A German businessman meets another transplant in Cambridge, an American psychiatrist. This isn't the memoir that features a build-up to a romantic meet-cute and an immediate happy-ever-after. Instead, Michael Norkus's FALLING WITH PURPOSE: A Strategist’s Pursuit of Love and Durchblick focuses on the real life that happens after the initial sparks of attraction, on finding and keeping someone you'd want to see across the breakfast table (as well as the night before). The other half of the story documents the journey and making of the man who would find her.
An author's voice makes or breaks the enjoyability of any nonfiction, but it's even more essential in memoirs. Thankfully, Norkus strikes the right balance between conversational, informative, and conspiratorial. The narrative reads easily, spooling outward from two concentrations that largely follow an alternating structure. One chapter will focus on the mischief a young Michael could get up to, or the strife he witnessed in the relationship between his parents. The next chapter will often fixate instead on the developing relationship he has with the amazing woman who's helping him learn to be a partner. This structure does work very well for the most part, highlighting the difference between the child-Michael seeking familial love and the adult-Michael seeking romance. Yet the text feels a little more chaotic than it needs to. Restructuring the dual narratives to something more chronological would have made FALLING WITH PURPOSE even stronger.
The content and message of Norkus's work never changes, staying consistently strong. As evidenced in the quote below, there's no shortage of lines that can emotionally impact the reader:
I never stopped loving Hans.
But respect came less easily.
I was his son, carrying his gifts and trying not to inherit his curses.
However, the quote is also indicative of a few rhetorical issues. A few extra line breaks undermine the sentences' cohesion, for instance. Some rhetorical devices, including contrastive negation, are used with a heavy hand.
The memoir still has a lot of humor and heart, and there's an added layer of appeal from the author's international origins. Despite its flaws, FALLING WITH PURPOSE should appeal to a wide audience.
Michael Norkus skillfully shares himself with the reader in FALLING WITH PURPOSE: A Strategist’s Pursuit of Love and Durchblick.
~ Lisbeth Ivies for IndieReader