In modern psychology, the term “flashbulb memory” is granted to vivid and long-lasting recollections of historical events, particularly those of personal and emotional significance. It is argued that the formation of these memories is separate from the formation of other autobiographical memories due to their detail and intensity. Often, these moments are those of cultural and historical significance—from moments of collective tragedy to moments of collective joy, like a hometown team finally breaking a long running losing streak.
Examples of this phenomenon of memory litter the pages of There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension, the newest work of nonfiction from esteemed writer, cultural critic, poet, and Ohioan, Hanif Abdurraqib. With There’s Always This Year, Abdurraqib has delivered a seamless and seemingly effortless blend of memoir, biography, and sociocultural commentary. The book’s structure follows the course of a basketball game—with section headings marking the pregame period followed by each consecutive quarter, as well as timeouts and intermissions scattered in between. Each quarter is subdivided into sections with time markers, the moments at which the clock pauses. In this way, much like a basketball game itself, the experience of reading the book disrupts time, stretching and rendering it elastic. Just as the four twelve-minute quarters can stretch beyond two hours in length, the reader progresses through pages at their own pace.
I read this book across three days, over the cusp of the new year into 2024. Perhaps I should preface by saying that I am a longtime fan of Abdurraqib’s work, and consider him to be one of the finest writers of our time. I should also perhaps say that I have never and likely will never be an ardent follower of NBA basketball (though I’ll never say never).
I was predisposed to be moved by this book, yes, but—basketball fan though I am not—Abdurraqib has such a keen awareness of mood that I couldn’t help but be brought to the edge of my own seat over highlights from years past. He affords his gentle, loving eye to not only his subjects, but also imbues his words with such feeling—be it affection or love or grief— that the reader is cast in the same light of emotion. I became complicit in and direct witness to the events of the book through his uniquely powerful gift of description. The book’s chapters are stolen moments from Abdurraqib’s own life—the one and only time he saw his father play basketball, for instance—highlights from the career of fellow Ohioan LeBron James, moments of collective and private grief, and moments of NBA history. I call these moments flashbulb memories for their cultural significance in general collective memory and for their loving description in Abdurraqib’s portraiture of them. He merges the personal and the universal in such a way that I cannot help but feel a part of these moments, despite some of them taking place before my birth, or before I was conscious of basketball’s existence.
What this book accomplishes with respect to physical location is also difficult to describe. Homage to place is paid, of course, as the narrative crisscrosses between Abdurraqib’s own beloved Columbus and LeBron’s basketball hometown of Cleveland. But physical location is also explored as an ache or absence, a felt concreteness when one is living elsewhere. Location here lives alongside site—basketball as a site of ascension, within the game itself and for the Black athlete who rises out of and above difficult circumstance to the level of celebrity, and in LeBron’s case to the level of King, Blackness as a site of community, community as a site that includes those who have stayed and those who have left, in more ways than one. Abdurraqib captures the feeling of loving a place that people aspire to leave, or one that is often overlooked or disparaged in public opinion.
It is easy to attempt to categorize Hanif’s works of nonfiction loosely by subject matter: the first about music—and about live shows in particular—the second about hip hop and A Tribe Called Quest, the third about the art and observance of Black performance, the fourth about basketball. Yet, they are also, in my memory, as any good memoir or memoir adjacent book is, time capsules to periods of the author’s life. The first about his twenties and his friends in the Columbus punk and hip hop communities, the third about his mother and the ongoing process of mourning her, and now, There’s Always This Year, largely about his father, about his family’s continuance in his mother’s absence following her passing. And so, as he sifts through and charts his own life through his bibliography, jumping forward and backward in time as it suits his desires and purposes, the longtime reader moves backward and forward in time alongside him. Abdurraqib’s writing contains its own unique musicality and rhythm, a playful blooming and flowing that I consider to be his signature and that I find immediately recognizable. And so when I read this work my past selves come collapsing in on themselves. At simultaneous occurrence, I am in my late twenties and reading in my apartment, where I live alone with my dog, in my chosen home city of Chicago, but I am also nineteen and reading Hanif’s words for the first time in my childhood bedroom in the dying summer days of the break between my first and second years of undergrad, and I am in my early twenties again in my childhood home in the mire of postgraduate uncertainty beginning to see a light at the end of the tunnel belatedly turning to They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, and I am in my mid-twenties in my second shared Chicago apartment in the fall of 2020 navigating early pandemic era precariousness feeling gifted by his words and their warmth in A Little Devil. What a blessing it is to witness his career, to be alive during a time when he is actively writing and publishing (and not to mention tweeting).
Abdurraqib has always written nonfiction prose with a poet’s ear and sensibilities, and here he integrates poems as interludes within the various plays and quarters of the text, each one written after or in homage to a great Ohioan. It is fitting that one of these tributes is to the late literary titan Toni Morrison, for, though I generally shy away from casting such comparisons, I want to see him similarly assigned on curricula in the decades to come, I want him to be read widely and embraced, and I know we have already given him some flowers, particularly in wake of A Little Devil in America, but surely there are even more flowers to give, flowers that he is more than deserving of. There’s Always This Year reaffirms that, much like we all bore witness to the ascension of LeBron James, we are all concurrently bearing witness to the career of a once in a lifetime literary great.
