I screwed up. When I told a story, maybe several stories—I was on a roll—about my younger years, longtime Princeton resident Mimi Schwartz said, “You have to write a memoir.” This was in 2010 at a writing retreat I hosted for friends in Sea Isle City.

“I do?” I said.

“Yes, you do,” Mimi said. “No, I don’t.”

“Yes, you do!”

When writing A Tipsy Fairy Tale, I found answers to questions I didn’t know to ask. Among my reasons for writing the memoir was to understand what caused the great sadness that led to my mother’s early death, and in turn, how it screwed up my childhood and adolescence. I didn’t expect to learn that my great grandmother was born in a Welsh city in Ukraine.

In recent years I have been returning to Wales to visit family, reconnect with friends and explore as much of the culture and land of my birth as possible. I wanted to become Welsh, to be Welsh, but I was too American for that to happen. Even though I was born in Wales, I thought of myself as almost Welsh or quasi Welsh or worse, faux Welsh. This didn’t please me.

What to do?

I sometimes wonder what my life would have been like had I grown up in Wales instead of the United States. Would my mother have died young? Would I have become addicted to alcohol at an early age? Would my life have been better or worse? I have a great life now. I can’t imagine how it could be better, but for certain it would have been different.

Not long after they were married in 1947, my American father Eddie returned to New York with his Welsh bride, Thelma. When my big brother Paul was born, the story is that they didn’t know what to name him. When Thelma looked out the hospital window and saw “Paul’s Fish Market,” she said, “Oh Eddie, Paul is such a lovely name. Let’s name the baby Paul.” Later in life, one of Paul’s great interests was fishing. I suspect he was trying to take revenge on that slippery species that gave him his name.

Denise Duhamel is an American Treasure! Each of her books is a surprise for the reader who didn't know poems could both surprise and delight the way her poems do. Duhamel's mind is a fun factory of the imagination that creates words and images that, forgive me, blow my mind.

It’s been a month since A Tipsy Fairy Tale: A Coming of Age Memoir of Alcohol and Redemption was published, and, Whew! I am “bowled over” by the response of readers who have taken the time to tell me how much they love it. Here are just a few of their comments.

“I am bowled over by your book. I’m almost done…a few more pages. I don’t want to finish. I might cry. I already cried.”

“I can’t put it down!”

“I believe it will become my favorite fairytale.”

“You're keeping me up way past my bedtime…The book is genius.”

“It is a truly astounding book. I was kind of reeling after I read it.”

“Wow. What a life…Wow. Boom.”

Here it is, the most miraculous medical metaphor in modern times: I have given birth to twins…twin poems that is…several years and several continents apart. While this sensational story has not yet been picked up by the Timeses of either London or New York, I suspect that it will soon emblazon the headlines of The National Enquirer. Here’s the scoop….

Mark Malatesta interview and review by Peter E. Murphy, author of A Tipsy Fairy Tale, published by McFarland Books

I thought my childhood and adolescence were normal, even after my mother died when I was seven, even after I was kidnapped twice by gangs (once at gunpoint), even after a priest used me as a boy toy for a year, even after I broke half a dozen ribs in a freak accident, even after I got a thousand dollars in debt to a Mafia-connected dentist, even after I found myself in a shootout in the bloodstained streets of Northern Ireland during the Troubles, even after all that, I thought my first twenty-one years were normal. It was decades later when I realized that … maybe … perhaps … well, they weren’t, which is why I wrote A Tipsy Fairy Tale, A Coming of Age Memoir of Alcohol and Redemption.