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Roughhouse Friday
- A Memoir
- Narrated by: Jaed Coffin
- Length: 8 hrs and 46 mins
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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.
What listeners say about Roughhouse Friday
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
- Doctor George
- 08-10-19
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.
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Story
Set in the coastal town of Danvers, Massachusetts, where the accusations began that led to the 1692 witch trials, We Ride Upon Sticks follows the 1989 Danvers High School Falcons field hockey team, who will do anything to make it to the state finals - even if it means tapping into some devilishly dark powers. In chapters dense with 1980s iconography - from Heathers to "big hair" - Barry expertly weaves together the individual and collective progress of this enchanted team as they storm their way through an unforgettable season.
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Field hockey+witchcraft = surprisingly enthralling
- By Bailey Winslow on 03-13-20
By: Quan Barry
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Ordinary Girls
- A Memoir
- By: Jaquira Diaz
- Narrated by: Almarie Guerra
- Length: 10 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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While growing up in housing projects in Puerto Rico and Miami Beach, Jaquira Diaz found herself caught between extremes: as her family split apart and her mother battled schizophrenia, she was surrounded by the love of her friends; as she longed for a family and home, she found instead a life upended by violence. From her own struggles with depression and sexual assault to Puerto Rico's history of colonialism, Ordinary Girls vibrates with music and lyricism.
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Compelling Story That We Don’t Get Enough Of
- By Leah T. on 06-09-20
By: Jaquira Diaz
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The Travelers
- A Novel
- By: Regina Porter
- Narrated by: Bahni Turpin, Dominic Hoffman
- Length: 11 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Meet James Samuel Vincent, an affluent Manhattan attorney who shirks his modest Irish-American background but hews to his father’s meandering ways. James muddles through a topsy-turvy relationship with his son, Rufus, which is further complicated when Rufus marries Claudia Christie. Claudia’s mother - Agnes Miller Christie - is a beautiful African-American woman who survives a chance encounter on a Georgia road that propels her into a new life in the Bronx. Soon after, her husband, Eddie Christie, is called to duty on an air craft carrier in Vietnam.
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Each character is quite a character.
- By Anonymous User on 01-01-22
By: Regina Porter
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Saint X
- A Novel
- By: Alexis Schaitkin
- Narrated by: Alex Hyde-White, Bailey Carr, Dana Dae, and others
- Length: 12 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Claire is only seven years old when her college-age sister, Alison, disappears on the last night of their family vacation at a resort on the Caribbean island of Saint X. Several days later, Alison’s body is found in a remote spot on a nearby cay, and two local men - employees at the resort - are arrested. But the evidence is slim, the timeline against it, and the men are soon released. The story turns into national tabloid news, a lurid mystery that will go unsolved. For Claire and her parents, there is only the return home to broken lives.
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I’d rather be alone with my thoughts...
- By Lewca on 02-25-20
By: Alexis Schaitkin
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Losing My Cool
- By: Thomas Chatterton Williams
- Narrated by: Thomas Chatterton Williams
- Length: 5 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Into Williams's childhood home-a one-story ranch house-his father crammed more books than the local library could hold. "Pappy" used some of these volumes to run an academic prep service; the rest he used in his unending pursuit of wisdom. His son's pursuits were quite different: "money, hoes, and clothes."
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The book is awful and so is anyone who praises it.
- By jason on 04-21-12
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The Road to San Donato
- Fathers, Sons, and Cycling across Italy
- By: Robert Cocuzzo
- Narrated by: James Patrick Cronin
- Length: 7 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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The Road to San Donato is an adventurous and nostalgic bicycling memoir of an American father and son tracing their Italian heritage. Riding rental bikes and carrying a bare minimum of supplies, Rob Cocuzzo and his 64-year-old father, Stephen, embark on a 425-mile ride from Florence to San Donato Val di Comino, an ancient village in the mountains outside of Rome from which the Cocuzzo family emigrated a hundred years earlier.
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Stunning and memorable
- By maida soehl on 03-05-20
By: Robert Cocuzzo
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Kings County
- By: David Goodwillie
- Narrated by: Marin Ireland
- Length: 14 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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From the raucous heights of Occupy Wall Street to the comical lows of the publishing industry, from million-dollar art auctions to Bushwick drug dens, Kings County captures New York City at a moment of cultural reckoning. Grappling with the resonant issues and themes of our time - sex and violence, art and commerce, friendship and family - it is an epic coming-of-age tale about love, consequences, bravery, and fighting for one’s place in an ever-changing world.
