Life on the run Michael C. Keith’s moving memoir BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

What a difference a decade, or few, makes. For a long time, the impulse for his memoir had been lurking in Michael Keith’s psyche like a toad ready to leap from the mouth of a vengeful fairy tale figure. He had, he says, a few things to work out emotionally about his dad.

" Early on in my young adulthood I had a lot of resentment toward my father, " he recalls, " and when I thought about writing it back then, I think it would’ve been pretty one-dimensional. A kind of ‘Daddy Dearest’ sort of book, you know. How I was wronged and my life was ruined by my father — that sort of thing. So I had to let it kind of ferment for a while. "

The result is The Next Better Place — A Father and Son On the Road (Algonquin Press, 304 pages, $23.95), a memoir that came out early this year to widely favorable reviews. As the accompanying review indicates, a boy travelling with an adamantly alcoholic father can accumulate a lot of experiences he’s not yet equipped to process into feelings. When your loving father lets your clothes fall to rags and filth, when time and again you watch him drink away your last few dollars and press you into shoplifting service, you accumulate a lot of cognitive disconnect to sort out some day.

Unconsciously as a boy, intentionally as an adult, Keith resisted succumbing to bitterness and hopelessness.

" You know, I never entirely give up on him, even as an adult — I was 37 when he passed away and he shadowed me for the rest of his life, " he says, although: " He was a burden in respects, and there were many times I wished he wasn’t around. "

The 57-year-old Keith is speaking on the phone from his home in Easton, Massachusetts, south of Boston. He has made a successful academic life for himself, notwithstanding having rarely gone to school when on the road with his father off and on from ages 5 to 17. He had to get his high school equivalency diploma in the Army, which he joined at 17 to get his life in order.

Later, after a dozen years as a radio broadcaster, he taught at such universities as Marquette and George Washington, published 16 books on electronic media and became a leading authority on the subject. Currently he is a senior lecturer of communication at Boston College.

As you can imagine, memoirs in general but particularly stories of fathers and sons have always grabbed his attention. He read the memoirs of Geoffrey and Tobias Wolff — whose recollections of their con man father are genre classics — as soon as they hit the bookstores. It was only four or five years ago that Keith felt that he could shape his experiences of those many itinerant years into a coherent, interesting story. Reading Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes sold him on first-person, present tense, but perhaps his most important decision was settling on the perfect age for such a narrator.

" I thought it worked in a number of ways, " Keith says, " in that the kid is not so young that he doesn’t have some adult insight, but he’s at the same time not so old that you can’t see life through that unique perspective of an 11-year-old. I think that contributed to a more colorful narrative. "

The book doesn’t disclose that, in the modern common practice of blending fact and fiction, events from over the course of his 12 years on the road with his father are conflated into a narrative of a year and a half.

" I think of writer Tony Earley’s definition of memoir as being half-memory and half-imagination, " Keith says of the author of Somehow Form a Family: Stories That Are Mostly True. " Trying to look back on something that occurred 40 years ago, there’s just no way you can do it verbatim, you can’t capture dialogue and whatnot. But what you can do is reconstruct as close to your memory as possible the nuances and the vernacular and the feelings that were going on. "

His memory of events at that time, he says, is probably sharper than of any other period of his life.

And that life has taken turns that more than compensated for a damaged childhood. He has been married to his wife Susanne for 17 years, and he has raised his daughter Marlo, now 33, with all the protection and stability that he never enjoyed himself.

" If my father had a redemption at all, it was that for her he became a good parent, a grandfather, " he says. " He was around and he grew close to her and cared for her — and she had a tremendous level of affection for him.

" So, " Keith observes with no irony — or envy — in his voice, " he got a second chance with my daughter. "

Michael C. Keith will read from his book on Thursday, April 10 at 4 p.m. at the Hoffman Room in Independence Hall at the University of Rhode Island in Kingston, and will sign books on Saturday, April 12 at 2 p.m. at the College Hill Bookstore, 252 Thayer St., Providence. Call (401) 874-4663 and (401) 751-6404, respectively.