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218 reviews for:
Philomena (Movie Tie-In): A Mother, Her Son, and a Fifty-Year Search
Martin Sixsmith
3.49 AVERAGE
218 reviews for:
Philomena (Movie Tie-In): A Mother, Her Son, and a Fifty-Year Search
Martin Sixsmith
3.49 AVERAGE
First of all, I am really disappointed to know that the title of the book has been changed after the movie has been released . The book is not about Philomenta, but actually about the son of Philomena, Antony Lee/Michael Hess.
It is a sad story, starting with Philomena sent to Roscrea Abbey, one of the "Magdalene laundries" which became sadly famous in the past years for treating the unmarried mothers into some sort of slavery and selling their babies, forcing the mothers to sign the papers, to US families who would pay a lot of money to take the kids.
Anthony is taken to the US by pure chance, together with Mary, a baby slightly younger than him, with whom he becomes close in the first years at the Convent.
Obviously no psychological support is given to the mothers or the kids who are suddenly put into strangers arms and taken away from their real mother. Anthony and Mary fly to the US with a perfect stranger who has barely come of age and start their new life into a family which already has three grown up children, just for some kind of whim of Marge, the step-mother, who wanted a baby girl but considered herself too old to have one.
Anthony and Mary get close one to each other, as the family never seemed to accept them (except Marge, who was anyway under the influence of Doc, her husband). Doc, the step-father, calls them "that babies of yours", the two eldest boys ignored them and the third one get jealous, especially of Anthony (now called Michael).
It's sad to see how Michael, always in search of approval from his father, grows up with a particular form of insecurity and, having the step parents always hidden the truth about the mothers in Roscrea, with the inner thought that his mother abandoned him because he was no good, so he wouldn't deserve good things.
This takes Michael spoiling his relationships,making him totally depressed at times and putting himself in dangerous and troublesome situations.
Struggling to know who he really is, he finds himself being homosexual in one of the cruelest and worst times of all for gay people, carrying on his career and becoming the key man in the Republican Party which stands against homosexual rights, he also witnesses with concern the discovery and spreading of terrible AIDS.
When Marge dies, Michael considers Mary his only link with the family, closes any contact with his father and brothers and goes on with his new beloved partner trying to live a normal life, never ceasing to try finding his own mother, while life has saved something else for him.
This book, the real life of Michael, made me sad. He could have been happy, but looks like he never was. i don't have any pity for the nuns that sold him together with many other children. They never regretted doing it, they only thought about saving their own reputation when hard times for the laundries eventually came. They where so misleading that lied until the end to Michael when he just wanted to know the truth. I guess they event thought they did something good for these children. While Michael probably wouldn't have been the Republican Party Chief Counsel, he could have had an easier existence.
It is a sad story, starting with Philomena sent to Roscrea Abbey, one of the "Magdalene laundries" which became sadly famous in the past years for treating the unmarried mothers into some sort of slavery and selling their babies, forcing the mothers to sign the papers, to US families who would pay a lot of money to take the kids.
Anthony is taken to the US by pure chance, together with Mary, a baby slightly younger than him, with whom he becomes close in the first years at the Convent.
Obviously no psychological support is given to the mothers or the kids who are suddenly put into strangers arms and taken away from their real mother. Anthony and Mary fly to the US with a perfect stranger who has barely come of age and start their new life into a family which already has three grown up children, just for some kind of whim of Marge, the step-mother, who wanted a baby girl but considered herself too old to have one.
Anthony and Mary get close one to each other, as the family never seemed to accept them (except Marge, who was anyway under the influence of Doc, her husband). Doc, the step-father, calls them "that babies of yours", the two eldest boys ignored them and the third one get jealous, especially of Anthony (now called Michael).
It's sad to see how Michael, always in search of approval from his father, grows up with a particular form of insecurity and, having the step parents always hidden the truth about the mothers in Roscrea, with the inner thought that his mother abandoned him because he was no good, so he wouldn't deserve good things.
