Perhaps most fascinating is the tale of the high school yearbook photo, staged with a pre–growth spurt Carkeet and the tall and popular girl. The realization that this explains the book’s cover photo (and also invokes an earlier essay of Carkeet’s I’d read while in his class) is memorable.

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(University of Georgia Press; 137 pgs; $22.95)

I’ll begin this review with all the disclosures: David Carkeet was my grad school professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis (UMSL); in fact, he was head of the MFA department when I began my studies. He’s the one who inspired me to try my hand at the personal essay (which, I suppose, review writing can sometimes be). I’ve been to his house (while he lived in St. Louis, that is); my friend and I were most impressed by the shelf of his library devoted to his novels translated into other languages. I tried to sell his youngest daughter on the merits of owning a ferret (to no avail; Dave and his wife were set against it).

When Carkeet accepted early retirement from UMSL (their loss, to be sure), he did so with the understanding that he could move anywhere he wanted (he chose Vermont) and focus on writing full time. Finally, we see the early fruits of this decision in Campus Sexpot, a memoir. Following all the aforementioned, it should be apparent I went into this book expecting some dirt: on Carkeet, his teaching experiences, his life. What I got, instead, was dirt on Dale Koby, a teacher of brief tenure at Sonora Union High School in Sonora, Calif., during Carkeet’s years there. Yes, that’s right: Campus Sexpotis a memoir of someone else’s life, interspersed with brief truths of the author’s own life. So, yes, I felt a bit cheated—but also, truth be told, relieved, as I really didn’t want to learn any of the travails as a campus sexpot of married family man Carkeet.

The back story is this: Koby taught for one year at Sonora Union before disappearing. Shortly thereafter, the sleazy novel Campus Sexpot made its rounds in the small gold mining town. The novel turned out to be a tale of adolescent impropriety, thinly veiled to represent actual faculty and students of SUHS. Throughout his memoir of the same name, Carkeet investigates Koby via the research library, reporting on his later literary efforts and also dissecting his writing style. (I felt shamed by these lessons; had I learned nothing in six years of graduate fiction writing study?)

Here and there, Carkeet offers us snippets of his own experiences: His short stature as an adolescent. His distant relationship with his father, the superior court judge. His foray into masturbation and, later, pipe smoking. Perhaps most fascinating is the tale of the high school yearbook photo, staged with a pre–growth spurt Carkeet and the tall and popular girl. The realization that this explains the book’s cover photo (and also invokes an earlier essay of Carkeet’s I’d read while in his class) is memorable.

The writing’s good, and there are, of course, morsels of brilliance, of insight, including the following, offering a glimpse into the father-son relationship which defined the young Carkeet:

When I saw High Noon at the Uptown Theater, I saw it with my father. It was the only movie I remember seeing with him. I was so deeply stirred by the marshal’s perilous solitude that afterward I felt the need to choose my words of comment very carefully. As we crossed Washington Street to our car, I said, “He had a lot of courage.” My father said, “He sure did.” I was six years old. “Courage” was a new word for me, and I was glad I had used it correctly.

But throughout my reading, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d been duped, misled. A memoir’s supposed to be about the author’s life, is it not? Instead, I got only snippets of his life, interspersed with longer passages recounting and evaluating Koby’s original text, coupled with speculations on his intent and later life.

Carkeet’s Campus Sexpot is a page-turner, to be sure—but in my case, it was turning the page in search of a truth that was not to be revealed.