Summary:
Sam and Jeff Freeman become best friends on the day they meet in 1968, the year they turn eight. I Remember Everything traces their lives for more than five decades, from growing up to growing old, and follows them on grand adventures, including two magnificent road trips, the first to New England the year they graduate from high school, the second to the mountains of the West with their sons more than thirty years later. The book also explores their mutual love for the music of the late John Prine, one of the greatest songwriters America has ever known. “I Remember Everything” was the title of John’s very last song.
But I Remember Everything is about more than an enduring friendship and memorable music. It’s also about the tragedy that takes Jeff’s life and its aftermath. How and why does Sam kill his best friend? Does he do the right thing on the night it happens? In the days that follow? Who kills a man and, four days later, delivers his eulogy?
Interview:
Donna Meredith: Could you tell us a little about the tragedy at the heart of this story? What motivated you to write about it?
Brooks Eason
Brooks Eason: This is not much of a spoiler alert because the tragedy occurs in the first chapter. Sam Thompson is the newly elected president of the Mississippi Bar. The book opens with the speech he gives at his investiture banquet in Jackson in July 2023. On the drive home with his wife Evelyn, he hits and kills a man riding a bike on the unlit Natchez Trace. Evelyn, a physician, gets out, checks the man’s pulse, and confirms that he’s dead. It’s too dark for her to identify him. Sam starts to call 911, but she stops him and asks how much he’s had to drink. Sam protests that he’s not drunk—he just gave a speech—but she says there’s nothing they can do for the man, who will be found soon enough, but sticking around and failing a breathalyzer test would be catastrophic for Sam. Reluctantly, he leaves the scene and drives home. The next day, Jeff Freeman’s daughter calls Sam and tells him Jeff was killed in a hit-and-run accident on the Natchez Trace the night before. Jeff was Sam’s lifelong best friend.
I was motivated to write the story because exploring how a fine, upstanding man deals with killing his best friend and leaving the scene seemed like a fascinating character study. Two facts gave me the idea for the story. First, a lawyer in the city where my wife and I live was killed several years ago in a hit-and-run accident while riding his bike alone at night. Second, a close friend is the past president of the Mississippi Bar, so I made Sam the Bar president.
DM: Sam Thompson and Jeff Freeman are the two characters driving this story. Please tell us a little about them. What are their differences? What similarities bring them together?
Brooks Eason
BE: Sam and Jeff are great guys—smart, funny, and kind and totally devoted to each other. When Jeff brings a king snake into their classroom in the fourth grade while Sam serves as the lookout, they promptly confess, and the school’s principal describes them as “not bad, just spirited, and honest to a fault.”
The boys are very different when they meet the summer they turn eight. Sam is a nerdy bookworm who spends his spare time reading the Encyclopedia Britannica. Jeff is already an experienced outdoorsman. He not only talks to owls, but the owls talk back. Sam grows up with money, Jeff without it. Sam’s father is a heart surgeon, Jeff’s a Marine helicopter pilot who gets killed in Vietnam. After desegregation in 1970, Sam and Jeff go to different schools, private for Sam, public for Jeff. But their differences shrink over time. Jeff teaches Sam to love the outdoors, Sam teaches Jeff to love history, and they both become successful professionals.
The similarities that initially bring them together are that they’re a month apart in age and Jeff and his mother move into the house two doors down from the Thompsons in northeast Jackson. The day after moving in, Jeff’s mother kicks him out of the house with instructions to find someone to play with. He rings the Thompsons’ doorbell, he and Sam become best friends that day, and they remain best friends until the night Jeff dies 55 years later. I have a friend who met his lifelong best friend the exact same way.
DM: You mention the music of John Prine. Are you a big fan yourself?
BE: I’m a huge fan and have been for fifty years. He’s my favorite songwriter. His music has been the sound track of my life, so I made it the soundtrack of Sam and Jeff’s.
