LIZ: Book #32

Cabin Pressure: One Man's Desperate Attempt to Recapture His Youth as a Camp Counselor by Josh Wolk

*Be warned, I read an advanced reader's copy of this memoir, so things may be slightly different in the final published version than what I read.*

288 pages

Completed 8/13/10

This was a campy (no pun intended) kitchsy memoir about a man in his mid-thirties about to get married who decides to relive his childhood by returning to the camp he so fondly remembers. When I first began to read it, I thought it was going to be a sappy let's-discover-who-I-am throughout this book, but I was pleasantly surprised when it did not end up that way. However, this book is hard to categorize; equal parts midlife crisis, troubled adolescent boys, sleepaway camp expectations, and relationship problems, there wasn't enough about each for it to really matter to me.

If Wolk had chosen to only focus on his feelings of underachievement or only his relationship, I wouldn't have picked this up in the first place. But I feel like a lot of instances in which ironic humor could have been injected went to waste. Ten year old boys are a species of themselves; that's enough material to drum up some humor. Instead Wolk takes us along his woe-is-me problems with the boys of his youth - who are now fellow adult counselors - and his inner conflict over why his fiance is stressed. (Perhaps because two months before their wedding, he decides to up and leave for rural Maine?!)

This was one of those memoirs that took awhile to get through even though it wasn't heavy or deep. I just lacked the interest needed to read it in it's entirety before picking up a new book, so it took me some time. If you're looking for a humorous, gritty story of a man who returns to camp to relive his glory days...this is not the book for you.