By the time he was in fifth grade at Hillcrest School, Steven Church stood taller than most of his teachers.

“As a kid, I was kind of freakishly huge,” he recalls. “I was 5 foot 7 and weighed 160 pounds. So for a 10-year-old I felt pretty freakish.”

That feeling followed Church through childhood, haunting him in moments of doubt and insecurity.

But there was one thing — one softbound, illustrated, fantastic thing — that never strayed far from his clutches and always made him feel more like a superhero than an oversized kid.

That thing was the 1980 edition of the “Guinness Book of World Records.”

Inside its gleaming yellow cover lay page after page of venerated outcasts. One had 23-inch-long fingernails that curved into bony twists. Another ate an 11-foot-tall birch sapling — leaves, branches, trunk and all — in just less than four days. Yet another jumped for 80 consecutive hours on a pogo stick.

And Church saw a little bit of himself in each one of them.

“In ‘Guinness’ I found people who had become heroes and freaks both by accident and intention, and I could tell that nobody really knew what to make of them either,” he writes in “The Guinness Book of Me,” a memoir of his boyhood in Lawrence told through the prism of excerpts from the iconic compendium.

Church introduces himself in the book’s opening pages as a youngster during an episode of borderline frenzy: The Book Fair has come to Hillcrest and it’s taking every bit of restraint he can muster to keep from charging to the front of the line and snatching his copy of the latest edition of the Guinness Book. Though he admits the contents don’t change much from one year to the next, his copies are all “tattered and dog-eared from overuse.”

Steven Church, pictured here in 1976, spent his boyhood in Lawrence, where some of his fondest memories centered around experiences with his brother and father. His fascination with the Guinness

A few years ago, Church’s father (Ed Church, of Lawrence) sent him a box of items he left behind when he went to college, and those well-worn books were inside. So Church, who has a master’s degree in fiction writing from Colorado State University, began using Guinness entries as prompts for writing exercises, imagining lives for people like the world’s lightest human and the world’s most perfectly developed man. Before long, the exercises had turned into long stories filled with recollections of his childhood.

“When I kind of hit on the idea to use the Guinness as an organizing principle and started talking about it more, I could tell by talking to people that it was going to be interesting,” says Church, who now lives in Fort Collins, Colo., with his wife, Rachel, and their 3-year-old son, Malcolm.

“When I would talk about it at parties or with friends, people were always like, ‘Oh yeah, I remember the fingernail guy, too. Everybody always has these pretty strong connections and memories to the Guinness Books.”

Fathers, sons and brothers

But Church’s memoir stands on more than a clever premise. At its heart, it’s a story of fathers, sons and brothers: their adventures, their mistakes, their pain, their losses.

A Guinness entry about Billy and Benny McCreary, the world’s heaviest twins, leads Church to thoughts of his own younger brother, Matt, who Church always admired for his fearlessness. When Matt is killed in a car accident, Church segues from facts about the world’s largest underground lake to an eloquent musing about a subterranean sea populated by dead heroes and loved ones.

Audio: Steven Church reads the opening chapter of his new book, “The Guinness Book of Me.”

In a chapter titled “Knives, Sharpest” — built around the Guinness record for the penknife with the greatest number of blades — Church recalls his father giving him his first knife when he is just 5 years old. All is well until a neighborhood kid corners Church during a game of tag. Church pulls the knife from his pocket, jabbing it toward the boy, who runs “crying and blabbing” to Church’s mom.

Later that night, Ed Church visits his son’s room and asks him to devise his own punishment.

“I think I should have to throw my knife into Clinton Lake,” Steven replies. His choked-up father concedes.

Lawrence native and Author Stephen Church always admired his younger brother Matt, pictured here in 1976, for his fearlessness. Matt was killed in a car accident while attending Purdue University.

“A few days later we drove out to the lake and parked on the dam,” Church writes. “We walked out onto the giant concrete spillway platform and stood there bawling our eyes out, the both of us. Dad and me. Father and son. Both of us guilty, Dad for giving me the knife in the first place, and me for ignoring his lessons and threatening my best friend.”

Ed Church, who lives in Lawrence and works at a RD Johnson Excavating, remembers the day well.

“It was an awful thing to have to go through,” he says. “If you give kids a choice, they’ll always pick worse punishments than you can imagine.”

Vulnerable spot

Although this is his first book, Steven Church’s short stories have been nominated three times for the prestigious Pushcart Prize. He’s working on another memoir that deals with the personal and cultural legacy of the post-apocalyptic made-for-TV movie “The Day After,” which was filmed in Lawrence in 1982. He’s also writing a novel based on hypothetical dilemmas in contemporary ethical theory, inspired by the grueling hours he spent as an undergraduate philosophy major at KU.

Born in 1971, Church grew up in a house on Stratford Road, just east of Iowa Street near the Kansas University campus. After Hillcrest, he attended West Junior High and graduated from Lawrence High School in 1990. He spent hours at the Natural History Museum and the Lawrence Public Library.

Church says he tried writing fictional stories based on memories from his childhood, but they all seemed artificial. So he made himself and his family the characters, putting them all in a sensitive position.

“One of the risks and also one of the benefits of writing nonfiction is there’s more of an investment of myself in the book, and I think more of an investment by the readers in me,” Church says. “I’m not pretending that this is an autobiographical novel; this is about my life. And that’s exciting, but it’s also kind of scary, too.”

Rose Marino, for one, appreciates Church’s candidness. Marino is Church’s mother-in-law. She and her husband make a brief appearance in the book during a section in which Church describes eating dinner at their home and feeling like a “shipwrecked Gulliver” among his wife’s diminutive and decidedly anti-Guinness family.

“It really let me see Steve in a little different light,” says Marino, associate general counsel at Kansas University. “If you know someone who wrote a book, even though it’s not strictly autobiographical, you kind of understand that person through a different lens.

“They’ve had to be pretty vulnerable in writing a book that discloses so much about their inner feelings and how they looked at experiences.”