Robert McBryde waited his whole life to release MY TIME WITH YOU HAS BEEN SHORT BUT VERY FUNNY. His whole life is in this book, a collection of humorous, personal, and often poignant essays. Many of these stories have been told over McBryde’s 35-year career as a teacher and radio broadcaster in Canada. But, gathered together, these tales infused with hindsight and wisdom take on a new life.
MY TIME WITH YOU HAS BEEN SHORT BUT VERY FUNNY is greater than the sum of its parts. McBryde often employs purple prose for comedic effect. He recalls the unwelcoming classrooms of his youth as “another boiling cauldron of amorphous atavism and animosity.” Later in the book, McBryde reflects on the smoke-filled “good old days” of Canadian radio: “The premises of this august branch of Canada’s national broadcaster were a stinky, fuggy, cluttered locus for rumpus, with harried employees beetling about the cubicles, looking dog-tired as they emerged from the billowing tobacco smoke that enveloped their nether realm.”
Facing life with a sense of humor is McBryde’s default style, as his jokes are often self-effacing, but there is a lot of pain and sorrow behind the laughs. While McBryde portrays his father as a cartoonish, hot-tempered Scotsman, the image of an abusive bully still comes through loud and clear. When McBryde’s mother plans a family trip to see a play, his father makes her pay for the cultural excursion: “Dad held forth for days about how idiotic and horrendous the experience had been, complete with remorseless salvos against my mother and her uppity aspirations.”
Unfortunately, E-book formatting issues detract from the reading experience. McBryde incorporates hyperlinks directly into the narrative, which are distracting and (literally) pull readers out of the book. While these digital asides are informative, they should be kept in a Footnotes section at the back of the book, or at least at the end of each chapter. This problem notwithstanding, the memoir is still an enjoyable and touching read.
Radio listeners in Quebec are already familiar with the wit and wisdom of Robert McBryde. The non-fiction collection, MY TIME WITH YOU HAS BEEN SHORT BUT VERY FUNNY, gives the rest of the world access to the author’s inimitable style.
~Rob Errera for IndieReader