"[Jackson] has a poet’s touch with words—simple, lyrical, evocative. . . . I could smell the mulberries crushed underfoot and the sweet steam of the cinnamon roll Grandma heated in the toaster oven just for Jeremy, hear the ever-increasing volume of an approaching late-spring storm. . . . The year of Jeremy Jackson’s life on which he meditates in I Will Not Leave You Comfortless marked his transition from the perfect happiness of childhood to the much more complex reality of adulthood. It records, as well, the abiding comfort that remains—family, home and love."
—Melanie Zuercher, Wichita Eagle
"Jeremy Jackson’s memoir, I Will Not Leave You Comfortless, immerses the reader in the sights, sounds and senses of a happy childhood in rural Missouri just before the digital revolution: a basketball hoop, the smell of pie, rumbling storms, a BB gun, the stain of sour mulberries underfoot in June . . . this local coming-of-age memoir is a sweet record of a time and a place that was not Always On."
—St. Louis Post-Dispatch
"The air, the weather, the landscape, the emotions, [Jackson's] first girlfriend and the gift he buys her, his troubles, his worries, his observations, all help locate us at the time of his youth and remind us of the noteworthy events of our own childhood . . . I Will Not Leave You Comfortless shines and glides beautifully onward with Jackson's eloquent language, his capturing of the subtle nuances, fears and joys of growing up, and his poetic descriptions of those lovely moments of being a child that many of us were fortunate to have experienced."
—Jim Carmin, Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Jeremy Jackson’s swirling memoir is built upon layers of well-chosen detail—it remembers the weather, the geography, the history of plowed earth, the coal-smoke taste of coffee and the aching love between the lines of handwritten letters. The result is like peering through a new lens at a familiar hillside, or walking through the pastures of your childhood and discovering they were bigger, not smaller, than you recall. Bigger, not smaller—now that is the mark of a generous writer.”
—Leif Enger, author of Peace Like a River and So Brave, Young, and Handsome
“Jeremy Jackson writes about Missouri as the young Hemingway wrote about Michigan: with a clear eye; with hard-edged nostalgia; and (here's the thing) with brilliance. I was going to add that I Will Not Leave You Comfortless reads like fiction, because it's well designed — but it doesn't read exactly like fiction. And maybe it's because every word of it is absolutely, searingly true.”
—Darin Strauss, author of Half a Life and Chang and Eng
"In its openness, its lucidity, its leaps of empathy and its quiet perfectionism, this is one of the most daring and affecting memoirs I've read."
—Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Brief History of the Dead and The Illumination
"Abundantly evocative and resonant, I Will Not Leave You Comfortless is an elegy to a year in Jeremy Jackson's boyhood life, an elegy to childhood, to innocence, and to a certain kind of rural American life that Jackson brings to visceral existence, here, in the hazy winter light of remembrance and in the sun-glow of memory. This book is what it felt like to be that boy, that year, on that farm, and it is full of the writing that Jackson is known for: beautifully expressive and strikingly lucid prose."
—Thisbe Nissen, author of Osprey Island and The Good People of New York
Gr 9 Up—Jackson recounts the details of his life in rural Missouri in 1984 when he was 10. Readers witness him navigating the changes that came through the loss of a loved one and a family member moving away. Creating a strong sense of place and time with evocative language, he immerses readers in the midst of a torrential thunderstorm. "I could hear the thunder. Muffled, thuddy thunder. And I could hear my quickened heartbeat. This was not good at all, this basementless tornado-bait farmhouse." Jackson writes about each season, whether the family is harvesting and preserving produce or homebound due to a blizzard, with equal descriptiveness. Sadly, the environment is more engaging than the people. One feels detached while reading about Jeremy and his family coping with a terminal illness, and the inability to connect with anyone makes the book tedious at times. The child's nervousness when purchasing earrings for his crush and the subsequent trepidation about giving them to her are believable, just not captivating. Older teens are perhaps the intended audience, given the small font and the reflective nature of the narrative, yet the plodding events, lack of engagement, and Jeremy's age may dissuade them from staying with it.—Hilary Writt, Sullivan University, Lexington, KY
