Praise for How to Walk with Steve:

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"The evocative vignettes of the memoir How to Walk with Steve capture growing up with the steady presence of a beloved brother."

     --Camille-Yvette Welsch, Foreword Reviews

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"Robert Fromberg's poignant memoir details the painful ordinariness of misery -- even for the bright scion of an artistic family . . . In refusing easy consolations, Fromberg has created a memoir that shines like polished bone."

     --Patricia Eakins, author of The Hungry Girls and Other Stories

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"Without a trace of affectation or adornment, Fromberg depicts the searing moments that made him who he is. Never have I read a more authentic, deeply-felt rendering of a child's developing mind."

     --Leslie Lawrence, author of The Death of Fred Astaire and Other Essays from a Life Outside the Lines

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"Fragmented yet unified, direct yet elusive, How to Walk with Steve is a vivid memoir about family and geography, obligation and freedom. Fromberg has a remarkable ability to inject meaning into silence, into the cracks between sections, into all the things that remain unsaid."

     --Brett Biebel, author of 48 Blitz

 

"How to Walk with Steve by Rob Fromberg is an inviting, conversational, and deeply personal portrait of a man's relationship with his brother across places and across time. Using small sections that can feel like standalone poems, Fromberg carefully crafts a resonant memoir about the challenges and obligations—and also the faith and love—that connect siblings through the years. Full of humor, honesty, and surprise, How to Walk with Steve is sure to succeed with nonfiction readers who appreciate unrelenting wit and candor."

     --Scott Kenemore, author of Lake of Darkness

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"How to Walk with Steve performs a rare trick: it treats heavy things—like Steve's autism—with a light touch, and minor things—like the horror of mispronouncing a word he knows well in English class—with utter seriousness. Fully aware of his brother’s oblique brilliance as well as his most upsetting tics, Fromberg presents the string of decisions, unforced errors, and well-meaning efforts that he made along the way to adulthood. He is as unsparing to himself as he is to those around him, and the effect is both agonizing and hilarious. If you've ever been in a situation where everyone else seemed to know something that you didn't and wondered whether you would ever figure out this central truth, this book is for you."

     --Valerie Block, author of Was It Something I Said?

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Book Description:

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How to Walk with Steve is a memoir of a boy’s connection with his autistic brother in a family defined by alcoholism, art, and death in a decaying Midwestern city.

 

With exposed-nerve scenes, Robert Fromberg immerses us in an early childhood made relentlessly unpredictable by autism and addiction; teenage years alone in 1970s New York City; and young adulthood as guardian of his brother after the death of their parents.

 

Robert Fromberg has published prose in Indiana Review, Colorado Review, Hobart, and many other journals. He graduated from the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers and taught writing at Northwestern University for 17 years.