By: David Goodwillie
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The Fortunate Ones
- By: Ed Tarkington
- Narrated by: MacLeod Andrews
- Length: 7 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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When Charlie Boykin was young, he thought his life with his single mother on the working-class side of Nashville was perfectly fine. But when his mother arranges for him to be admitted as a scholarship student to an elite private school, he is suddenly introduced to what the world can feel like to someone cushioned by money. That world, he discovers, is an almost irresistible place where one can bend—and break—rules and still end up untarnished.
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Southern Saga
- By cindy henzel on 02-18-21
By: Ed Tarkington
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How to Find Your Way in the Dark
- The Sheldon Horowitz Series, Book 1
- By: Derek B. Miller
- Narrated by: Michael Crouch
- Length: 12 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Twelve-year old Sheldon Horowitz is still recovering from the tragic loss of his mother only a year ago when a suspicious traffic accident steals the life of his father near their home in rural Massachusetts. It is 1938, and Sheldon, who was in the truck, emerges from the crash an orphan hell-bent on revenge. He takes that fire with him to Hartford, where he embarks on a new life under the roof of his buttoned-up Uncle Nate.
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Absolutely wonderful story.
- By George Thomas on 12-11-21
By: Derek B. Miller
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Punch Me Up to the Gods
- A Memoir
- By: Brian Broome
- Narrated by: Brian Broome, Robin Miles
- Length: 7 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Punch Me Up to the Gods introduces a powerful new talent in Brian Broome, whose early years growing up in Ohio as a dark-skinned Black boy harboring crushes on other boys propel forward this gorgeous, aching, and unforgettable debut. Brian’s recounting of his experiences—in all their cringe-worthy, hilarious, and heartbreaking glory—reveal a perpetual outsider awkwardly squirming to find his way in. Indiscriminate sex and escalating drug use help to soothe his hurt, young psyche, usually to uproarious and devastating effect.
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All I Can Say is Wow!
- By Sonya on 05-29-21
By: Brian Broome
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AMORALMAN
- A True Story and Other Lies
- By: Derek DelGaudio
- Narrated by: Derek DelGaudio
- Length: 5 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Derek DelGaudio believed he was a decent, honest man. But when irrefutable evidence to the contrary is found in an old journal, his memories are reawakened and Derek is forced to confront - and try to understand - his role in a significant act of deception from his past. Using his youthful notebook entries as a road map, Derek embarks on a soulful, often funny, sometimes dark journey, retracing the path that led him to a world populated by charlatans, card cheats, and con artists.
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A perfect companion piece to In & Of Itself
- By jesse on 07-09-21
By: Derek DelGaudio
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Greenlights
- By: Matthew McConaughey
- Narrated by: Matthew McConaughey
- Length: 6 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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I’ve been in this life for 50 years, been trying to work out its riddle for 42, and been keeping diaries of clues to that riddle for the last 35. Notes about successes and failures, joys and sorrows, things that made me marvel, and things that made me laugh out loud. How to be fair. How to have less stress. How to have fun. How to hurt people less. How to get hurt less. How to be a good man. How to have meaning in life. How to be more me.
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Love this!
- By Nancy on 10-21-20
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Hollywood Park
- A Memoir
- By: Mikel Jollett
- Narrated by: Mikel Jollett
- Length: 11 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Hollywood Park is a remarkable memoir of a tumultuous life. Mikel Jollett was born into one of the country’s most infamous cults and subjected to a childhood filled with poverty, addiction, and emotional abuse. Yet, ultimately, his is a story of fierce love and family loyalty told in a raw, poetic voice that signals the emergence of a uniquely gifted writer.
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An honest and heartbreakingly beautiful memoir
- By Jeannete Coronel on 05-28-20
By: Mikel Jollett
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House of Sticks
- By: Ly Tran
- Narrated by: Ly Tran
- Length: 11 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Ly Tran is just a toddler in 1993 when she and her family immigrate from a small town along the Mekong river in Vietnam to a two-bedroom railroad apartment in Queens. Ly’s father, a former lieutenant in the South Vietnamese army, spent nearly a decade as a POW, and their resettlement is made possible through a humanitarian program run by the US government. Soon after they arrive, Ly joins her parents and three older brothers sewing ties and cummerbunds piece-meal on their living room floor to make ends meet.
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A story that will change how you view your own life
- By Anonymous User on 07-18-21
By: Ly Tran