Kickflip Boys: A Memoir of Freedom, Rebellion, and the Chaos of Fatherhood

By page twenty of Neal Thompson’s memoir, Kickflip Boys, my heart was thundering and my eyes welled with tears. I won’t give the anecdote away, except to use Thompson’s own observation: “…Something changed in me that day. Some innocent piece got gouged out…” Kickflip Boys is an uninhibited story of raising two sons who challenge, defy, refuse, and sometimes vandalize our societal structures. Sean and Leo are skateboard kids, who are bright, skip school to skate, sometimes do drugs, and love one another with a ferocity that is admirable. This memoir is a wild ride, filled with heartbreaking moments that drop into sunshine ones — “Later, I’d discover that not every park was as mellow as Food Lion Skatepark, not every skater a misunderstood angel.” As the boys age, spinning further into defiance, Neal and his wife, Mary, wonder about their complicity in their children’s behavior: did they give them too much freedom? Did they reward them for disobeying the rules? Does having your twelve-year-old mix you a Manhattan instill a predilection towards substance abuse? And it makes you wonder how you’d react if the ones you loved ignored your hopes and dreams, curfews and pleas. Throughout the highs and lows of parenthood, Thompson also recounts his own shenanigans as a teenager, falling in love with his wife and his own career as a writer. Love, anxiety, and the pursuit of freedom burn through every page of this rewarding memoir, which seems to say, the rules don’t always work, but devotion does. --Al Woodworth