Barrelhouse Reviews: I’m Never Fine by Joseph Lezza

Reviewed by Manuel Betancourt

Vine Leaves Press / February 2023 / 252 pp

The title of this collection of essays is as much an admission as a threat. Or rather, as much an explanation as an expiation. A confession, if you will, that seeks less atonement than commiseration. Who among us is ever “fine,” after all? The word, as Joseph Lezza explains, is bandied about so often precisely because it’s so innocuous, because it’s an easy shield with which to deflect any kind of self-examination. Most people to whom we say “fine” aren’t really that interested in hearing how we’re doing, how we’re coping, how we’re managing.

Serving as a tone-setter for an achingly personal series of pieces (“essays” almost feels too restrictive a term), the line “I’m never fine” is a true distillation of the heartbreak and grief that follows. The loss of the title is the death of Lezza’s father from an aggressive cancer. As if anticipating the difficulty of packaging such a personal story and the expectations this effort is sure to elicit in his readers, Lezza’s “Preface” makes clear that he’s not here to comfort us or show us a template for how to deal with similar tragedies. Instead, he forces us to follow along as he navigates the calcified kind of anger that characterized his own journey.

To start not just with such a title but with such a hardened emotion is enough to set I’m Never Fine apart from the ordinary run of tomes on grief. What’s in front of you is thornier, tougher. As Lezza looks back on the many months he and his mother cared for his dad in what increasingly felt like a futile fight, I’m Never Fine’s many pieces paint as much a portrait of those visits to the ER, those long stays in the hospital, even those final days in hospice care as of a writer fending off the desire to make sense of it all. “The thing about cancer is how its enormity behooves an intense sense of focus from those it engages,” he writes. “That very preoccupation is all too easy to conflate with the belief that there is only one way to feel about something.”

That explains why “never fine” is both refrain and structure. Being not fine opens up Lezza to indulge in the many other feelings he cycled through as he watched his loving father slowly (and then all too rapidly) slip away from him. As a love letter from a doting son, I’m Never Fine is painstakingly produced. Memories are etched with vivid imagery, whether they took place in childhood driveways where a father’s love could be contained in a makeshift cardboard Italian ice stand, replete with a swinging door for (kid-sized) employees; in nameless restaurants where “patrons within earshot did a piss-poor job of hiding their curiosities, crouching behind foggy partitions and menus slashed with syrupy dribble,” or even in medical offices where pills and dosages become the way to measure progress (or lack thereof). By the time the reader arrives at “Abide the Chirping,” wherein Lezza wrestles with his now decade-old anxiety diagnosis, his writerly impulses appear more legible. Lezza illustrates these episodes with such fastidious attention to detail that the reader can almost feel him wanting to not leave anything out. There’s an archival urge here, an intention to remain present in past reminiscences—even in the painful ones, as when, in “Little Murders,” Lezza painfully relives what it meant to experience the way a father’s love could come with a “despite” attached to it.

One of the joys of Lezza’s writing is its own shapeshifting; sometimes he calls the reader to follow him as he tries to sketch a Polaroid of a memory, while other times he reaches for a poetic brush to color in impressionistic, lyric moments. Throughout, Lezza seems intent to shape his grief. He seeks familiar forms (poems, memoiristic missives, threaded essays) as if to grasp for ledges on which to stand lest he fall into a formless abyss. It’s no surprise to find that his most affecting pieces emerge when he stops struggling at the intersection of lyric and memoir, when his overly descriptive tendencies melt away and he dives deep into himself instead. Indeed, the final third of the book (coincidentally the third that takes place after his father has passed and most concerns itself not with how we lose in life but how we recover in memory) hints at an assured voice which can gracefully write about religion, his own coming-out, and even a folly-fueled Italian trip.

“If I can turn hours into days and days into weeks, then the space between the tenses can be flattened and pulled,” he writes. “As long as my eyes remained fixed, he won’t ever be gone. Only going.” I’m Never Fine feels like an instantiation of such a desire. The book breaks down hospital visits and teary-eyed diner conversations, doctor calls and endless medical tests into carefully curated minutiae that flood sentence after sentence. It constantly seeks to stop time and capture the moments before they evanesce completely. Here’s where the title is the tell again: not because it focuses on “fine,” but because it zeroes in on that modifying word “never.” Lezza leaves a looped confession, a portrait of constant state of being. Grief, as Lezza reminds us, has a neverending half-life.

Manuel Betancourt is a Los Angeles-based queer Colombian writer and film critic. His work has been featured in The New York Times, BuzzFeed Reader, The Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, and Electric Literature, among others. He’s the author of Judy at Carnegie Hall (Bloomsbury University Press, 2020), The Male Gazed: What Hunks, Heartthrobs and Pop Culture Taught Me About (Desiring) Men (Catapult, 2023), and a co-writer on The Cardboard Kingdom series (Knopf Books for Young Readers, 2018, 2021, 2023). Find him at mbetancourt.com.