Review: 'This Is Where I Am,' by Zeke Caligiuri

Many memoirs follow a narrative arc that starts with a good life, spirals into a downfall and ends on a positive note of redemption.

Zeke Caligiuri's memoir, "This Is Where I Am," follows that trajectory to a certain point. But he's still looking for redemption. Caligiuri wrote this memoir from behind bars, where he was sentenced to 34 years for robbery and homicide.

Caligiuri came of age in the early 1990s in "Murderapolis," when Minneapolis was marked by widespread drugs and guns. He's brutally honest about the decisions he made and takes responsibility for those decisions. In raw yet lyrical language, he attempts to explain how a once promising life went wrong.

"It's about how people can be good — a part of healthy families with good intentions — and be bad, part of something evil at the exact same time," he writes in the introduction.

He grew up with two supportive parents and a grandma who lived just across the park. Still, he ran with the proverbial bad crowd, doing drugs and cutting school. Caligiuri doesn't provide specific details on why he chose that path. One suspects he doesn't quite know, either. The only hint Caligiuri provides is in reference to depression that plagued him — deep, dark cycles that worsened each year.

One particularly long cycle ended with the crime that landed him in prison. Here, too, he's light on details. According to news reports, Caligiuri and two other men were convicted of breaking into an apartment in the Lowry Hill neighborhood and robbing 50-year-old Edwin Isaacson before beating him to death with a shotgun.

This is not a life-in-prison memoir. Rather, Caligiuri spends the first two-thirds of the book recounting his life in south Minneapolis — the loving grandma, the friends who almost died, the girls who stole his heart. Here's where his eye for detail comes through — his grandma's yellow dress, a little boy lost on Christmas and girls with "hairsprayed waterfall bangs."

The prison chapters are meditative, more about thoughts and less about day-to-day life. How it feels to be visited by a onetime girlfriend whom he'll never hear from again, how it feels to be the only family member not at a grandma's funeral and how it feels to leave the prison for just a few hours, shackled around the ankles, to view his father's body at a funeral home.

The crux of any memoir is transformation. Somehow the writer has to change. Caligiuri is not the same person he was in the early 1990s. But he will not have a shot at complete transformation until he's released from prison. He recognizes there are no guarantees: "It's about how what became so sinister and ugly can hopefully transform again."

Rachael Hanel teaches mass media at Minnesota State University, Mankato, and is the author of the memoir "We'll Be the Last Ones to Let You Down."

This Is Where I Am
By: Zeke Caligiuri.
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press, 296 pages, $17.95.
Event: 7 p.m. Oct. 24, Open Book, 1011 Washington Av. S., Mpls.