After reading Chasing Francis by Cron, I was interested in picking up his memoir, Jesus, My Father, the CIA and Me: A Memoir...Of Sorts. I wanted to learn more about the man who came up with the story behind Chasing Francis and of course, I'm always a sucker for memoirs.
I found this book to be easy to read as it chronicled Cron's childhood growing up with an alcoholic father. The majority of the book covered Cron's school years and the significant life events and interactions that shaped him, particularly those with his father and how they affected him as he grew up. Cron writes with a sense of humor, and I often found myself chuckling out loud. The humor wove its way around the painful incidents of his childhood and helped the memoir from being overly sad or dark.
My only criticism was that there was a part of the book that didn't seem to flow chronologically. At the end of one chapter, Cron is floundering a bit as a college student. In the next chapter, his dad dies, he finishes college and gets married. I had to flip back through to see if I had missed something. Maybe the author intended to use it to get across the abruptness and chaos that his father's death brought to his life or maybe it just needed a little more in the way of details to make it flow better. It also seemed to jump whole periods of his life towards the end of the book, as if he was trying to finish it in a certain number of pages, after spending a lot of time and detail on his childhood. And even though the title has CIA in it, the CIA was really just a very small part of the book.
Other than that, I really enjoyed the book and also the way he explained his search for his father's love as being integral to almost everything else in his life. I liked his writing style and would definitely recommend the book.
