What a narrative! Imagine a Hungarian great-grandfather, who amasses a small fortune in Montego Bay opening a music warehouse and who becomes a naturalised British citizen of Jamaica in 1888.

Imagine a grandfather who loses the entire business to an employee within five years, leaving an American grandmother perpetually trapped in Jamaica, pining to return to Philadelphia.

Couple that with a mother who has her "lowly Syrian background" thrown at her by in-laws, fears of insanity in the family and a father who rarely shows affection and drinks until his death at age 45.

Confronting death

Imagine a 16-year-old boy happening upon that death just as the phone rings. Read Winkler's remembrance:

"I answered it and heard my mother say, "Tony, tell Daddy to pick me up at Uncle Michael's store."

"Daddy dead, Mummy," was all I could blurt out.

"Stop the foolishness," she replied sharply. "I'm hot and tired."

"Daddy dead, Mummy." I burst into tears.

Then she believed me. "Oh, my God," I heard her gasp.

She was thirty-eight years old, had seven children and was three months pregnant with her eighth. Her husband had died bankrupt with no assets."

Trust the darkness? People fear darkness, fear the unknown, fear change or what might lurk beyond their control.

Optimism

Anthony (Tony) Winkler's strange choice of title for his autobiography, Trust The Darkness: My Life as a Writer, foreshadows his invincible optimism in the face of a life so peculiar as to have prematurely buried a lesser man.

Much as I enjoyed The Lunatic, one of the funniest books ever written, much as I enjoyed The Painted Canoe and Going Home To Teach, Tony's autobiography defines him so distinctly it has become my favourite.

It explains his pugnacious personality, his occasional lewdness, his shrewd and tender insight into human behaviour which he evokes with such skill.

Myriad insights

The writing is honest, appealing even when some of the events are not. For in describing his early life in Jamaica as one of seven white children living in a predominantly black nation, especially at a time in Montego Bay when the extremes in wealth associated with being white contrasted so strongly with the poverty of most Jamaicans, Winkler's personal revelations allow us a better understanding of his writing, while simultaneously opening myriad insights into the workings of Jamaican people.

When a really fine writer shares with us an honest assessment of his own life, shares where the influences and incidents come from that he incorporates into his creative work, it is cause for great respect.

I think of A Fish Out of Water, Mario Vargas Llosa's extraordinary exploration of his political campaign for the presidency of Peru at a critical time in his country's history, alternating each chapter of his political foray with a chapter delving into one of his novels.

Or one turns to Paul Theroux's In Sir Vidia's Shadow, a delineation of his own writing career, as mentored by V.S. Naipal but revealing more of the mentor and his alienation from the Caribbean despite his masterpiece, A House for Mr Biswas.

Fall from grace

The Winkler family's fall from financial grace, so that the material advantages disappeared which made young Tony a target to be beaten and humiliated by MoBay's street urchins, also allowed him to identify with them, to understand the injustice of their lives.

Throughout his narrative, the personal resonates with the political, whether in his childhood and adolescence in Jamaica, or his adulthood in the United States (US), enriching the narrative substance.

Winkler left Jamaica four years after his father's death, at his mother's urging.

His early years in the US reflect those of many migrants determined to succeed, working 40-hour weeks as a short order cook while going to university, tired, overworked but determined.

Winkler's perseverance is phenomenal, his love of Jamaica absolute and his insights thoughtful: "What people love about the past is that its outcome is known and over and contains no surprises."

Or "I think that the best writing is often done obliquely when you are busy focusing on something else."

His hard work is an inspiration, with over a dozen college text books written, five novels, two autobiographical works, plays and two films.

Winkler has reason to believe that people will care what he has to say, whether distilled directly from the experiences of his varied life, or by entering "the dark land of the subconscious with no visible way out".

Parkinson's disease

Trust The Darkness isn't just any memoir. This is the work of someone whose mortality has been declared in a ruthless manner.

Some 12 years ago he was diagnosed with the neurological disorder, Parkinson's disease.

In 2003, he called and asked if I wanted to interview him again. I'd done that years earlier for a well-established and respected American publication which, as luck would have it, ceased publishing in a dispute over ownership rights just before that issue would have come out.

Winkler's disease had reached a stage where his words were slurring. Rather than give the appearance of having imbibed too much during his launch in Kingston of the play The Burglary, as with everything else in his life, Winkler confronted the problem head-on and decided that it was time the reading public was told of his disease.

That article based on our interview includes 'A Parkinson's Prayer', the prayer with which he defiantly ends his autobiography writing: "I am not a disease. I am a man."

Five years after our interview, Macmillan Caribbean has published Trust the Darkness, My Life as a Writer, all 472 pages in hardback with a portrait by Judy Ann Macmillan as true to the man in her painting as Winkler is to Jamaica in his writing.