Half the Story: Paul Clemens, Made in Detroit: A South of 8 Mile Memoir

Paul Clemens has an important story to tell in this memoir,1 but it is not the story we expect. Born in Detroit in 1973, he grew up as part of a rapidly shrinking minority: white people in the Motor City. We anticipate a literate Eminem, but Clemens is honest enough to admit that his real contacts with the life and culture of black Detroit have been minimal. He had no love for the music the best locus for racial crossovers indeed almost no real contact with black Detroit, because he was educated in the still largely white Catholic parochial system. The real story in this memoir is the story of Clemens's father. He is the one genuinely "made in Detroit," born in 1944 when the city was truly "the arsenal of Democracy," a man who, in his son's words, "worshipped at the altar of the internal combustion engine." His work was making cars, and his only leisure was repairing and racing them. As Clemens observes, his father was part of