No Soft Landings

David McCreery's memoir of growing-up in a family of alcoholics in Pittsburgh, PA began as a mere journal entry, one February morning. It would become a place to grapple with tormented questions about how it was that, despite the many blessings of affluence and education that had been bestowed on him, he was unemployed, alone, behind on his rent and estranged from the only family member he had ever loved.

David McCreery's memoir of growing-up in a family of alcoholics in Pittsburgh, PA began as a mere journal entry, one February morning. It would become a place to grapple with tormented questions about how it was that, despite the many blessings of affluence and education that had been bestowed on him, he was unemployed, alone, behind on his rent and estranged from the only family member he had ever loved. Alcohol had always been the go-to answer for his parents, two of his siblings and assorted aunts and uncles on both sides of his family. But David didn't have a problem with alcohol on that cold February morning. David had a problem with living.

"Sick and tired of being sick and tired," David McCreery found himself in the throes of writing all of "that" down, without even a hint of what "that" truly meant. Before he knew it, those journal entries began to take shape and something resembling a memoir emerged in the Spring of 2000. He had always known and experienced how little secrets and denials in a Scots-Irish family had caused the family hierarchy- his mother and father- to drink vast quantities of alcohol, what, David came to think of as "disappointment ointment." A transformation of that family ensued, slowly at first but, over time, it set one person against another in a hideous display of familial deconstruction: the damn thing disintegrated before his eyes. Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1948, David McCreery attended private boys schools- Shady Side Academy k-9, then The Hun School of Princeton, Princeton, New Jersey for prep school. He came to realize that the universe placed him in various settings for reasons that he ascribes to nurture, rather than reward. It was one gloriously rainy day in Princeton in 1968 that David was asked to apply to one of America's great small colleges, Westminister College in Fulton, Missouri. He graduated four years later and moved to Little Rock, Arkansas and has lived there ever since. He is the grandfather of two precious girls: Palmer and Ellis Flanagin, ages 10 and 6 respectively.