A Species of Memoir

“Mayors have to fix potholes. They have to worry about permitting for restaurants. They have to make sure the elderly get their streets shoveled,” says Dan Chiasson, Lorraine C. Wang Professor of English. “It’s real hands-on action that you’d be protected from if you were a legislator down in Washington. Those guys are not getting a call at 3 in the morning from somebody who’s pissed because the UVM frat next door is having a party. … You have to be everybody’s mayor.”

Chiasson has spent the past five years thinking about the role of a mayor—in particular, the very memorable former mayor of his hometown: Bernie Sanders.

In the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, Chiasson decided to write a biography of Vermont’s first socialist mayor. While Bernie for Burlington: The Rise of the People’s Politician, which was published by Knopf on Feb. 3, is a very different kind of work from Chiasson’s previous five books—all collections of poetry—as soon as you hear Chiasson discuss it, you know that he was destined to write this book.

Chiasson was 9 when Sanders became mayor in 1981, 17 when he left City Hall, and 19 when he was sworn in as Vermont’s sole member of the U.S. House of Representatives, in 1991. “You know, we were working class, low-income people, and there was no college in my background,” says Chiasson of his family. “I’m sort of an outcome of Bernie’s intervention in community life in the city of Burlington. … I am an outcome of an experiment in progressive politics.” Chiasson went on to receive his B.A. from Amherst College and a Ph.D. from Harvard.

Bernie for Burlington is not only a biography of Sanders during his mayoral years. Chiasson hopes it also comes across as a “cool hybrid” of biography, memoir, cultural history, and sociology.

“I’m an amateur,” says Chiasson, who has been contributing poems to the New Yorker since 2000 and book reviews since 2007. “I’m not credentialed in any of these types of writing, so I wouldn’t know how to play by the rules. I wouldn’t know how to be a biographer or a sociologist or a cultural historian. … So that was freeing to me, to just kind of color outside the lines a little bit.”

The result is a chatty, engaging, and deeply detailed 592-page book that captures Chiasson’s childhood, teen, and young adult years, in parallel to Sanders’ time as Burlington’s mayor and his eventual election to Congress. It’s also a loving tribute to the city of Burlington. Chiasson said he “couldn’t draw the line” between himself and the other, because his life, his family, Sanders, and Vermont were all so deeply intertwined—often, when conducting interviews for the book, he found he had people in common with his research subjects.

“I kept finding myself and my relatives and friends just inside the story, so it was not going to be possible for me to write without that,” he says. Chiasson points to the chapter about a legendary Italian restaurant in Burlington called Bove’s, which was for many years a “kind of political salon” and also the place where the Sisters of Mercy took Chiasson out to eat after his first communion. The man who ran Bove’s entered the 1981 mayoral race as a third-party candidate and likely tipped the election in favor of Sanders. “Another writer would just tell the political story,” says Chiasson, “but I could tell that story and also testify to how good the lasagna was.”

“The research and the memory were speaking to one another in this really cool way,” Chiasson adds, saying his next project will definitely be another book of nonfiction, since he had “so much fun” writing this one. While he had to learn many skills on the fly while researching Bernie for Burlington (“I’d never done an interview before. I really had never done anything really journalistic at all! I didn’t even write for a high school paper,” he says), he believes that it’s not that different from his other books.

“I think of poetry as a nonfiction genre,” says Chiasson. “Poetry is a species of memoir, really.”