By John Hood

We’ve all got a past. Some of that past is handed down, some of it is our own doing, but we’ve all got one. And be it shady or bright, painted or trite, what we do with that past is what makes us who we are.

And who we will become.

Donald Antrim inherited a past that might’ve done in lesser folk, or at least driven ’em to a full course in anti-depressants. Thick, cloying, bitter and volatile — it is in his blood, in his bones and in his brain, boiling.

Mostly though, Antrim’s past gets stuck in his throat, like the catch of a memory you just can’t bear to cherish — or the face of the woman who brought you to be.

See, Antrim’s got a back story that’s very much haunted by a single, smoldered soul:

His mother.

In The Afterlife (Picador $13), Antrim brings that bad past to life, to love and — yes! — to live, and in so doing creates a work as elegant and moving as a tear.

OK, many tears, heaping bucketsful of the salty stuff, in fact. But Antrim — thank Zeus — is no crybaby, not even close, so the tears track back into scar rather than wallow.

And Louanne Antrim could leave a mean scar. Think Mommie Dearest in a suburban Miami subdivide (or a Sarasota bungalow, or a Southern college campus) — abusive, neglectful, recriminating. And that’s just for breakfast.

Like the Joan of arch cruelty upon which the above legend was based, Louanne’s lashings come courtesy of a considerable amount of both drink and derangement. She talks to mythological spirits, including the Virgin Mary; she swears upon conspiracies of every imaginable stripe; she’s unstable, unhinged and unspeakably many things a mother decidedly should not be.

This, naturally, makes for some very heavy woundings, and Antrim recounts them all with a candor befitting their brutality. But, bad as it gets, his life with Mommy wasn’t all “no wire hanger” moments. Artistic and impulsive, almost despite herself, dear ol’ Mom had a certain daring to her, and more than a little derring-do, even if she was often too drunk to get it done.

Plus, when you think about it, the woman did raise two kids basically by herself. Granted she’d driven away their father, and, admittedly, her techniques were more than a bit odd, yet didn’t leaving the children very much to their own devices allow them to grow into their own?

Of course it did, which is probably part of the reason why Antrim’s become one of our finest scribes — given enough rope, he chose to pull himself outta the tunnel and smack into the light of a soul’s very dark night.

We should all be so unlucky.

Donald Antrim reads from The Afterlife at 8 p.m. Thursday, June 7, at Books and Books, 265 Aragon Ave., Coral Gables. Call 305-442-4408.

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Oh, Henry!

Short and Often Very Bittersweet, These Are the Prizes of Our Lives

By John Hood

O. Henry had a backstory straight outta Faulkner: born William Sydney Porter during the Civil War, on a North Carolina plantation called Worth Place, mother dead of TB when he was 3, raised in the home of his paternal grandparents, bookkeeper then pharmacist, ranch hand then draftsman, bank teller and founder of a failed satirical weekly called The Rolling Stone, columnist and reporter for The Houston Post.

Then things really got colorful: indictee (for embezzlement), fugitive (a lam to Honduras provoked the phrase “Banana Republic”), convict (he did three of five in the Ohio State Pen), then the Big Bad Apple, where he wrote a story a week for the New York World, hard-backed four collections, and drank enough to die before he hit 50.

Eight years after O. Henry’s death, The Twilight Club (later the Society of Arts and Letters) held a dinner in his honor at the Hotel McAlpin. Seemed the chronic drink and debt were forgiven if not forgotten, and the man remained revered. A few months later at a Biltmore meet, the members decided to remember him with an annual award for short story writers, and in 1919 The O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories was born.

The collections’ been racking ever since.

Now simply called The O. Henry Prize Stories, version 2007 (Anchor, $14.95) keeps alive all the brilliance of the namesake master with a stroke of heritage that, despite its history, remains fully representative of the way we live now.

Here we have brand names such as William Trevor, Alice Munro and Ariel Dorfman, as well as names soon to be branded the best there is — folk like Jan Ellison with her very first published story (“The Company of Men”), and Charles Lambert, who next year will publish his very first novel (Fern Seed).

We have bears and war buddies and navel-gazers and gringos, thieves, lovers, enemies, and friends, 20 tall in all.

But beyond the bylines, we have ourselves. Like its many predecessors, this collection is all about the bits of the pieces that make up life — the nuance of tragedy, the impressions of redemption, the feel of every episode. Our lives are not novels. We don’t consist of three great acts that arc perfectly to an end. No, we dip and we curve and we rattle and we rise, at whim if not will, and it takes tales like these to tell us who we were, who we are and who we may be still.

In O. Henry, we have prize.

Hood is online at www.therealjohnhood.com.

Comments? E-mail letters@miamisunpost.com.