Mark Metcalf is the author of the new memoir Tim Tim Timmy. The book focuses on the life of his late brother Tim. Also an actor, Metcalf is based in Portland, Oregon.
Q: Why did you decide to write Tim Tim Timmy?
A: I was taking a memoir workshop and the prompt one week was "an encounter." I wrote about my brother, Roy, leaving after helping me get through two weeks of winter in Missoula just after a hip replacement.
For me the moment became very emotional, unusually emotional for our family. When I read the piece in class I could not stop crying and the people in the class were all very moved. I realized that my family meant more to me than I had ever thought.
I had left home to go to college and had not come back for six years. When I did come home it was more out of a sense of obligation than it was real affection. Realizing that my love for my family was more powerful than I had previously thought I began to write about them all in the workshop.
After writing about four pieces about different members of my family and their history I realized that there was more to be mined if I built whatever it was I was writing around the suicide of my youngest brother, Tim, when he was 46 years old.
I had never truly mourned or grieved his death. I had dealt with it and the aftermath and moved on, or such was my thinking at the time. So ... I began writing.
Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: My brother, Tim, spent the last seven years of his life living in our parents’ home in North Carolina. He had an episode in New York City, where he had been living just a few blocks from where I lived.
That episode put him in Bellevue Mental Ward where he spent 60 days until our parents were able to sign him out in their care. He was a deeply depressed person who really wanted only to die, to be done with the demons that had haunted him since he was a child.
My wife and 5-year-old son visited them as often as we could and on one visit we all took a walk in the sunlight of a fall day. Tim weighed over 300 pounds by this time, six years into his stay in North Carolina, with long unkempt hair and a permanent scowl on his bearded face.
We still managed to get him to come along with us as we wandered around the village of Pinehurst. We found a children's playground and my son wanted to play so we stopped.
Somehow he cajoled Tim into going on the slide with him, sitting on the small merry-go-round, the kind you propel with your feet, swinging on the swing and generally enjoying the playground as it was intended.
There were a couple of moments when our parents, my wife, and myself saw Tim laugh out loud and even give a hoot as he slid down the slide, my son in his lap. It was the first any of us had heard him laugh or even smile in perhaps 10 years.
My son started calling him Tim Tim Timmy around that time. They shared some kind of bond and experienced some kind of freedom together that we were overjoyed to have witnessed. Thus the title Tim Tim Timmy.
Q: What impact did it have on you to write the book, and what do you hope readers take away from it?
A: The process of writing the book became my way of grieving or mourning, of actively loving my brother. Obviously long after that love could do him any good, but it was good for me.
By wrapping my life into the story of Tim's struggle and finishing with the story of my son's diagnosis as being dyslexic and on the autism spectrum when he was in sixth or seventh grade and the steps that were taken to help him learn to read and write, to succeed at school, and eventually to be able to live without anxiety in social or work situations.
I want the book to be a rallying cry for parents to listen closely to their children, to talk to them as equals, to recognize difficulties and pay attention to them. To indulge their passions and offer them countless ways of expressing their complicated thoughts and dreams.
The world that children are living in is vastly different now than it was in the middle of the last century in the middle of the country when mental illness was shuttled off into a corner, not tended to, or thought to be "just a phase" and ignored.
There is therapy now. There are pharmaceutical solutions or aids that can reduce the anxiety of living and being "different." There is science that identifies differences in how people learn and how their brains behave differently in different situations.
We are learning to respect the odd, eccentric or differences among us. We can do better at the inclusion of those that in the past we thought of as "the other." If we do, we will be stronger for it.
Q: How would you describe your brother’s legacy?
A: Legacy is an odd word, usually applied to politicians or people in the public eye. I suppose a case can be made that I am now bringing my brother's life and his struggle into the arena, into the public sector.
Therefore, I hope that his story, his strength and his weakness, his strong, strong brain, his passion for the theatre and his lifelong fear of being different and damaged, of being unworthy, can offer some solace and hope to those also struggling and to those who care for them.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: Really just working on getting this book out in front of people. I am also writing a rather candid piece about sex and how men have and are dealing with sex as they grow and, perhaps, mature. I don't know yet if it is a performance piece or a play or what. It is evolving.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: No. I live a pretty low-key life. A good day is when I write about 500 to 1,000 words, take Mike the Dog for a couple of hour-long walks or a swim in the river and then manage to make something halfway interesting for dinner.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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