Roughhouse Friday

A Memoir

By: Jaed Coffin

Narrated by: Jaed Coffin

Length: 8 hrs and 46 mins

Publisher's summary

"Jaed Coffin narrates these personal stories of his encounters.... His quiet, calm narration has a steady, honest tone as he describes his upbringing, his relationship with his father, and the low-level fights that take him around Alaska." (AudioFile magazine)

This program is read by the author.

A beautifully crafted memoir about fathers and sons, masculinity, and the lengths we sometimes go to in order to confront our past.

While lifting weights in the Seldon Jackson College gymnasium on a rainy autumn night, Jaed Coffin heard the distinctive whacking sound of sparring boxers down the hall. A year out of college, he had been biding his time as a tutor at a local high school in Sitka, Alaska, without any particular life plan. That evening, Coffin joined a ragtag boxing club. For the first time, he felt like he fit in.

Coffin washed up in Alaska after a 40-day solo kayaking journey. Born to an American father and a Thai mother who had met during the Vietnam War, Coffin never felt particularly comfortable growing up in his rural Vermont town. Following his parents’ prickly divorce and a childhood spent drifting between his father’s new white family and his mother’s Thai roots, Coffin didn’t know who he was, much less what path his life should follow. His father’s notions about what it meant to be a man - formed by King Arthur legends and calcified in the military - did nothing to help. After college, he took to the road, working odd jobs and sleeping in his car before heading north.

Despite feeling initially terrified, Coffin learns to fight. His coach, Victor “the Savage”, invites him to participate in the monthly Roughhouse Friday competition, where men contend for the title of best boxer in southeast Alaska. With every successive match, Coffin realizes that he isn’t just fighting for the championship belt; he is also learning to confront the anger he feels about a past he never knew how to make sense of.

Deeply honest and vulnerable, Roughhouse Friday is a meditation on violence and abandonment, masculinity, and our inescapable longing for love. It suggests that sometimes the truth of what’s inside you comes only if you push yourself to the extreme.

©2019 Jaed Coffin (P)2019 Macmillan Audio

Fearless in the Ring and in Self-Revelation

I enjoyed everything about his book and Jaed's reading of it, from the richness of the story, to his at times tentative, even shy-sounding, reading of the text. Yet he is as fearless about revealing his psychological struggles as he is in facing a more experienced opponent in the ring. Jaed is honest, doesn't spare himself the recounting of embarrassing scenes when they will elucidate his growth from naïveté to maturity.

Jaed is an excellent storyteller with an exciting, emotionally moving story to tell. The narrative flows from his life with his parents in Maine into the a life of his own in Alaska, where he arrives after a 1,000 mile solo paddle, and learns to become a boxer.

The boxing scenes allow the reader to intuit what these experiences mean for Jaed in the development of his masculinity, and to see how they help him fill the gap left from his well-meaning but flawed father.

This book has a strong sense of place, with evocation of both the beauty and the roughness of Alaska.

I did not want the book to end and I hope he writes many more.