Nonfiction by Nicole Treska, reviewed by Monica Wendel
WONDERLAND (Simon & Schuster)

Some memoirs feel like stories told in a therapist’s office. The white noise machine, a box of tissues, predictable healing arcs. Other memoirs can feel braggy, like the writer is in a competition for being the most deranged. Nicole Treska’s memoir, Wonderland, feels different – it has the intimacy of a friend who opens up a beer, rolls up her sleeves, and bellows, have I got a story for you.

Because Treska is loud, and she’s got a lot to say: about her Boston mob family, her peripatetic childhood, her family’s struggles with addiction, and her own big heart, swollen and hurting with love. Treska has an ear for what a person’s lies about themselves can reveal, and nowhere do we see this more than with her father, the expertly rendered and hilarious Phil. Case in point: when Nicole is six years old, she’s told that her father is “going away to camp” He’s going to prison for federal drug trafficking. 

By the time Phil leaves (for prison, not camp), Nicole’s mother is remarried, and Nicole spends her childhood following her military stepfather, Daddy Mike, around to various postings, attending “six first grades.” Eventually Phil, recently released from prison, trails Nicole and her younger sister Lindsay across the country; together, they watch TV in motel rooms and eat at chain restaurants. Treska reflects on those moments with her signature blend of humor and philosophy: “Regardless of time or place, our rituals in the homogeny of Middle America created a sameness. That a rest stop could feel like home showed how adrift we were from what we knew. Burger King rest stops still make me say, You know, we used to live in these.”

As an adult, Nicole recreates that chaos in the most 21st century way: through Airbnb. One of the most fascinating threads in Wonderland is an up-close look at the complexity of the Airbnb phenomenon and how it shapes both neighborhoods and lives. When Nicole’s roommate moves out, Nicole starts to build wealth by renting her old room. Her other jobs are unreliable; at Pangea, where she waitresses, she sometimes only makes her $30 shift pay. Even her checks from City College, where she adjuncts, often come late. Airbnb is a lifeline. 

Nicole acknowledges that by converting her second room into a hotel, she’s taken housing off the market for someone who needs a place to live. At the same time, her landlords are raising the rent, and the apartment is caught in the Kafkaesque housing system of New York City’s regulations around rent protections. Nicole is an individual caught between competing institutions. It’s a quandary where no one is innocent and no one emerges unscathed. 

Throughout the book, money is power – making is, losing it, borrowing it, gambling it. And there’s no one who gambles like her father Phil. Phil, the heartbreaker. It’s a testament to Treska’s skills as a writer that Phil manages to charm the reader, even as his missteps pile up. During Treska’s childhood, Phil’s missteps look like lies, gambling, missing child support checks, and domestic violence. But as he ages, Phil becomes vulnerable; he gets catfished on Facebook, accidentally eats the pot brownies hidden in the freezer, and, despite multiple visits to Nicole’s Harlem apartment, fails to learn how to work the shower, the toaster oven, or the remote. 

Phil’s struggles are treated with both softness and honesty, which Treska extends to others in her life, too. Midway through the book, two brothers lead a ten-year-old Nicole into the basement of a friend’s house. As the scene unfolds, we hold our breath as readers, anticipating violation. Is this the defining moment of trauma? But the scene moves in an unexpected direction, one where the boys’ hands lead Nicole to feeling “charged,” not torn apart. 

That same softness we find with Phil and in the basement is hard to find in “the Turk,” a pseudonym for the on-again, off-again lover that Nicole falls for in spite of – or because of – his physical and emotional distance. While their first date is lush and rich, taking place among the red curtains and crowds of Halloween at KGB, what follows is sparse. Though The Turk haunts the pages of the entire book, we never fully feel we know him. He remains a somewhat empty character in a menagerie of strong portraits. Even his apartment is bare. Treska’s writing never falters, but she has less to work with here. 

Thankfully, Nicole does not hold back. When the inevitable heartbreak arrives, she’s visiting her mother in Florida, a scene that devolves into slapstick when Nicole wakes up covered in bedbug bites. As Nicole, heartbroken and bleeding, lies naked on the floor, trying to not to itch herself, I found myself once again cheering for her. She pushes the bedbug-infested couch out of the house. She roars at her mother. She refuses to pretend it doesn’t hurt. 

In the end, maybe there’s no difference between telling your story in a whisper to a therapist and spilling it loudly over the table. Maybe there’s no difference between peeling back the layers of pain and waving them in your mother’s face to see. Maybe we’re all victims; maybe we’re all perpetrators. Sometimes, shit hurts. Sometimes Nicole steps into the cycle; sometimes she steps away. She enables Phil. She breaks the cycle; she breaks her own heart. In the beginning of the book, she writes: “Too loud and in the wrong place, that’s me. But I turned up and I learned. I gathered the crumbs I could use to survive, and I was nice to people. I have a booming laugh that makes me a henball, like the rest of my family. I made friends easily, a real neighborhood girl. I fit right into New York, a town that loved a fun fuckup willing to try.” It’s not just New York that loves this fun fuckup; Treska’s ability to find softness in the most unexpected moments, memories that resist an easy answer or resolution, means that readers will love this book too.