In this otherworldly memoir of extraordinary power, Mark Richard, an award-winning author, tells his story of growing up in the American South with a heady Gothic mix of racial tension and religious fervor. Called a “special child,” Southern social code for mentally—and physically—challenged children, Richard was crippled by deformed hips and was told he would spend his adult life in a wheelchair. During his early years in charity hospitals, Richard observed the drama of other broken boys’ lives, children from impoverished Appalachia, tobacco country lowlands, and Richmond’s poorest neighborhoods. The son of a solitary alcoholic father whose hair-trigger temper terrorized his family, and of a mother who sought inner peace through fasting, prayer, and scripture, Richard spent his bedridden childhood withdrawn into the company of books. As a young man, Richard, defying both his doctors and parents, set out to experience as much of the world as he could—as a disc jockey, fishing trawler deckhand, house painter, naval correspondent, aerial photographer, private investigator, foreign journalist, bartender and unsuccessful seminarian—before his hips failed him. While digging irrigation ditches in east Texas, he discovered that a teacher had sent a story of his to the Atlantic, where it was named a winner in the magazine’s national fiction contest launching a career much in the mold of Jack London and Mark Twain. A superbly written and irresistible blend of history, travelogue, and personal reflection, House of Prayer No. 2 is a remarkable portrait of a writer’s struggle with his faith, the evolution of his art, and of recognizing one’s singularity in the face of painful disability. Written with humor and a poetic force, this memoir is destined to become a modern classic.
Author
Mark Richard is an American short story writer, novelist, screenwriter, and poet. He is the author of two award-winning short story collections, The Ice at the Bottom of the World and Charity, a bestselling novel, Fishboy, and House of Prayer No. 2: A Writer's Journey Home. Mark Richard was born in Lake Charles, Louisiana, and grew up in Texas and Virginia. As heard on the Diane Rehm Show on NPR: He grew up in the 1960s in a racially divided rural town in Virginia. His family was poor. He was born with deformed hips and spent years in and out of charity hospitals. When his father walked out, his mother withdrew further into a world of faith. In a new memoir "House of Prayer No. 2" he details growing up in the American South as a “The Special Child” and how the racial tensions and religious fervor of his home town animate his writing today.[1] He attended college at Washington and Lee University. His first book, the short story collection The Ice at the Bottom of the World, won the 1990 PEN/Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award. His short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire, GQ, The Paris Review, The Oxford American, Grand Street, Shenandoah, The Quarterly, Equator, and Antaeus. He is the recipient of the PEN/Ernest Hemingway Award, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Whiting Award, a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship, the Mary Francis Hobson Medal for Arts and Letters, and a National Magazine Award for Fiction. He has been writer-in-residence at the University of California Irvine, University of Mississippi, Arizona State University, the University of the South, Sewanee, and The Writer’s Voice in New York. His journalism has appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s, Spin, Esquire, George, Detour, Vogue, The Oxford American, and The Southern Review, and he has been a correspondent for the BBC. He was also screenwriter for the film Stop-Loss. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife Jennifer Allen and their three sons.
