From the Cyclops Cave
A Braided Memoir
FROM THE CYCLOPS CAVE:
A BRIADED MEMOIR
A braided memoir of resilience, self-discovery, and the search for home.
From the Cyclops Cave: A Braided Memoir intertwines past and present, weaving a turbulent childhood in 1950s California with an adult life shaped by solitude on the Cycladic islands of Greece. Abandoned by his father and raised by stangers, the author grows up yearning for connection; decades later, in a primitive hut locals call the Cyclops Cave, he finds both refuge and reckoning. Through braided chapters moving between memory and the immediacy of Greek island life, this poignant memoir explores resilience, identity, and the lifelong journey to belong.
“Poignant and profound. From the Cyclops Cave looks backward and inward—and isn’t this something we should all do? Read this book as a model for your own contemplation of the forces that shaped your life. Who loved you? Where do you feel at home? What are you still seeking? As the author wrestles with these questions, wonderfully so on an iconic Greek island, readers are allowed entry into multiple worlds: sunny California, sunny Greece, dark memories, shining moments of connection. In the end, you also might find yourself asking, “And my own life unfolding against the backdrop of a pitch black universe, what is its pattern?”
--Sharman Apt Russell, author of Standing in the Light: My Life as a Pantheist
“As epic in scale as the Greek tales of the land this story is ultimately built upon, Don Schofield’s saga of growing up is a bildungsroman writ large. Across America and then beyond, decades of our common cultural history play out in this one singular life of a displaced soul. Ever introspective, Schofield is set adrift by ill-equipped parents mired in their own generation’s calamities, sent on a quest that becomes our universal own, for a lasting sense of arrival, for depth in the midst of beauty, for a way to be close enough to humanity to partake in it but not so close we get lacerated even more. For, finally, a recognition that we are all eventually fatherless children, at sea in a world older than we are. A lasting lesson, and a form of grace.”
--Liz Stephens, Director, Mojave Desert Arts.
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"Schofield’s memoir chronicles his turbulent life in America and Greece.
The author, who hails from California, first visited Greece as a tourist in 1976. On a subsequent trip to the country, he decided to stay. He initially earned a living by teaching English, “traveling to the homes of young Athenians, tutoring them for the American TOEFL exam and the British First Certificate and Advanced.” Eventually he looked for “a quiet place to write, something simple and far away from tourists.” He wound up renting a house in a remote area on the island of Kýthnos. His “whitewashed hut in the Cycladic style,” nicknamed the “Cyclops Cave,” is the inspiration for the memoir’s title. (The Cyclops Cave certainly has its peculiarities; at one point, Schofield puzzles over what sort of creature had taken some bites out of a peach.) Interspersed with scenes from Schofield’s life in Greece are memories from the author’s rocky upbringing. At the age of 4, he was handed off by his father, a Greyhound bus driver, to a foster family living in Fresno, California. One of the stipulations of the foster care was that his birth mother would never be allowed to see him, “no matter what.” He was raised for years by a man and woman he called Nan and Papa. Nan was in her 20s and came from a Catholic Italian family; Papa was a Cherokee in his 40s. Papa could be a playful practical jokester, though he could also turn violent and was prone to severe mood swings. Schofield was 8 when his father married a woman named Nora; he left Nan and Papa for Sacramento. Life with his father and Nora proved difficult, and it wound up being a temporary arrangement. The author spent a period in his teens bouncing between Catholic school and various homes.
As the memoir moves back and forth between different periods, it offers some potent scenes. In Greece, the author encountered rural people who used every part of the animals they slaughtered and were unperturbed by the associated sights. He remembers seeing three slaughtered baby goats with “congealed blood caked along the edge of their open lips” as if they were “three singers from the dead crooning into one microphone.” Schofield recounts an occasion when, back in the U.S., he visited Papa in a “dingy motel off I-80,” where he found the now-old man “sweating on crumpled sheets, back propped up on a stained pillow, his rusty wheelchair folded up in a corner, no nurse in sight.” When he lived with Nora, she made it clear that it was her house, governed by her rules. The author recalls not being allowed to play on the lawn: “All I can do is sit on the patio or stand in the driveway and throw my tennis ball against the garage. Over and over.” In Catholic school, Schofield was punished for smoking cigarettes by being forced to smoke a cigar. The memoir teems with such vivid recollections, transporting readers to memorable moments.
A finely detailed, enveloping look at life in two disparate countries."
--Kirkus Reviews
PUBLISHED EXCERPTS
The Compass: “Lamb”
The Writers’ Journal: “Boy Justice”
Talking River: “The Luckiest Boy in the World”
Weekly Hubris: “Two Arrivals”