Boy On A Unicycle: Confessions Of A Young Man Trained To Be A Winner
Novelist Dan McCall details his obsessive quest to become the 1950s poster boy for American optimism. After winning multiple national speech contests and becoming “California Boy of the Year,” his appearance on the rigged TV quiz show Strike It Rich forces him to come to terms with deceptions about himself, his family, and his country. Later, as a student at Stanford, he is exhilarated and disturbed by his first experiences with alcohol and sex. He also finds himself irresistibly drawn to reading and writing fiction. The memoir is framed by McCall as a young adult in crisis, drunk and alone in a dark corner of Calcutta, facing the demons that would soon compel him to become a writer.
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Straight-forward, engaging writing you’ll want to read in one sitting.
tragically lived and beautifully told, about “winning” in America and Not only does this novel hold true to the distinct narrative voice that so many of Dan McCall’s readers have come to love, it also gives us a vivid, and at times chilling sense of how that voice came to be. Young Dan has his demons, to be sure, and some are quite clearly of his own creation. But some of them arise from budding talent, a complex family structure, and expectations for success from both within and without. Dan McCall poured a lot of himself into this manuscript, and over several…