Yes, I Want to Destroy Your Sweater: Prologue
First of all, The Christmas Sweater is illustrated? I phrase that in the form of a question because I found it surprising and not surprising at the same time. At the start of each chapter is a 4”-by-4” black-and-white drawing that I imagine will elucidate some of Glenn’s more complex themes. Flipping through the book, I can tell you that these illustrations include a sweater, Christmas presents, a snowflake, and a chocolate bar. I’m just eye-balling this, but the size of the font and the fact that every single page has a festive red border with sprigs of holly in the corners leads me to estimate that The Christmas Sweater almost definitely has a lower words-to-drawings ratio than, say, the Harry Potter series.
But what I really want to talk about in this post is the two-page prologue, in which Glenn Beck delves into some genre-bending fuckery that would blow my fellow writing students’ minds, if I had any inclination to share with them this absurd project of mine. The prologue is entitled “The Way It Ends…” which, you know, it’s no Memento but I guess I can give a moderate amount of props to the fact that Glenn is not telling a linear narrative. Except no. Because the prologue begins with the narrator reminiscing about this mysterious Christmas sweater with which, I fear, we shall soon become intimately familiar, noting that he held onto the sweater even long after it had ceased to fit him, because “captured in its yarn were fragments of my childhood innocence—my greatest regrets, fears, hopes, disappointments—and, in time, my greatest joy.” Which, no wonder the sweater stopped fitting him; all these feelings are caught in the yarn. And then there’s a lot of nonsense about this story including “events I never intended to share with anyone” except that it seems as though “my sweater wanted its story told” (emphasis mine—anthropomorphizing a sweater? Bold, Glenn Beck, bold). The narrator tells the reader that the story he is about to share is “my gift to you,” and then—THEN!—he signs the page: Glenn.
Remember, people, this book is categorized as a novel. The main character’s name is Eddie, if the book jacket is to be believed. And yet here—and in the absofuckinglutely bizarre book trailer I linked to earlier—Glenn Beck is taking complete ownership of the events that have yet to unfold. What we’re about to read is not fictional, Glenn is saying, it’s his story, his sweater. Except—no, it isn’t! It’s Eddie’s story, Eddie’s sweater!
There are plenty of writers who are at their most brilliant when testing that tension between fiction and non-fiction—Lorrie Moore’s “People Like That Are The Only People Here” and Rick Moody’s “Demonology” come to mind, and so does the entire oeuvre of Aleksandar Hemon, which we could talk about if he’d ever respond to my request for an interview. These are writers who understand that when a story seems to brim with genuine emotion, their readers will assume the story is true, and so they basically fuck with the reader until the reader maybe feels sort of dirty for having made such an assumption. What these writers don’t do is say, “Yeah, this totally happened to me, but for some reason I’m going to name this character Eddie instead of Glenn so that it’s, you know, literary.”
Glenn is saying, “I am Eddie.” But if Glenn is Eddie, why isn’t The Christmas Sweater a memoir? I have a theory: Glenn isn’t Eddie. I have a suspicion that Glenn wants to appropriate Eddie’s story, because he feels that this story will showcase attributes that Glenn would like his readers to pin on him—valor, precociousness, spirituality, down-home-aw-shucks-Americanity. But he’s just self-aware enough to know that you can’t just make up something and claim that it happened to you (thanks for nothing, James Frey), and so Glenn becomes Eddie and Eddie becomes Glenn and the average reader has already moved past these two pages because they don’t think about these things as hard as I do.
Or, you know, it’s possible that Glenn Beck is just a moron.