This takes Michael spoiling his relationships,making him totally depressed at times and putting himself in dangerous and troublesome situations.
Struggling to know who he really is, he finds himself being homosexual in one of the cruelest and worst times of all for gay people, carrying on his career and becoming the key man in the Republican Party which stands against homosexual rights, he also witnesses with concern the discovery and spreading of terrible AIDS.
When Marge dies, Michael considers Mary his only link with the family, closes any contact with his father and brothers and goes on with his new beloved partner trying to live a normal life, never ceasing to try finding his own mother, while life has saved something else for him.
This book, the real life of Michael, made me sad. He could have been happy, but looks like he never was. i don't have any pity for the nuns that sold him together with many other children. They never regretted doing it, they only thought about saving their own reputation when hard times for the laundries eventually came. They where so misleading that lied until the end to Michael when he just wanted to know the truth. I guess they event thought they did something good for these children. While Michael probably wouldn't have been the Republican Party Chief Counsel, he could have had an easier existence.
3.5 stars.
The first part included perspectives of some people who weren't really important in the long run and didn't add anything to the narrative and I almost gave up on the book because of this.
However, reading about Philomena's time at the abbey was captivating and once Michael's story began in earnest I really liked learning about his life and enjoyed the book much more. It's very different from the movie, but still an interesting read.
The first part included perspectives of some people who weren't really important in the long run and didn't add anything to the narrative and I almost gave up on the book because of this.
However, reading about Philomena's time at the abbey was captivating and once Michael's story began in earnest I really liked learning about his life and enjoyed the book much more. It's very different from the movie, but still an interesting read.
It's an interesting story, but Sixsmith's writing style is simply awful.
2 thoughts
1 = how can people, especially religious people, ever justify the cruelty they knowingly inflicted on these mothers and their babies?!? Unfathomable.
2 = I hate it when there are photos in books and the captions give away major plot points/twists/events that the story hasn't got to yet :-(
1 = how can people, especially religious people, ever justify the cruelty they knowingly inflicted on these mothers and their babies?!? Unfathomable.
2 = I hate it when there are photos in books and the captions give away major plot points/twists/events that the story hasn't got to yet :-(
I thought this was a good book telling a very sad story. I only gave it 3 stars because of two major problems I had with it. One was the misleading title. We have a glimpse into Philomena's life early on, but for 3/4 of the book we follow her son's life. I don't have a problem with that and I'd been told this book was told from his point of view; but if you're looking for his mother's story, I think you're better off watching the film instead.
The other star it lost was for the fact that I find the recounting of events and situations difficult to buy into. Although I'm sure the essence of the story is all there, I find it impossible to believe that the conversations could've been remembered and retold, word by word, in the way they were written for this book. I wouldn't have expected so much detailed dialogue to feature in the retelling of a true story which started taking place well over half a century ago.
Having said that, I still think it was worth the time I took to listen to it and would recommend it to other people.
The other star it lost was for the fact that I find the recounting of events and situations difficult to buy into. Although I'm sure the essence of the story is all there, I find it impossible to believe that the conversations could've been remembered and retold, word by word, in the way they were written for this book. I wouldn't have expected so much detailed dialogue to feature in the retelling of a true story which started taking place well over half a century ago.
Having said that, I still think it was worth the time I took to listen to it and would recommend it to other people.
View this review on my blog to see photos and video: http://mariesbookgarden.blogspot.com/2014/11/the-lost-child-of-philomena-lee.html
With the success of the movie "Philomena," this book was reissued as Philomena with a cover showing Dame Judi Dench and Steve Coogan, the actors who play Philomena Lee and Martin Sexsmith in the film. The book, which came first, is not really about Philomena. It's about her son Anthony, known as Michael Hess in the United States.
