A STEP AWAY FROM BATHING WITH A TOASTER

A Step Away from Bathing with a Toaster

The title stops you before you know the book and means something entirely different once you do. A Step Away from Bathing with a Toaster is a memoir about the distance between where a person is standing and the worst place they could end up, and about what happened in that space for David Kitzmiller during one of the lowest stretches of his life.

Kitzmiller wrote this book in ten days. Not at a desk at home, but on a nine-day cruise along the Australian coast, in the wake of a single weekend in Sydney that broke something loose after years of depression following the end of a marriage. He did not set out to write a memoir. What came out of those ten days was both a record of the trip and a reckoning with the years leading up to it, written in real time while the events were still warm.

About the Memoir

The Dealing with the Toaster series begins here in publication, though Born with a Toaster in the Bathroom, the prequel, reaches further back into Kitzmiller's origins. A Step Away from Bathing with a Toaster enters the story in adulthood, after the wounds of childhood have had decades to settle into patterns. Kitzmiller is no longer trying to survive what is being done to him. He is trying to understand what he has done to himself, and what the collapse of the life he had built has cost.

Sydney arrives in the book the way a detail only works when it is true: a city so vivid after years of depression's gray that the color of it felt like a message. The cruise that followed became the container for everything he needed to examine. The choices that preceded the marriage's end. The version of himself he had been living inside without fully seeing. The question of what came next and whether he had the will to find out.

The book is not without humor. It is, in places, genuinely funny. Kitzmiller has always understood that the absurdity of being alive does not pause for grief, and A Step Away from Bathing with a Toaster does not ask it to. Fleeting romance, the specific comedy of being emotionally undone on a cruise ship, and the strange lightness that surfaces when a person has run out of things to protect himself with all find their way onto the page. The humor is not relief from the weight. It is part of the weight, and Kitzmiller knows the difference.

What This Book Is

A Step Away from Bathing with a Toaster is not a recovery memoir in the conventional sense. There is no clean arc from broken to repaired. What it offers instead is something closer to real time: a writer processing through writing during the days when that processing was most necessary, with enough honesty to leave the unresolved parts unresolved. The result reads less like looking back and more like being inside the moment as it is still happening.

It is a memoir that trusts the reader to sit with discomfort. It does not explain itself. It does not arrive at tidy conclusions. It arrives at Sydney, and at the slow recognition that the world still has color in it, and for now, that is enough.

Style

Kitzmiller's prose in this memoir is immediate and unguarded. He writes without the distance that time usually gives a writer, because the time was not there. The result is a voice that sounds like thinking out loud in the most controlled way possible: candid, self-aware, occasionally self-deprecating, and never performing a version of himself that is easier to take than the true one. Poems from the Toaster readers will recognize the same emotional honesty in a longer form.

Related Works

For the full picture of how Kitzmiller arrived at the person in these pages, Born with a Toaster in the Bathroom traces the childhood and adolescent years that shaped everything that followed. The Poems from the Toaster collections serve as an emotional companion to the series, holding in poetry what the memoir holds in prose.

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