A Personal Review Of Mark Ellison’s ‘Building’

This Thanksgiving, I am thankful for a serendipitous reconnection to one of the people who made me who I am.

As readers, we look for books that “speak to us” in some kind of metaphorical way, hitting themes that resonate in our lives and elevating them to grand principles. But in the case of one recent memoir, I had the surreal experience of reading a book that spoke to me literally, in a familiar but nearly-forgotten voice calling to me across the chasm of half a lifetime. And I had the chance to answer back.

If you’ve been reading book reviews or watching PBS
PBS
lately, you might have heard about Mark Ellison, a master carpenter who specializes in high-end interior renovation projects of astonishing difficulty, craft and beauty. Ellison’s first book, Building: A Carpenter’s Notes on Life & the Art of Good Work (Random House, 2023), is part memoir of his experiences as a skilled laborer for the super-rich, part meditation on the craft of building physical structures in an impermanent world, and part life lessons on deriving satisfaction from one’s work. It has received good reviews in outlets including the New York Times
NYT
and the New Yorker, which had previously run a feature on Ellison.

In the book, he recounts his exploits with the candor and humor of a born raconteur, but there is more than just good storytelling at work. In a world obsessed with the “creative class,” we rarely hear from someone who actually creates physical objects or works with his hands. Ellison is as eloquent lamenting the vanishing world of professional craftsmanship as he is detailing the logistics of moving several tons of drywall up the service elevator of a prewar coop in the heat of summer.

His voice rings with the authenticity of someone accustomed to being underestimated. It is satisfying because we the readers share in his delight in proving the doubters wrong, whether that is a self-important architect with no practical knowledge, or a condo board that takes a dim view of grubby construction workers stomping around the building. Part of that underdog attitude comes from Ellison’s unusual path to the top of his trade. His parents were academics and professionals, and he was offered, but rejected, a smoother path to success through elite schools and the social connections they afforded. One gets the impression that the problem is not that he was not good enough for them, but they were not good enough for him.

“It’s easy to fritter away something that’s handed to you,” said Ellison in a phone interview over the summer. “To get good at something, you have to value it, to really want it, need it, hunger for it. I was damned if I was gonna let anybody tell me how to live my life and they never did. My parents thought I’d wind up dead under a bridge or something. That’s what they figured.”

Ellison has a curious mind, a musician’s ear, and an engineer’s eye for problem-solving. This is someone who would have been good at a lot of things; he is ridiculously good at building things because that is what called out to him, and he chose to listen. In his career, he has built impossible staircases, elegant dens paneled in the wood of nearly extinct trees, Chinese puzzle-box apartments full of hidden panels and elaborate electronics, and other projects that would leave most builders and engineers howling in despair.

His earliest work, however, includes a lesser creation, one that you won’t necessarily read about in his book unless you know what to look for. That would be me.

I don’t mean that literally. My parents were the principal contractors on that particular project. Mark just came in later, at a particularly pivotal moment, to fit the structure with a couple of brass accessories that have proven exceedingly useful and durable.

In 1982, when I was 15 years old, for reasons I still can’t fully explain, I chose to go on an 8-week canoe trip in the rugged wilderness of northern Ontario. The camp assigned 19- and 20-year old trip leaders to shepherd a gender-mixed group of 14- and 15-year old soft city kids like myself through rivers and lakes so far from human settlement that we needed to be resupplied by seaplane. These days, it is probably a violation of child welfare laws to even contemplate sending a young person to such a place, but back then, my folks just shrugged and said, “fine, whatever gets you out of the house.”

Like a lot of 15 year olds, I was starting to pull together the ingredients of the person I was to become, but I didn’t have the recipe. Hell, I couldn’t even find the kitchen. I knew I was skeptical of authority and disdainful of status markers. I had things to say and some rudimentary skills at expressing myself. But I didn’t fit in, and didn’t feel comfortable with the available options for non-conformity.

The trip leader that summer was a brash 20 year-old named Mark Ellison. Even then, he was curious, creative, confident, and completely indifferent to what anyone else thought. He taught us various wilderness survival skills, showed us how to sharpen a buck knife and build a fire and carry a canoe for long distances. At night, he’d play guitar around the campfire, belting out his favorite tunes and ones he’d written himself, in a rough and ragged voice, encouraging us all to sing along. When we stopped in town, he picked up a crate of Molson beer and handed them out to us as if it were the most natural thing in the world. This was the first bottle of beer that I had not had to sneak from my parents’ refrigerator, and few beers since have tasted as sweet.

At one point, one of the girls in our group broke her ankle on a hike. Mark and one of the campers paddled 16 miles back to a service road, where they somehow talked some French Canadian truckers into reporting it to the authorities. A seaplane came to pick her up before they made it back, and a potential disaster became just another colorful anecdote.

