Someone must have arranged this. It’s as if Frank Schaeffer’s book Crazy for God was designed to come out in tandem with Jody Bottum’s essay “The Judgment of Memory” in the March issue of First Things . It’s as if Crazy for God was published merely to illustrate all the pitfalls pointed out in Bottum’s essay. (Have the two been conspiring?) Bottum writes that “the last thing we need from writers is another simple and sincere account of their own lives,” but Crazy for God gives us one more. Bottum tells us that there remains a place in the genre of memoir “for reticence, and secrets swallowed,” but Crazy for God just spits it all up. Bottum writes:
The death of parents leaves their honor in their children’s hands, and the cruel accuracies we might fling in anger against them while they are alive seem even more wrong to use against them once they are gone.
