Walk a Mile in My Shoes – Surviving Life’s Challenges is a dramatic first-person account of the wild twists and turns in Paul Bradford’s life. With roots as a Southern boy coming of age in the 1960s, Bradford’s heartwrenching story spans some seven decades of internal and external upheaval. For readers who can handle conflict, infidelity, abuse, and torment, an emotional rollercoaster awaits those willing to climb aboard this jarring ride. Bradford’s early beginnings include abject poverty, limited education, and life under the dominion of an abusive, alcoholic father, and he unsuccessfully grapples with the irrational behavior he observes. “I didn’t know how to reckon with such chaos and disorder.” In a vicious cycle, this tumultuous dysfunction is revisited in damaging ways throughout the author’s life.
Little is withheld as Bradford describes the satisfaction of dispatching a rascally rooster, skinning a rabbit, or breaking down a freshly slaughtered hog, images some readers would rather not visualize. As he moves through time, the traumatizing details do not let up. He is bereft of his mother, abandoned by his father, and molested by a stranger before his tenth birthday. A series of foster homes are a bright spot compared to his drunken father, but there is little in the way of good examples or nurturing figures. One thread woven throughout this memoir is the author’s complex attitude toward sex and sexuality. Scenes depicting these activities are forthright and prolific, giving the impression of fixation or compulsion rather than curiosity. As a young gay man grappling with his sexuality in an intolerant time, the prevailing views and religious influences are a source of increasing pain, confusion, and vexation. Bradford eventually joins the military, marries a woman, raises a family, and finds financial success. All of this is eclipsed, however, when his sexual proclivities derail his decades-long marriage. Rather than open up about being gay, he opts to hide this from his wife, along with an abundance of extramarital sexual encounters. Continuing in his selfish behavior, life’s biggest plot twist occurs for Bradford when he engages in lewd behavior with a fostered teen boy. By 2013, Bradford is left spending his golden years divorced, shunned by his children, and behind bars for abuse of a minor.
As appalling as the subject matter in the first half of this book is, the second half goes in a different horrific direction. Besides being labeled a sex offender and serving a prison sentence, Bradford details his struggles navigating a legal system that does not seem to value rehabilitation. The author’s candid recollections of therapy sessions, probation conversations, and time incarcerated offer an eye-opening look at things from a viewpoint most are more comfortable disregarding. While there are moments of hope and optimism, Walk a Mile in My Shoes is a sobering reminder that who we are today is the result of yesterday’s choices.
