All Tomorrow’s Parties: A Memoir

In this carefully wrought coming-of-age memoir, a young American writer searches for home in an unlikely place: East Berlin immediately after the fall of the wall. Tin House editor Spillman, who spent his first eight years in West Berlin, recounts his 1990 return with his wife, the writer Elissa Schappell, seeking the heady air of East Berlin, where skinheads battle anarchists while talk of radical art and politics fills the seedy bars and underground raves. As their money dwindles, Schappell’s enthusiasm for the melodramatic atmosphere and their threadbare squat wanes, and she pulls away from Spillman’s literary romanticism. Interspersed are scenes from Spillman’s youth, as he bounces between his divorced American parents, weathers his father’s struggle with his own homosexuality, sings in opera productions at music festivals, disdains his schoolmates, and longs for a life that matches his nonconformist self-image. Spillman describes a hilarious attempt to get a Communist laundry to wash his clothes, which requires negotiations, inspections, and an eight-day wait. Ultimately, his is a quest of roots and writerly authenticity—and his evocation of East Berlin’s last days is exquisite and revealing. (Apr.)