Curriculum Vitae is a hyper-realistic character study of Ian Sloan, a forty-four-year-old high school English and journalism teacher. A fractured personal life and mundane occupation serves as the big yellow bus that carries the reader into his world.
The setting is Anesthesia—an upper middle class, Los Angeles suburb, during Reagan’s 1980s. One of Ian’s idealistic journalism students is on the warpath to expose controversy with the district superintendent, which could cause political disaster. Ian’s ex-wife, now married to a successful tax attorney, suspects their son’s recent behavior is drug-induced. His father’s health is deteriorating. And to top it off, a local single mom has ensnared him in an involuntary romance.
But Ian’s existence runs much deeper than his daily schedule and annoyances. Author A. B. Boyd digs deep into his character’s emotional life—revealing a desire for reconciliation with his dying father, coupled with an on-and-off relationship with his own son.
Curriculum Vitae will leave the reader in a state of self-examination, realizing that suicide bridge is just a bridge, and a job is just a job—but relationships and being needed is the stuff that life is made of.