Jason Schmidt was three years old when police barged into his house and arrested his father for selling cocaine. “That was a very confusing evening for me,” said Schmidt, a Seattle author. It turned out to be just one episode in a chaotic childhood, where love and warmth mingled with drugs, violence and crime.
Schmidt wrote about his unconventional background in his memoir, “A List of Things that Didn’t Kill Me.” He writes about the outsider culture he moved in, where parental supervision was minimal and school optional. But mostly he writes about his complex relationship with his father, who raised his son as a single parent in the 1980s, even as he struggled with drugs, came out as gay and, eventually, died of AIDS.
Schmidt writes about coming to terms with years of abuse, and about coming to understand his father’s point of view, to some extent. And he considers the series of factors that allowed him, now with a law degree and kids of his own, to make it to adulthood largely in tact.