I didn’t have an older brother or any male role model close to my age, and at this crucial time in my life, I got to go through a fundamentally formative experience watching someone like that at close range, handling the ongoing crisis and drama of that trip with a competence that seemed effortless. Until I had encountered Mark, it had not occurred to me that it was possible to make a life (or certainly a living) by following the call of your own interests wherever they might lead, developing your skills without regard to the expectations of others, or achieve some measure of likeability by being yourself instead of what people wanted you to be. After that summer, it never again occurred to me to do or be anything else.

I had not thought much about Mark in the 40 years since that summer. The intervening years took us in different directions, and I didn’t see or hear from him again. But then in early June, a friend of mine posted a review of Building on Goodreads, and instantly, I knew that, although the author’s name was not uncommon, it had to be the same guy.

Reading the book was a profound experience. The author, looking back at his 60 years, had drawn the same lessons in his own life that he had imparted, without conscious intention, to me on that trip so many summers ago, long before he could have known what life held in store for him. He even recounted his own version of the events of that summer toward the end of his narrative, in a way that gave me chills.

It rarely occurred to me exactly how important that experience, and his contributions to it, fundamentally shaped my career path and character. But having read Building, as I look back on my own decisions about whether to embrace or reject the advantages of a privileged education, take a salary and conventional job or take the path of an independent, occasionally entrepreneurial professional, and be governed – or not – by the opinions of others, I find it more than coincidental that my choices and Mark’s ended up pointing in similar directions.

When I finished the last page, I felt the overwhelming urge to reconnect, but also some fear of reaching out at random. Fortunately, because I write about media, entertainment and books professionally, I was able to set up an interview through his publicist for a story about the book, without mentioning the connection. It was quickly confirmed as a matter of routine. Though I have interviewed a lot of well-known and accomplished people, this particular conversation filled me with a mix of anxiety and excitement.

Eventually, the time came. I fired up Zoom and I found myself staring at a face now on the other side of middle age from those days in the early 1980s, but still possessed of the same easy manner and confidence.

We began with the usual kinds of topics. Mark opened up about the frustrations and satisfactions that he documents in the book, as well as his unorthodox path to becoming a published author. His voice and manner had been seasoned over the decades, but he had the same gruff confidence I remembered. “After I was profiled in the New Yorker, a literary agent contacted me out of the blue while I was at work,” he explained. “She said she liked the article and wanted to know if I would be interested in writing a book. I mean honestly, I was like, ‘Lady, I’m so busy!’ I’ve never written anything. I didn’t graduate from high school because I didn’t write my term paper for history and writing had always been a chore.”

But, it turned out to be too good an opportunity to pass by, and once he put his mind to it, the stories just started flowing. “It’s very intentional that the book is written as short digestible stories one by one that all kind of contain little nuggets of how I found my way through the world through all these years. And I enjoyed that.”

Finally, the point came in the conversation when I mentioned, as casually as I could manage, that we had met before.

His eyes narrowed and I could see the wheels turning. I didn’t expect him to remember me in particular; I was not memorable, even in a small group.

“Your name seems familiar,” he said. “But I can’t place it.”

“Summer of 1982, northern Ontario,” I volunteered. His face lit up like someone had opened the blinds on a sunny afternoon. What must have been, to him, another tedious but necessary press availability turned instantly into something else, and the whole tone of our conversation changed. He asked about my life and the directions it took. I gave him the short version, since I was supposed to be interviewing him, but leaned into the aspects that, in retrospect, felt inspired by that summer.

“It’s really fascinating to me,” he said as he thought over what I’d told him. “You took away from that experience the whole essence of what I’m trying to say. One of the reasons I wrote the book was to encourage people to go their own way, think their own thoughts. It’s like, fuck everybody that’s thinks they have something to tell you, some way you’re supposed to follow, unless you choose to.”

Perhaps realizing he had a sympathetic audience, his stories became more personal and candid.

“My mom laughed her head off when she found out I sold a book. And my dad, he’s an academic, he’s into publishing. We have a strained relationship to some extent, so when one of his friends told him he’d read the profile of me in the New Yorker, he was like, ‘how could this be possible? My idiot son who never did anything anybody actually told him to!’ It surprised the shit out of him, it really did, because there’s no place in his mind for him to put his son Mark Ellison and the word ‘author.’”

I asked if there was anything he would tell the 20-year old young man I first met back in Canada. “I’d tell him it’s gonna work out, no matter who doubts you or tells you you can’t do it. It’s going to be 30, 40 years of chasing it, but at the end of it all, you can tell them ‘I told you so!’”

It was a sentiment I could deeply appreciate.

One of the bittersweet aspects of Building is when Ellison muses that so many of the painstaking construction projects he created in his career are destined to be temporary: unsentimentally discarded when a new occupant takes over the space or a new trend blows through the world of interior design. Fortunately, not all of the things we create in this world are made of brick and stone, and sometimes the things we build, without even trying, can last a lifetime.