After David died, Ken was left with an archive of fragments. He began a long, careful process of piecing together that resulted in this chiseled documentary. Along the way he finds a kind of satisfaction that David’s dysfunction never permitted him. He becomes the writer his brother couldn’t. (He’s now series editor at PBS’s Frontline.) And in a slightly uncomfortable turn of events, he falls in love with and marries David’s college sweetheart.
If all of this seems alarmingly vulnerable to Freudian interpretation, don’t think that Dornstein isn’t aware of that. His memoir is an elegy, a love letter, but also a necessarily mechanistic performance of what Freud called “the work of grief” — “the only way of perpetuating that love which we do not want to relinquish.”
THE BOY WHO FELL OUT OF THE SKY | BY KEN DORNSTEIN | RANDOM HOUSE | 320 PAGES | $23.95
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