With wry humor and wonder, Spillman beautifully captures the deadpan hedonism of the East Berliners and the city’s sense of infinite possibility, which, to his frustration, never quite imbues him with his own artistic compulsion. (One is reminded as much of Cyril Connolly’s anti-bildungsroman Enemies of Promise as Nick Hornby’s culture-besotted High Fidelity.)
He's not a stylist, but has a plain and conversational voice. I like that. The this guy/that guy chapters are short, punchy and focused, and I like that, too. They twine around each other in their motif of rambling attempts at finding and living an authentically artistic life ... if you can inoculate yourself against this engorged sense of self-importance going in — if you can transmute long passages about the importance of living like an artist into a kind of pleasant humming noise in your brain without it tripping all your rage switches — the ride is still very much worth it.
All Tomorrow’s Parties is at once a completely relatable and unique coming-of-age story ... His desire for an exciting life can be infectious, and his ultimate pursuit of it makes for an exhilarating read.
I want to assure him, as I’ve assured myself: Worrying about having the experience is the experience. It just happens that life is fabulously anxious. Writers are not the ones invited to the dance. We’re the ones with our noses to the window, wondering about the people who seem to be having such a good time. Spillman’s life is a good one to read, and when people start to quote from it, the dance will continue.
Each chapter comes with an epigraph from a famous writer or musician and a 'soundtrack' that ranges from Beethoven to the Sex Pistols. Neither adds anything to what we go on to read, but they do underscore Spillman’s absolute commitment to art — creating it, being influenced by it, living for it. Sometimes he goes on about it too much, but in the main his memoir says exactly the right things in the most engaging way.
Spillman is happiest when he is betwixt and between — on the road, crossing borders, running long distances. This is a realm he knows intimately and documents beautifully in All Tomorrow’s Parties, a yearning, restless memoir about a lost boy looking for home...If the ending feels a little pat that’s perhaps because, as the adage goes, it’s the journey not the destination — and Spillman is all journey.
Spillman must have felt a great catharsis when writing this book. It is a shrine filled with relics for the people and the art he loves. It quivers with the type of honesty it takes to admit your deepest, most damning secrets. But Spillman isn’t angling for sympathy. Instead he is bold and almost defiant. All Tomorrow’s Parties is a major achievement and a reflection of the epigraph for chapter 59, which is a Denis Johnson quote: 'Write naked. Write from exile. Write in blood.'
