Book review: Lessons in Gratitude: A Memoir on Race, The Arts and Mental Health

Lessons in Gratitude: A Memoir on Race, The Arts and Mental Health

Aaron P. Dworkin

280PP ISBN 9780472076994

University of Michigan Press $44.95

Aaron Dworkin’s autobiography is by no means a light read. Although one knows it must end well, that the protagonist will somehow overcome adversity to establish the ground-breaking Sphinx Organization, it gets worse before it gets better.

Dworkin is shockingly frank about the clinical actions of his adoptive parents and the beatings he received. Both parents were behavioural scientists, yet neither apparently understood the challenges and racism a bi-racial child could experience growing up in a white family in the 1980s. Although they supported and enabled his love for the violin, even his practice time was regimented to an authoritarian degree.

When it seems Dworkin’s teenage life can’t spiral much further downwards, as his father calls the police on his own son stating that ‘there’s an armed Black man in our house’ and an officer approaches with shotgun drawn, there soon comes a breath of fresh air: his time at the Interlochen Center for the Arts.

This is perhaps the heart of the book. It is not a story about being a violinist; rather, it is a story about being human, in which music and the violin are crucial threads in the tapestry of Dworkin’s life. Interlochen is not the end of the turbulence, but it is the first time he finds community among creative minds, opening a whole new world musically, socially and spiritually.

Throughout the rest of his journey, despite evictions and entrepreneurial ambitions cut short, Dworkin is seemingly irresistibly drawn back to the arts. Ultimately, the dream that succeeds is the one that marries his love of music, his business knowledge, and his experience as a bi-racial American: the Sphinx Competition for Young Black and Latino String Players. Dworkin reveals everything it took for an undergraduate student’s idea to burgeon to international proportions, and even outgrow its founder.

Beyond this, there are the aches and triumphs of love, plus an exploration of nature versus nurture as he reconnects with his birth family, reconciles with his adoptive family, and raises a family of his own. A self-defined ‘Poetjournalist’, Dworkin does not scatter his poetry throughout the whole book but rather places it in the context of when it was written, offering a direct view into the moment.

The book makes for a compelling read, and while it is easy to forget it isn’t fiction amid the unfurling drama, the journey of growth and ultimate victory over adversity are all the sweeter for it being a true story.

LAUREN WESLEY-SMITH