In the House of My Fear: A Memoir

Anyone who lived through the Sixties and has any sembalance of rememberance about those years should read this book. Agee's experiences and recollections are nothing short of amazing, and his unique insights into the metaphysical side of life and things is stunning. In the House of My Fear is a classic.

Joel Agee read at my Reading Series last week (March 4, 2005). This is the introduction I gave for that event: I received an e-mail from Joel Agee. Spoke to him. Then, last week, I met him. Despite that, while reading "In the House of My Fear," late in the book, while a man is wandering through the streets of London, the abyss very near, I totally forgot that the very same man and I exchanged e-mails not a day before. I felt...afraid...for him. The places--on the map and in the mind--that Joel Agee describes--often seem impossible to escape from and emerge...what? Sane? Whole? I don't know. I often forgot--completely, as if the words "a memoir" were not written on the front of the book--that what I was reading was true. The events related in this book...happened, even though the narrator hardly believes much of it was actually real while it was happening to him. It sometimes seems like a common thing; we read books, see films, listen to music, view paintings, etc..., and the power of great art takes us out of ourselves, even briefly, to another, more wondrous place. Places that exist only in the mind of the artist, who, if expert, by an act akin to telepathy, transmits those experiences to us, profoundly. But beyond the simple telling, the act of transmission, "In the House of My Fear" has a power, a force, that I simply have not experienced as a reader, maybe ever. The act of reading it was, for me, a physically altering experience. I do much of my reading these days on the subway. Now, in New York, where eye contact is often seen as threat, and displays of public emotion are usually frowned upon, my reactions to this book could not help but have been expressed. I found myself, at one point, almost folded in half, holding the book between my legs. The story had literally bowed me down. I can't imagine what the people on a crowded E Train thought at that moment. And I took the sensations, the moods, the feeling imprinted upon me by this amazing book up from the underground, to the world above. The very air seemed more vibrant. And I, with nothing stronger in me than food and water, felt a little of that hallucinatory state that Joel Agee describes in such a terrifyingly beautiful way. This is a book that unerringly organizes tangled events that, in and of themselves are seemingly random, into an inarguable order; with unexpected deadpan humor, uncanny understanding of the connections between loved ones, and a feel of a great and necessary quest. It was a joy and a privilege for me to read, and an honor to be able to present Joel Agee... I cannot recommend this book highly enough...

IN THE HOUSE OF MY FEAR is a great book. Not only is Joel Agee a wonderfully gifted writer and storyteller, but his memoir/novel is a terrific evocation of a time when many young people said, "Make love not war," and "May the Baby Jesus shut your mouth and open up your eyes." I was a photographer in the 1960's and did my own book about that time period (Britannia Press, "It Happened In Monterey") about the 1967 milestone, the Monterey Pop Festival. I remember that era with fondness and wonder. In telling his own story of gradual breakdown and eventual breakthrough into self-realization, Agee recounts a series of incredible adventures and meetings. He also captures the essence of a time when no dream seemed impossible, and manages to evoke, not just remember, a consciousness I believed was buried before reading this book. I have always wished for writing that succeeded in revealing the hippy experience, always wondered if a psychedelic drug trip could find expression in language. This book does both. It is also a timeless story about a soul's passage through great danger and ultimate redemption. I recommend it highly.

All of us who were "on the scene" in the sixties, that indescribable time of extacy and rage, now have a book that like no other helps us to understand our own experience of the time. Younger readers will learn more about this watershed moment in modern American history by reading this novelized memoir than by reading the historians. Unlike his father in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Agee's focus is inward, an attempt at a "rescue mission" to release the ghosts of past terrors. Agee's journey takes us on an often breathtaking trip in a VW bus through North Africa, Spain, France, Switzerland, and finally England, where he loses his bus and, temporarily, his mind. Readers of Agee's earlier memoir of boyhood, Thirteen Years, will welcome this continuation of a remarkable biography by a brilliant prose stylist.

Joel Agee has written a memoir-masterpiece, which, in its orginality and interest rivals that of his father's "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men." What James Agee did for the America of the 1930's, Joel has done for the 1960's. No one who has lived through the so-called "Hippie revolution" can afford to miss reading this brilliantly written autobiography-novel which goes to the very heart of a key period in American history and illuminates it "from within." This is a work which should be widely read--and appreciated. It also happens to be a page-turner!