating sense of humor.

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Peter Selgin is currently the Viebranz Distinguished Writer in Residence at St. Lawrence University, in Canton, New York. Winner of the 2007 Flannery O’Connor Award for Fiction for his story collection Drowning Lessons, Selgin has also published a novel, Life Goes to the Movies, and two works on the fiction writer’s craft, 179 Ways to Save a Novel: Matters of Vital Concern to Fiction Writers and By Cunning and Craft: Sound Advice and Practical Wisdom for Fiction Writers.