“A defining voice for his generation . . . Payne is extraordinarily gifted.” —Boston Globe
“Burns starkly and powerfully . . . a book that is, as much as anything, a study in the power of inexhaustible candor . . . like the best memoirs, it’s about something far harder to pin down, something unspecific and ineffable in the way time moves and lives fade, the moments that none of us can get back. . . . Payne’s writing is loose, confident and snappy, and he has a rare ability to distill enormous scope into a single sentence, sometimes a single image .
. . [Payne] gives us the ambiguities of real life, a story that is sometimes hard to take, but always worth it.” —Lucas Mann, San Francisco Chronicle
“Piercing . . . a tour de force.” —David Ulin, Los Angeles Times
“Intense, painful, and beautifully rendered . . . The story is built like a labyrinth. Memories and experiences are pathways leading into and out of others, deftly moving the reader forward and back in time…That David cuts himself no slack, and boldly, unflinchingly tells his own faulty story is remarkable.” —Patricia Ann McNair, Washington Independent Review of Books
“Powerful . . . a deep examination of many sorrows.” —People
“A super-honest, affecting personal narrative; Payne writes about his childhood, his parents, and his career with a novelist’s sensitivity to detail.” —GQ.com
“A memoir as raw, intimate and courageous as a series of midnight confessions fueled by a bottle of vodka . . . [Payne’s] barefoot journey, every brave and bloody step over broken glass, shows how even the darkest emotions and deepest wounds can yield to love.” —Gina Webb, Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Payne explores his family and all its troubled relationships and history, striking universal notes that will hit you where you live . . . Not since William Styron’s 1951 debut novel ‘Lie Down in Darkness’ has there been a more eloquent, courageous depiction.” —The Winston-Salem Journal
“Powerful, gripping, raw and tender.” —The News & Observer
“David Payne goes to the bone in his deeply felt Barefoot to Avalon.” —Elissa Schappell, Vanity Fair
“Riveting family history [asks] complex questions about social prestige, mental health, and the ties that bind . . . powerful.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Moving . . . there’s a novelistic intensity to the story, with Payne dwelling on vivid recollected scenes, recreating their atmospherics and teasing out every buried emotional tremor and element of foreshadowing, but his prose also has the rawness of a confessional . . . Writing with a mixture of clear-eyed realism and lyrical elegy, Payne shows how a family’s pain, resentment, and loss get transmuted into love.” —Publishers Weekly
“Barefoot to Avalon is simply magnificent. The book has the feeling of nothing at all reserved, a kind of go for broke passion. In this complete commitment it steps across a normal threshold between reader and book. It has because of this a powerful healing effect of a very strange, unusual kind. Reading it has been a huge experience.” —Suzannah Lessard
“Barefoot to Avalon is one of the most powerful and penetrating memoirs I’ve ever read; it is fiercely honest, deeply engaging, and utterly heartbreaking.” —Jay McInerney
“The tangled ties of adult siblings are one of the most under-explored themes in literature. In Barefoot to Avalon, David Payne transforms the story of a brother’s death into a potent and heartbreaking meditation on love and loss and the long climb out of grief.” —Jenny Offil
“An elegy to a brother that plumbs depths beyond depths—a fever-dream of a memoir, a blazing map of familial love and loss, headlong and heartbreaking and gorgeously written.” —James Kaplan
“A major achievement and a whole new standard for memoir—Barefoot to Avalon is brave and brilliant, deep and true. Payne has tried to get the whole universe on the head of a pin, and done a fine job of it.” —Lee Smith
“A brother’s tragic death is at the heart of this memoir, but David Payne transcends the troubled relationship between his brother and himself to achieve something more—a compelling study of the inextricable link between the families we are born into and those that we try to create. Barefoot to Avalon is clear-eyed and unsentimental, which makes it all the more powerful and, ultimately, unforgettable.” —Ron Rash
Grove Press
