Saturday Review: “Fear and Hope in the 1980s” a review by Elaine Thomas in NCLR Online Spring 2025 of Paul Crenshaw’s memoir Melt With Me (2023)
Life is hard for teenagers of every generation and its difficulties are unique to the era in which they are raised, and that’s what Paul Crenshaw captures in Melt with Me as he “examines a seeming multitude of fears faced, or at least felt, by children and adolescents during the 1980s.” As Thomas writes, “They lived in the shadow of international, national, and localized threats that ranged from nuclear missile proliferation amid geopolitical tensions to stranger danger, razor blades in candy apples, and exaggerated claims of Satanism with accompanying ritual sacrifice.”
She goes on to say that Crenshaw’s book is “memoir-in-essays” while also offering “thoughtful cultural critique.” As he does this Crenshaw’s writing “also contains flashes of humor,” Thomas writes. “Dark humor, to be sure, but conveyed in such a way that the reader understands and feels the drive toward connection and love that underlies the fear and at times anger.” And at times Crenshaw’s writing is so vivid that Thomas found it difficult to finish — “a warning that every essay may not be for every reader” — as Crenshaw “does far more than tell another story of one boy coming of age in a specific time and place,” tapping into “the omnipresent fear they felt threatening not only their day-to-day lives but their very existence.” It’s a good read — “Crenshaw’s writing is clean and clear” — and valuable for its “courage required for an introspective boy to excavate his own thoughts and feelings as he tries to understand a perilous world, learning what part of its perceived dangers ring true and what under careful scrutiny emerge as mythical constructs.”
Read full review online now! Order a copy of book here.
