Books

Kim Powers doesn't go home to McKinney much. It's where his father drank too much. It's where his mentally ill mother died after taking too many sleeping pills, but not before she insisted the Apostle Paul told her to beat Dad with a frying pan. And it's where he grew up inseparable from but at war with his twin brother, Tim.

"It's always very emotional for me to come back," he says by phone from his home in New York. "I drive down the street I grew up on, and my parents are long gone. Strangers live there now. I wouldn't recognize it. It's tough."

But he does come home in his recent memoir, The History of Swimming, which chronicles a lost weekend spent in North Texas some 20 years ago. He also defies Steely Dan by going back to his old school, Austin College, right up the road in Sherman.

The reason for his prodigal return? The disappearance of his twin: a self-destructive, suicidal drinker whose voluminous letters created a trail of bread crumbs to familiar haunts.

"It's all about an obsession with my twin brother and us trying to form our separate identities," says Kim, who graduated from Austin College in 1979. "I wanted to present Tim's letters to the world, even long before anything tragic had happened with Tim. I remember being home Christmas and finding this treasure trove of them."

But he never expected he would have to "play Da Vinci Code with them," as he puts it, in a desperate attempt to find their author. He never expected his twin to vanish.

It all started with a phone call from Tim's office. He hadn't shown up for work that day, hadn't called anyone or left a note. Just disappeared. Tim's recent suicide attempt, and a severe nervous breakdown in college, led Kim to assume the worst. It also led him to hop on a plane to D/FW, rent a car and embark on an urgent trip down memory lane.

It seems the area had changed a little. Those little suburbs that used to dot the local map weren't so little anymore. His hometown, which had a population of about 18,000 when he lived there, was almost unrecognizable.

"I literally got lost the last time I came back," he says. "I used to be able to take that route from the airport to McKinney blindfolded. Now I have to map it out. The whole area has so grown up with these overpasses and circles and everything.

"It's not like it was ever The Last Picture Show or Mayberry, RFD. But it certainly had a bit more innocence to it when I was there growing up than it does now. It's a big city."

Much of The History of Swimming consists of Kim dissecting that treasure trove of letters, looking for clues that might point the way to his brother, dead or alive. He hightails it to the Austin College campus and meets a new friend; together they follow a new clue to the Texas Hill Country, where Tim once spent a college summer studying drama.

All the while he reads the letters, sifting, obsessing over their allusions to swimming, remembering.

"I love the letters," he says. "I should call it 'A memoir by Kim and Tim Powers.' There's such an equal partnership in the writing of the book."

Mr. Powers, who has written for ABC's Good Morning America and Prime Time and penned the screenplay to the film Finding North, writes bluntly about his love-hate relationship with his twin: "Hate, when he was drinking, which was most of the time now. Love, except when I had to save him, which was also most of the time."

But he also injects a good deal of humor. Musing on the fact that he, Tim, and older brother Porky are all gay, he anticipates the reader's response: "Yeah, three gay brothers, film at 11, stay tuned."

The History of Swimming makes it easy to stay tuned as it builds into an engaging combination of memoir, confession, thriller and travelogue.

We're led by Kim Powers' fraternal obsession and obligation, and by his twin's haunting epistolary contributions. The narrative momentum carries to the home stretch.

In some ways, the Swimming process has helped Mr. Powers reconnect with this past. "I've been hearing from so many old high school and college friends that still live in the area," he says. "It's been great. They've been catching me up on everything going on down there."

But these days, Mr. Powers is happy to call the East Coast home. "I describe myself as a fallen Texan," he laughs. "I love it more in my fantasy world than in reality. I pine away for it, but I don't act on it as much as a I should. I just don't get down there as much."

For that he can be forgiven.

E-mail cvognar@dallasnews.com

Kim Powers

(Carroll & Graf, $24.95)

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