Let Me Count the Ways: A Memoir

by Tomás Q. Morín

2023 Vulgar Genius Nonfiction Award
2022 Writer's League of Texas Nonfiction Book Award 

Growing up in a small town in South Texas in the eighties and nineties, poverty, machismo, and drug addiction were everywhere for Tomás Q. Morín. He was around four or five years old when he first remembers his father cooking heroin, and he recalls many times he and his mother accompanied his father while he was on the hunt for more, Morín in the back seat keeping an eye out for unmarked cop cars, just as his father taught him. It was on one of these drives that, for the first time, he blinked in a way that evolution hadn’t intended.

Let Me Count the Ways is the memoir of a journey into obsessive-compulsive disorder, a mechanism to survive a childhood filled with pain, violence, and unpredictability. Morín’s compulsions were a way to hold onto his love for his family in uncertain times until OCD became a prison he struggled for decades to escape. Tender, unflinching, and even funny, this vivid portrait of South Texas life challenges our ideas about fatherhood, drug abuse, and mental illness.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Latinx

198 pages, Paperback

Published March 1, 2022

About the author

Tomás Q. Morín is the author of the collection of poems Machete and the forthcoming memoir Let Me Count the Ways, as well as the poetry collections Patient Zero and A Larger Country. He is co-editor with Mari L’Esperance of the anthology, Coming Close: Forty Essays on Philip Levine, and translator of The Heights of Macchu Picchu by Pablo Neruda. He teaches at Rice University and Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Reviews

[Kimber Griffin · Rating 5 out of 5]

While I hold a deep appreciation and personal connection to this memoir, I would only recommend this to a certain few.

Let Me Count the Ways can be highly triggering to those who’ve experienced physical abuse or proximity to drug abuse. In summary, this book details a man’s learning of how to live with lasting pain.

Highlights: I love how this was written chronologically, and how relationships are at the core of this book. Isn’t it interesting to recall childhood memories as an adult? Because what we know now, we couldn’t have known then. While going over these memories, Morín details so much of his childhood with poetic commentary and mature reasoning. He has a heightened sense of awareness, which is understandable, considering his life at times depended on it. One of the lovely (but fleeting) moments of this book was when Morín learned to laugh. I read that with a happy heart.

As painful as it was to read, it’s an act of bravery for Morín to write as openly as he did. It takes an enormous account of courage and coping to share intimate details of a troubled upbringing. In a way, it’s easier to keep the difficult parts locked away, free of critique and criticism.

It’s a story that deserves to be told - but read at your own risk, and don’t expect any happy endings.

[Christie Bane · Rating 4 out of 5]

I cannot get enough of books set in poor small towns; I don’t know why. After reading enough of them, I strongly believe that growing up in a poor small town is a cultural experience just as much as race, nationality, et cetera. The author of this book is Mexican and from a small town in Texas (from which he somehow escaped to get an MFA, despite growing up poor and surrounded by drugs and violence, neither of which were a part of my poor small town experience). Interestingly enough, the author’s small town in Texas is the same as the small town in Texas in the last book I read — Mathis. Anyway, it’s a memoir about family and growing up and how you can never really get away from what made you. Ain’t that the truth. Good book.

[Smita]

https://www.loc.gov/events/2022-natio...

[Sophie Dixon · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found each essay deeply moving in its own right, but even though they built on each other and looped in referential ways, the OCD sections of the book and the familial relationships sections didn’t work cohesively for me at all - tricky because I really loved this but also felt it was disjointed, with so many allusions to narratives that were then never developed !! but what is a poet writing paragraphs if not elusive and yet expansive. I think I would recommend !

[georgi · Rating 4 out of 5]

be aware of triggers regarding addiction, drug use, abuse, OCD.

[Reader · Rating 4 out of 5]

Let Me Count the Ways is such a honest look into Tomás Q. Morín's life. It begins with his childhood, when he grew up too fast and became obsessed with so many different ideas in that elementary school brain of his. He was born into a world where he could not pinpoint bad, from a bad person. In this memoir he opens up having us on a walk through his life to connect with him and also understand that he could not have known a different way with all this chaos waring in his head. When he was younger he convinced his mother to buy him encyclopedias and I think this shows Morín had this drive to understand the world around him. He wanted to discover life through gaining knowledge. Then his writing itself gives so much meaning in the way he ties words and the way he incorporates poetry into this memoir is brilliant, it brings in a whole new level of using repetition and lyrical pieces to build and understand. Tomás Morín titles each one of the chapters in this memoir with a different thought or idea or how something should be interpreted, it helps us identify what he believed and how that changed in him, in the way people viewed him, and what he wanted. He is a talented writer making language so much more that words that end in a period. He weaves them to create a message even if that message is just to be who he is.

[Kelly · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing this book in exchange for an honest review.
OCD manifests itself in different ways. For Tomàs, it was a way for him to survive a childhood of his father's addiction and uncertainty.
I had a hard time keeping interested in this book, possibly because it was translated and didn't flow as well. But overall, it's an interesting story.

[Zoë Fay-Stindt · Rating 5 out of 5]

A carefully woven portrait of kin that honors the ambiguity and messiness of being in relationship, and finding a self that can emerge, not unscathed, from the process. Beautiful, tangled, and true.

[Maggie Wiegand · Rating 5 out of 5]

somehow healing for me i sincerely think the way he writes is so beautiful and true

[MK LaFs · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ooof this one made me cry

[rexrae · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh, to manage to write about grief, and the sometimes unspeakable personal pains of the past so succinctly and with a goal to honor themselves for pushing through despite difficulty. Morín purposely sought to commune with his own heart in this tender offering.

[Chance Lee · Rating 2 out of 5]

The writer is uninterested in writing strong, cohesive scenes and even less interested in sticking to a consistent verb tense, giving the text a rambling, incoherent feel that I could not finish.