Hitchhiking with Larry David

May 1, 2013
Light, summery memoir of a journey toward healing from a relationship gone slightly sour. Once a successful entrepreneur in the music industry in Nashville, Dolman (What Matters Most: Intimate Interviews with Notable Nashvillians, 1997) found himself wanting an indefinable something more than his big house and trophy wife. So he sold his business and traveled west to California, where strange coincidences led him to meet a woman he almost instantly considered his soul mate. To his great surprise and bitter disappointment, the relationship did not survive the couple's return to Nashville, where "the Miracle" (as he refers to the otherwise unnamed woman throughout the book) wanted more of a commitment than he did and began looking for it with someone else. Devastated by this apparent betrayal--not just by the woman but also by the universe--Dolman went to his octogenarian parents' summer home on Martha's Vineyard to lick his wounds for a couple of weeks. He wound up spending an entire season there, hitchhiking and biking the island with no larger agenda than eating donuts and ice cream, swimming and sunbathing, and meeting random Vineyard denizens, including, yes, Larry David of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm fame. The first conversation between Dolman (hitchhiker) and David (ride purveyor) is the highlight of the book, not because of anything the two strangers discuss but due to the fact that David's acerbic misanthropy adds a delightfully real contrast to the otherwise sugary-sweet goings-on. Dolman was once a motivational speaker, and it shows. He approaches most conversations like group therapy, where everyone shares Oprah-like wisdom about the pains and joys of life, but nothing goes much deeper than standard Hollywood "life lessons." Pleasant enough beach reading for romantics and believers in fate but probably not for fans of Larry David.

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June 1, 2013
Like Larry David's TV shows, Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm, this curious memoir is witty, boasts an assortment of offbeat characters, and offers just a hint of surrealism. While summering on Martha's Vineyard after a failed relationship, Dolman was hitchhiking when Larry David, of all people, stopped and picked him up. They had a lengthy, wandering, even occasionally profound conversation, and then David dropped Dolman at his destination. That appeared to be the end of Dolman's encounter with David, whose TV series, Dolman was embarrassed to admit, he had never seen, not one episode. But as the summer wore on, they kept running into each other, and a weird sort of friendship grew. It's difficult to categorize this book. On the one hand, it's a nifty memoir that allows us to see a side of a celebrity we don't normally see; on another, it's a story about Dolman's emotional and spiritual quest to find himself; on still another, it's a portrait of an unusual friendship, the kind that would fit right in, for example, on Seinfeld. A quirky and frequently thought-provoking memoir.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)