A Review of Paul Crenshaw’s MELT WITH ME: COMING OF AGE AND OTHER 80s PERILS
It’s difficult to convey what it felt like to be a kid with the threat of nuclear destruction hanging over your head. Paul Crenshaw’s most recent essay collection, Melt with Me: Coming of Age and Other 80s Perils (2023) grapples with just that.
Many decades are easily signaled by their outward appearances. Slip a stack of neon-colored rubber bracelets on your arm and hold the front of your hair up to the sky while applying a quantity of Aqua Net that opens a hole in the ozone layer. Et voilà! —you’ve become a “young person of the 80s.” To fully commit, set up a console tv, turn on newly launched MTV to watch Michael Jackson moonwalk or Duran Duran sing on a yacht while paint is randomly thrown at half-naked women. If you switch to the news, you might see Ronald Reagan in his costume too: a Hollywood actor playing a folksy president while secretly selling arms abroad and ignoring the AIDS crisis at home.
Indeed, surface markers often conceal something darker. Melt with Me’s opening essay, titled “Choose Your Own Adventure for 80s Kids,” uses second person POV to plunge the reader into an array of 1980s paranoia: stranger danger, razor blades hidden in sweets, satanic cults, acid rain—even quicksand makes an appearance. It’s a clever way of grabbing the reader by the collar and leading them into a time marked by a socio-economic shift that saw the rise of latchkey kids and an existential crisis of the nuclear variety. As someone who was also surprised that quicksand was not the prevalent concern I had thought it might be, I recognized the choices laid out here, though ticking the box on a certain age bracket isn’t required. There’s much to be gained from considering this period from an individual perspective. I might nod my head when Crenshaw describes certain events, but I grew up in a lapsed-Catholic family in the Northeast, while Crenshaw writes of his experiences in a rural, conservative, Bible-belt town. As such, an essay focusing on an evangelical preacher, whose name I had only heard in passing, drew me in. The essay, titled “Satanic Panic,” delves into a world of manufactured fear facilitated by Mike Warnke, a charlatan that exploited parents’ anxieties and helped to light the fires of a debunked conspiracy that would send hundreds of people to prison on false claims.
It’s in the specifics where the writing in Melt with Me illuminates, and sometimes breaks your heart. “Left Turn at Albuquerque,” in which Saturday morning cartoons become a refuge from domestic upheaval, details a six-year-old’s belief that winning a drawing contest can save his parents’ marriage. “Dead Baby” reflects on a horrific event while investigating the history of “sick humor.” (These essays don’t pull any punches.) On the geopolitical scene, “Professional Wrestling Is Real” examines a good/evil binary that acts as propaganda for war and obscures the messiness of “us vs. them.” In that vein, “Cold Cola Wars” explores Coke vs. Pepsi in terms of America vs. the Soviet Union, but more poignantly so in how a Pepsi-drinking teen is viewed.
Ass-baring teens provide some levity (see “The Full Moon”), but it is fear that permeates these essays. When the visceral threat of mutually assured destruction casts its gloom over one’s formative years, there’s no way around it. Being young and fearing total annihilation because of a political climate and long history that you don’t fully understand leaves you with only your wild imagination and a pervasive sense of hopelessness. “I think now,” Crenshaw writes, “we were so worried about missiles that we saw monsters everywhere, so scared of what we couldn’t see that we decided everything we saw was dangerous.”
Those fears would feed into the Satanic Panic, which would then lead to other conspiracy theories that spurned terrifying real-world responses—such as an armed man entering a family pizza joint to “rescue” children supposedly abducted by powerful politicians and other “elites.” I recalled this event when I began reading Melt with Me, as that particular pizza joint was local to me at the time, and I happened to be driving by just as the police arrived and cordoned off the area. I could have easily been there with my family when those shots were fired. It’s an event that Crenshaw specifically mentions as he plums the throughlines linking the manifestations of our anxieties. No 80s hallmark is examined as though it exists in a vacuum.
Any writer who’s been in this game long enough knows that essay collections can be a difficult sell, and essayists are sometimes pressured to bend essays into the shape of a memoir. I’m glad to pop in and out of an essay collection in much the same way that I enjoy short story collections. These individual, close examinations merge to become something whole. Allow me to briefly approach the bench and state my case further: Personal essays have value as historical documents that acknowledge lived experience as essential to understanding a particular time and place. In considering the work of writers from different backgrounds and identities, we gain insight that can lead us to a place of deeper empathy.
The essay form provides space to thoughtfully engage with ideas and seek out meaning; in the right hands, it’s the anti-hot take. Melt with Me thoughtfully excavates experiences within a specific time to question our parents, our government leaders, our religious institutions, and what a generation left for the generations that followed—but also to understand what fear does to us when we don’t pause to interrogate it.
Melt with Me: Coming of Age and Other ’80s Perils by Paul Crenshaw is available from The Ohio State University Press.
