On June 13, 1984 at 8:12 PM, a boy named Darren Manley was born - and time went haywire. Why? His mother was already forty-four years old. His father was fifty-seven. Growing up, Darren wasn't exactly like other kids his age. His first movie idol was Cary Grant. Ice cream didn't taste right unless it was homemade. And he was convinced Bing Crosby was still crooning his way to the top of the charts. Until he went to preschool and realized he was living in a completely different era. How to Build a Time Machine follows Darren's painfully comical attempts to fit into the culture of the '80s and '90s while growing up in a house still stuck in the '40s and '50s. This is a story of punk rock and Big Band; Sinatra and Sublime; Tom Cruise and John Wayne. But it's also a story about how a search for identity became a search for reconciliation. Haunted by tales of the grandparents he never knew, surrounded by a cast of aunts, uncles, and half-sisters in the twilight of their lives, Darren had a front-row ticket to the theater of growing old; to feel that universal pang of wanting more time with the people you love. As his parents got older and their health failed, time was only speeding up. He couldn't close the generation gap he inherited, but he could at least fight it by taking his parents on an unforgettable final trip through time. How to Build a Time Machine is a beautifully rendered coming-of-age memoir wherein age itself is both the hero and the villain. It surveys the boundaries of the American family and shows us that time is no match for the people and memories we hold dear.

Author Biography

Darren Manley lives in Southern California, where he works for his local library and helps care for his parents. His nonfiction has appeared in the Los Angeles Times and his fiction in Stoneboat Literary Journal. Find out more at www.darrenmanley.com.