My Tumbling Bumbling Wonderful Life

5 Star Review

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Editorial Book Review:

By Sally Pearson

There is a particular kind of memoir that earns its warmth not by glossing over the hard parts but by looking at them squarely and finding, somehow, something worth laughing about on the other side. David Browning Abright’s My Tumbling Bumbling Wonderful Life belongs firmly in that category. It is candid in the way that only a writer who has genuinely made peace with his own stumbles can be, and the result is a book that is as funny as it is honest.

Abright traces a life that veered considerably from the promising trajectory of his early years. Financial insecurity, a first marriage that did not last, a winding career that took detours through civil engineering and a long stint with Sears before eventually finding its footing: none of this is the stuff of triumphant narrative in the conventional sense. And yet Abright renders it with a lightness of touch that keeps the pages turning, because underneath the humor is a genuine generosity toward himself and toward the reader. He is not interested in impressing anyone. He is interested in telling the truth about what it feels like to be a person in midlife who has not yet figured everything out, which turns out to be an experience a great many people recognize.

The stories involving his daughters and his second marriage, with all the complexity that blended families bring, are among the most affecting passages in the book. Abright does not pretend that any of this was easy, but he makes clear that it was worth every awkward, uncertain moment. The underlying conviction of the memoir is that the arc of a life cannot really be judged from the middle of it, and that the relationships and small moments of connection along the way matter more than whatever external markers of success one has or has not accumulated.

This is the kind of memoir that is most useful not as a story about someone exceptional but as a reminder that ordinary lives, honestly examined, have their own quiet grandeur.