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by Jaed Coffin
A beautifully crafted memoir about fathers and sons, masculinity, and the lengths we sometimes go to in order to confront our past.
While lifting weights in the Seldon Jackson College gymnasium on a rainy autumn night, Jaed Coffin heard the distinctive whacking sound of sparring boxers down the hall. A year out of college, he had been biding his time as a tutor at a local high school in Sitka, Alaska, without any particular life plan. That evening, Coffin joined a ragtag boxing club. For the first time, he felt like he fit in.
Coffin washed up in Alaska after a forty-day solo kayaking journey. Born to an American father and a Thai mother who had met during the Vietnam War, Coffin never felt particularly comfortable growing up in his rural Vermont town. Following his parents' prickly divorce and a childhood spent drifting between his father's new white family and his mother's Thai roots, Coffin didn't know who he was, much less what path his life should follow. His father's notions about what it meant to be a man―formed by King Arthur legends and calcified in the military―did nothing to help. After college, he took to the road, working odd jobs and sleeping in his car before heading north.
Despite feeling initially terrified, Coffin learns to fight. His coach, Victor "the Savage," invites him to participate in the monthly Roughhouse Friday competition, where men contend for the title of best boxer in southeast Alaska. With every successive match, Coffin realizes that he isn't just fighting for the championship belt; he is also learning to confront the anger he feels about a past he never knew how to make sense of.
Deeply honest and vulnerable, Roughhouse Friday is a meditation on violence and abandonment, masculinity, and our inescapable longing for love. It suggests that sometimes the truth of what's inside you comes only if you push yourself to the extreme.
"[A] powerful, wonderfully written exploration of one's sense of manhood." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A compelling story of small-town boxing in Alaska and a complex examination of masculine identities." - Kirkus Reviews
"Roughhouse Friday is as bare and intimate a rendering of masculinity, of young adulthood, of being human as I have ever read. This is a fearless and exquisite work of art." - Lily King, author of Euphoria
"Roughhouse Friday is one of the most convincing memoirs I have read tracking the mysterious course of an obsession―in this case, an obsession with fighting (i.e., "boxing") against all odds of success and in the face of much risk. It's a touching document, candid, utterly convincing in its myriad details of American manhood and in the clarity with which the young, aspiring boxer assesses his life. " - Joyce Carol Oates
This information about Roughhouse Friday was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Jaed Coffin is the author of the memoir A Chant to Soothe Wild Elephants and teaches in the University of New Hampshire's MFA creative writing program. He lives in Brunswick, Maine.
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