Avoid the Day: A New Nonfiction in Two Movements

Written by Jay Kirk

Narrated by Andrew Eiden

""Avoid the Day truly seems to me to push nonfiction memoir as far as it can go without it collapsing into a singularity and I am at a loss for words. You are just going to have to read it."" –Helen Macdonald, author of H is for Hawk

A surreal, high-wire act of narrative nonfiction that redefines the genre, Avoid the Day is part detective story, part memoir, and part meditation on the meaning of life—all told with a dark pulse of existential horror. What emerges is an unforgettable study of mortality and the artist’s journey.

Seeking to answer the mystery of a missing manuscript by Béla Bartók, and using the investigation to avoid his father’s deathbed, award-winning magazine writer Jay Kirk heads off to Transylvania, going to the same villages where the “Master,” like a vampire in search of fresh plasma, had found his new material in the folk music of the peasants. With these stolen songs, Bartók redefined music in the 20th Century. Kirk, who is also seeking to renew his writing, finds inspiration in the composer’s unorthodox methods, but begins to lose his tether as he sees himself in Bartók’s darkest and most personal work, the Cantata Profana, which revolves around the curse of fathers and sons.

After a near-psychotic episode under the spell of Bartók, the author suddenly finds himself on a posh eco-tourist cruise in the Arctic. There, accompanied by an old friend, now a documentary filmmaker, the two decide to scrap the documentary and make a horror flick instead—shot under the noses of the unsuspecting passengers and crew. Playing one of the main characters who finds himself inexplicably trapped on a ship at the literal end of the world, alone, and under the influence of the midnight sun, Kirk gets lost in his own cerebral maze, struggling to answer his most plaguing question: can we find meaning in experience?

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperAudio
• Release date: Jul 28, 2020
• ISBN: 9780062848765

Jay Kirk

JAY KIRK is the author of Kingdom Under Glass, named one of the Best Nonfiction Books of 2010 by the Washington Post. His award-winning nonfiction has been published in Harper’s, GQ, the New York Times Magazine, and anthologized in Best American Crime Writing, Best American Travel Writing, and Submersion Journalism: Reporting in the Radical First Person from Harper’s Magazine. He is the recipient of a Whiting Award, a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, and was a finalist for the 2013 National Magazine Award. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Pennsylvania, where he founded XFic.org, a journal of experimental nonfiction.

Reviews for Avoid the Day

[modioperandi · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Thanks to Netgalley for my ARC. Avoid the Day is one of the few can't put it down memoirs I have ever read. Specifically the third. The only other memoirs that I have read that is this good although very different was Aleksandar Hemon duality My Parents: An Introduction / This Does Not Belong to You and Simon Sellar's Applied Ballardianism Memoir from a Parallel Universe . The writing in Avoid the Day is superb - the subject matter is delightfully hard to categorize mystery? mystery memoir? historical memoir? journalistic memoir? Also vampires and music. Jay Kirk is spinning a of plates here and with great skill. His observations are maddeningly good. Every sentence makes you, or at least me, wish that I could put my own jumbled thoughts together so wonderfully. The writing is clear and a has a bluntl brute force approach to the world. More than anything what strikes me is what strikes me about the Aleksandar Hemon and Simon Sellars memoirs the insane imagination that it puts forth about things, ideas, people, himself, and the word. Its the exact sort of escapism that you need right now. Its just perfect. The book is, to jam it into a category much less description is a travelouge about a writer, Jay Kirk, who is seeking to distance him self from his childhood hometown of Vermont by way of the Artic circle, Bela Bartok, the Hungarian countryside, Transylvania, Vampires, through the lense of drink, drugs and frazzled to highly focused states of mind. This is a surrealist fever dream of a memoir. Its what you need as you enter the 50th pandemic burnout of the year. Highly recommend.