SALT LAKE CITY, UT, February 25, 2020
Chuck Radke
Charles Lewis Radke was born to a woman who doctors warned should never have children. She was diagnosed with lupus at twenty-one and not expected to live past thirty. In the years she had left, they said, the disease would gnaw at her connective tissues, leaving her joints in a state of bone-on-bone and leaving her child motherless. Flannery O’Connor, who suffered from the same disease wrote, “The wolf, I’m afraid, is inside tearing up the place.” O’Connor, diagnosed at twenty-five, made it to thirty-nine. Radke’s mother lived another six decades.
She lived, Radke says, because she had to.
Just a month before his eighth birthday, sitting in the passenger seat of their Buick Skyhawk, Radke’s father quotes the fifth stanza of Service’s “The Spell of the Yukon” to explain to his son why he is leaving to start a new life with a thinner, prettier woman named Patty who wants nothing to do with his seven-year-old boy. This leaves young Radke with only his mother to care for him, and no one but him to care for her.
In their Fresno home in the middle of a fig orchard, Radke hosts Tupperware® parties to raise extra money. He administers his mother’s assortment of medications when she’s in too much pain to do it for herself. He learns to make meals out of whatever is available, even if it’s only tomatoes, mayonnaise and bread. All this before he is twelve years old.
Decades later, on Christmas Day 2018, Radke’s mother, now eighty, gifts her son with a tree ornament which she asks him to hang on the tree next Christmas, so she can still be a part of his family’s celebration. “My belief,” Radke says, “is that she knew she only had months to live.”
Faced with finally losing his mother to an illness that should have taken her years ago, Radke began writing their story. He finished a month after her death, days after what would have been her eighty-first birthday.
Radke’s memoir, recently acquired by E.L. Marker, is starkly honest, deeply personal, and effortlessly funny. His story is as exceptional as it is relatable, as impossible as it is true, as singular as a stucco neighborhood in a fig orchard in Fresno, California.
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Charles Lewis Radke is first a husband and father of three. He earned his master’s degree in English at Fresno State, followed by an MFA at Florida International University. He returned to Fresno State where he founded their Graduate Writing Studio.
His stories have appeared in The San Joaquin Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Gulf Stream Magazine, and The South Dakota Review. He is the recipient of an AWP Intro Award for fiction and the Estelle Campbell Prize for literature from the National Society of Arts and Letters. He writes every day, even if it’s on a napkin, and when life gives him a tomato and bread and mayonnaise, he makes a sandwich.
For more information visit charleslewisradke.com.