After John died of COVID in early 2020, I wrote a long essay about what his music means to me and posted it on Facebook. A friend read it and introduced me to Episcopal priest David Elliott, who’s known and loved John’s music longer than I have and uses his songs in sermons and funerals. There’s an Episcopal priest in the book named David who loves John’s music. I asked the real David if he wanted me to change the name of the fictional one, but he said no. I think he likes the fictional one. I know I do.
Donna Meredith
DM: What research was required for the writing of this story?
BE: Sam and Jeff go on four grand adventures in the book, starting with a road trip to New England the summer they graduate from high school. After three weeks, when they’re almost broke and will have to head home, they find five hundred dollars in the glove compartment, placed there by Dr. Thompson, and they head to Maine. The same thing happened to a friend of mine when he was in college.
Nearly fifteen years after the road trip, Sam and Jeff spend a week canoeing the Upper Missouri in Montana, retracing the route of Lewis and Clark. More than two decades later, they take their sons on a magnificent trip to the mountains of the West. Shortly before Jeff’s death, they go trout fishing in Arkansas. Their sons are now grown, so they take their dogs.
I have gone with my best friend to many of the same places Sam and Jeff go but not all of them. I read on the Internet about the places I haven’t been. I also researched details about school desegregation, the Easter Flood in Jackson in 1979, and the symptoms of a cruel disease.
There were also many questions to which I found the answers by Googling. For example, two hamsters make a brief appearance in the book in 1978. I wanted to call them Laverne and Shirley, but that would make no sense if the show was not yet on then. I found it debuted in 1976 and was good to go. The following year Sam and Jeff perform rescue operations during the Easter Flood in Sam’s canoe. When they ferry a Doberman and a tabby cat to their people on dry land, Jeff sings a line from the chorus of “Reunited” by Peaches & Herb. I Googled the release date of the song. It came out a month before the flood. Again, good to go.
How would I have found the answers to those questions before the Internet? When I wrote my first book, about hiking trips with my best friend, I spent many hours in the Eudora Welty Library in downtown Jackson reading about national parks. The library had plenty of books on the parks, but I doubt there were any about Peaches & Herb.
DM: What are you working on next?
BE: I’ve begun work on a comic Southern novel set in Lafayette, Louisiana. I’m thinking sort of a modern-day Confederacy of Dunces.
DM: What does it feel like when the first shipment of one of your books arrives and you open it and hold the book in your hands for the first time?
BE: Here’s how I feel. After you’ve come up with an idea, prepared an outline, written a first draft, then revised it, revised it, revised it again, then revised it one last time because there is always room for improvement, and after you’ve found a publisher, gone over page proofs, and decided on cover art, and after all the decisions that must be made have been made and the book arrives and you hold it in your hands, it’s like holding your newborn baby. I Remember Everything is my tenth child. I have a daughter, two sons, and seven books.
About the Author:
Brooks Eason has written five books. His first, Travels with Bobby, is about hiking trips in the mountains of the West with his best friend. Fortunate Son, his memoir about his adoption as an infant and discovery of his birth mother’s identity when he was nearly fifty, was nominated by the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters for best nonfiction work. Bedtime with Buster consists of conversations between Brooks and his dearly departed dog and includes more than thirty marvelous illustrations of Buster by Atlanta artist Bob Fugate. Redemption – The Two Lives of Harry Brooks is a novel based on the life of Brooks’s grandfather, who was a fugitive and felon in the first half of his life and a gifted Methodist preacher in the second. His most recent book, The Scoutmaster, is the story of the wonderful life of his father, who served as a Boy Scout leader for more than sixty years and was an extraordinary influence on three generations of young men in his hometown.
Brooks has three children and five grandchildren and lives in Madison, Mississippi, with his wife Carrie, three rescue dogs, and an orange tabby cat named the Count. In their spare time, Brooks and Carrie host house concerts, walk the dogs, and dance in the kitchen.
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