The Talking Cure
by Mike Feder
Seven Stories Press 2001
(originally appeared in Hyde Park Review of Books)

It would be a shame if Mike Feder’s memoir were to be confused with books like these, as when his earlier book of stories was misguidedly shelved as Humor. As the name suggests, "The Talking Cure: A Memoir of Life on Air" is as much about Feder’s emergence as one of the most compelling and distinctive voices in radio as it is about the concurrent struggle for sanity that dates back to his childhood. His compelling, often harrowing, yet highly engaging account explores the complex relationship between the two, as in the question he ponders following a successful spoken word performance the evening before his second institutionalization: “I’m wondering how I was able to remember an hour and fifteen minutes of the most complicated story, getting all the dates and the pacing and the particular lines just right, down to the last little pause and nuance, even manage to be funny and make people laugh. How is that possible when I can hardly walk the streets, ride the trains, eat, or sleep without shaking in terror?” The answer is that storytelling is the very wellspring of Feder’s sanity, and often its last refuge. Silenced by himself or by others, he collapses into paranoia and despair; only when he is “sitting on a porch, or walking in the quiet of the evening, or lying next to someone in bed, pouring out my mind and heart, exchanging stories, casting up dreams in the darkness,” is he truly content.

As a child, he would tell endless stories in a frantic attempt to bolster the sanity of his deeply disturbed mother. His inevitable failure would wreak havoc with his relationships with women, especially following her suicide shortly after he begged her to leave him in peace, the note reading “I can no longer live without the respect of my children.” His own needs neglected by his father, a globetrotting civil engineer (and CIA agent, as Feder later learned), he turned for comfort to the Lone Ranger, Amos and Andy, and by the mid-1960s, the maverick broadcasters of New York’s WBAI-FM, a Pacifica Radio station, who opened his ears to the limitless possibilities offered by that era’s freewheeling FM culture.

Since 1979, Feder has engaged WBAI listeners in a free-ranging discussion of current events in the world outside as well as within his tortured mind. Fortunately for fans of Hard Times, his weekly live show, and for readers of his memoir, his need to tell stories is well served by his skill in doing so. He recounts his life as a series of linked episodes, each with its own tension and denouement, showing a keen eye for the small details that bring characters, places, and situations to life. He leavens despair with humor, but never at the cost of trivializing the story or insulting the reader’s compassion. Unflinchingly honest, he never asks for forgiveness, although his desperate need to be forgiven and to forgive is never far from view. He speaks matter-of-factly about his envy and neglect of his own children, his extramarital affairs, the self-absorption that cost him two marriages, his excruciating overreaction to the sudden fame that courted him all too temporarily in the late 1980s. The portraits he presents of his numerous therapists in some of the book’s funniest scenes are refreshingly free of vindictiveness and score-settling. Highly revealing but never self-indulgent, Feder’s memoir transcends the madness memoir genre in the most fundamental way of all: by being a good story told well.