"In the general waste of living, a few things are lasting-the first love, the lost child, the turning point-those are keepers." So begins Bobby Jack Nelson's memorable look back at a life lived in fast forward-a last-ditch attempt to confront the caprices of a blind fate that demands yet eludes understanding. What key might unlock the meaning behind a mother's bleak end to a bleak life? Or his epic, Thurberesque struggles against a new stepmother and four "step-snivelings"? When his amazingly desirable wife, Tracy, demanded, "Why don't you love me?" during his high-flying days as an ad exec, why did she have to ask it while pointing a .38 between his eyes? How did he ever survive disasters as different as the abduction and murder of a young son or the loss of Darlene, the most beautiful girl in his woebegone hometown of Dalton, Texas?

Keepers is the product of a powerful storyteller's urgent attempts to find the plotline in the raw material of his tragicomic life. The war between men and women has rarely been as honestly portrayed or the American male psyche so definitively laid open for examination.