Half of What I Say Is Meaningless: Essays

Half of What I Say is Meaningless is a series of memoirs, set by turns in Joseph Bathanti’s hometown of Pittsburgh as well as in his ultimate home in North Carolina where he landed in 1976 as a VISTA Volunteer assigned to the North Carolina Department of Correction. Though these essays are not queued chronologically, they form a seamless chronicle of contemplation on the indelible stamp of home, family, ancestry, and spirituality, regardless of locale. The book opens with The Turf of Hankering, which tells the tale of Bathanti’s leaving Pittsburgh for his VISTA training in Atlanta, meeting a Southern woman, and fellow VISTA he is destined to marry, his lurch into the American South where he would eventually make his beloved home, and his first attempts at becoming a writer. The fourteen essays are written in a voice that is always elevated, though conversational, wry, funny, quintessentially human, and laced with poetry.