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Norman Ollestad will be reading from his book, Crazy for the Storm: A Memoir of Survival, at Elliott Bay Book Company on June 15, at 7:30 p.m.
Crazy for the Storm: A Memoir of Survival, is both a chilling account of survival and a heartwarming coming-of-age story based around Norman Ollestad and his relationship with his father, the late Norman Ollestad.
In the opening sequence, we meet eleven-year-old Norman, his father "Big Norman," and his father's girlfriend Sandra, while they are boarding a small chartered Cessna en route to Big Bear Mountain. As the cover and the first chapter of the book put it, "Just after sunrise, we slammed into a rugged 8,600-foot mountain engulfed in a blizzard. By the end of the nine-hour ordeal, I was the only survivor."
From this point on, the chapters go back and forth between the moment and the endurance of the crash, and the year before that "Little Norman" had spent with his father, including a summer trip to Puerto Vallarta to visit his grandparents and many surfing and skiing trips. We are giving you a fair warning, this memoir will make you cry.
The story takes place in the late '70s and the era is apparent throughout the book, due to the language, the pop culture references, and even the extent of some of the father-son adventures that take place. Norman and his father had a special driving technique for when his father got drowsy and wanted to "rest one eye."
"I took the wheel while his foot kept even pressure on the pedal. If a car appeared up ahead I was to wake him up even though he was supposedly just resting one eye. It never struck me as dangerous. In fact it seemed like a good deal because when he woke up from his catnap he always felt fantastic and I was always proud to share the load."
We won't even begin with how obviously insane this is, and how now even leaving your child in the car with the windows down to run in for Starbucks could get you in hot water with Child Services. It's sadly ironic, that among many of the dangerous situations adventures his father would instigate, he ultimately would die in a tragic accident that could have easily been prevented.
We were surprised recently while flipping through the latest City Arts magazine to see a quick review for Crazy for the Storm, in which all they say is, "The author grew up in the shadow of a father who wanted him to be an athletic "Boy Wonder. The NYC publishing world is nuts about this June title."
We were actually a little stunned by this being the only description of the memoir, and still can't quite put our finger on how we feel about it. Mainly because we don't necessarily agree--we saw the story from a completely different angle. Rather than the author growing up in the shadow of his father, we felt that the memoir was an accurate portrayal of their relationship and what the author's son-father experience was like.
Yes, his father had once been a child movie star, an FBI agent, and the author of the novel Inside The FBI (currently out of print), but all of those things are not the main point; they're spoken of briefly in relation to "Big Norman's" life, but that's it. And rather than his father wanting him to become a "Boy Wonder," this is the loving nickname his father would call him, making the reader feel as though "Big Norman" already thought of his son as a "Boy Wonder," probably since the moment he was placed in his arms at birth.
Granted, Crazy for the Storm is all about Norman's father pushing him physically and mentally to extremes, but the author looks back on it positively--if he hadn't spent so many hours training on the ski slope or in the water surfing, he wouldn't have survived the plane crash, or--as we felt the author was implying--he wouldn't have learned so many life lessons and how to deal with facing his own fears.
Looking back, Norman does realize that possibly his father was trying to live through him vicariously, but what father doesn't? We are their children, and this is their one opportunity to give us everything that they didn't have, couldn't afford, or couldn't accomplish. Crazy for the Storm shows that regardless of "Big Norman" not always being right in his child-rearing decisions, he did okay; and based on his instilled knowledge, influence, and life teachings, he gave his son the luxury of being able to survive the plane crash and tell about it.
Besides finding this book online or in your favorite local bookstore, it will be available at thousands of Starbucks' as their newest pick, and it is in the works of being made into a movie by Warner Bros.
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