A Book Review

You Had to Be There: From Web Town to Psych Ward – A Memoir
by Terrence McCarthy
Published June 15, 2010 by Createspace


Sometimes when I'm with my friend Bob and his wife Penny, she will interrupt him saying “TMI, Bob.” Too much Information. So when Bob and I get together without Penny we exchange TMI and tell the whole story, sometimes for the third or fourth time. I think it's in those long detours to explain that Bob and I learn about each other and tell each other who we really are.

Terrence McCarthy's memoir “You Had to Be There” is TMI. McCarthy's memoir is incredibly honest. In reading it we learn who Terrence McCarthy really is. In his unpolished style with detours and repetitions McCarthy seems unconsciously to reveal more and more about himself.

Born at the beginning of the Baby Boom, growing up in an unremarkable town in an ordinary family McCarthy is in some ways a Baby Boomer Everyman. It isn't the usual memoir we read, grunts in Vietnam, famous reporters or writers, movers and shakers, people who make history or stand in the middle of it. But he's not Everyman, he's Terry McCarthy and in reading the book he has written we come to know Terry McCarthy like a good friend.

If I were teaching a class about the 60s and 70s in America I would assign “You Had to Be There” as required reading. It is full of anecdotes that make the era real. He struggles with his inner demon and goes from one college to another and finally drops out. He joins the Air Force and goes to Myrtle Beach and then England while Vietnam is raging. He gets out of the Air Force and is lost at home, finding a job in a local factory or mill, meets his future wife in a local watering hole, finishes college, becomes a journalist, a copywriter and then quits and works for 11 years in a locked psych ward as a counselor.

It's not the stuff of history but in fact it really is, an ordinary life in extraordinary times, lived well and with great awareness. It is ordinary and good people like Terrence McCarthy who make an age what it is and in this Terrence McCarthy is an extraordinary person, a person I enjoyed getting to know.

I hope McCarthy gives us a sequel, this book brings us to the middle of a good life.  A sequel and we can share with McCarthy the insights of growing old. More information, please.

You Had to Be There at Amazon