Although I found the book to be mostly fascinating, it is decidedly not nonfiction. As a fictionalized account of Michael Hess' life, British journalist Sixsmith took extreme liberties with the story...inventing dialogue and fabricating scenes that didn't actually happen. I looked in the back to see his sources, but no interviews, letters, or other paperwork were cited. We know he interviewed people, but one of his key sources, Susan Kavanaugh, has said that he made up a lot of what's in the book and painted Michael's character in an unflattering way. How could Sixsmith have known what Michael said confidentially to his therapist and priest in confession? He should have stated at the outset that this was a fictionalized account of Hess' life.
With that said, I found Michael's story to be moving and interesting. I learned a great deal about the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, the inner workings of the Republican party during Reagan's tenure, and the Irish Catholic church. I already knew about the Magdalene laundries and found the beginning of the book to be fascinating and heartbreaking, as Philomena Lee's beloved son is ripped away from her...and she was powerless to prevent it. I saw the film "The Magdalene Sisters" back in 2003 and know the Joni Mitchell song well.
The Catholic church has never taken responsibility for these abuses, and staunch Catholic defenders either defend the practices or deny that any abuses took place. In fact, young women and girls (such as Sinead O'Connor) were enslaved in these Catholic-run prisons until 1996.
In my research, I was glad to discover that Philomena Lee met Pope Francis recently, giving her a sense of closure:
"I felt such a sense of relief yesterday for the guilt I carried and that I still carry a little bit today," said Lee on Thursday, a day after the audience. "Because you were made to feel so, so bad about having a baby out of wedlock. "He really made me feel so good inside because I carried the guilt inside me for 50 years, without telling anybody."
However, the Catholic church has yet to issue an apology or validate the abuses suffered in its name.
Back to the book. One quibble I had, echoed by Michael's friend Susan Kavanaugh, is the author's near-obsession with Michael's sexual practices. He is portrayed as a sex-obsessed, promiscuous. and thrill-seeking gay man who is incapable of staying faithful to his partners. That might be true, but we have no way of knowing where he got his information. It's almost as if he's implying that Michael contracted AIDS because of his sexual behavior. He also infers that Michael is never satisfied and cannot make a commitment because he is tortured by being abandoned by his mother. That seems to underline every single activity in Michael's life...that he didn't deserve to be happy. In spite of this, Michael led a highly successful career (as a closeted gay man and supposed Democrat) in the Republican party and the White House. That must have been enough torture for him--as he heard all sorts of homophobia, hatred, and AIDS jokes from the party itself and the religious right. One Goodreads reviewers put it well:
"Having stuck this very bad book through to the end, I really would have liked to understand Michael/Anthony's true character but perhaps only glimpses of that can be extrapolated from Sixsmith's words. He portrayed Michael on the one hand to be generous, witty, fun loving, brilliant, sensitive and on the other to be moody, self destructive, dangerous and insensitive. Completely misleading and contradictory. If a writer can't truly get to the heart of someone's character, then do bereaved friends and family still living a courtesy and don't write about character at all. If Sixsmith had focused on Philomena's quest rather than trying to fabricate a dead man's personality, he would have been more in his element."
Finally, Sixsmith's writing was choppy and didn't flow together well. In a few early chapters, we learn about a civil servant who is trying to stop the tide of Irish babies being sent to the USA to be adopted...Sixsmith alludes to his man's unhappy marriage as well, but to what point? He drops out of the story. We also never hear about Michael's relationship with his brothers later in life...one of them mercilessly bullied him as a young child. We know he doesn't include them in his will, but that's about it. Sixsmith also wrote a couple of chapters in first person as he described how he wrote the book--this totally threw me off and confused me until I figured out who was speaking. These chapters would have been better put in an introduction.
I would have liked to have known more about Michael's sister Mary in her later years. She is mentioned a few times and comes to see Michael at the end of his life. Given the fact that she was the most important person in Michael's life--and she is still alive--why didn't we get more of her story? I can find little about her on the Internet.
Philomena herself doesn't come into the book again until the very end, which was a loss. I'm not sure why Sixsmith chose to portray the life of a man who had died...instead of the mother who was alive. Maybe so he could take literary license with the facts? Who knows?
I was annoyed by the ending, in which Sixsmith mentions Anthony/Michael's father...he alludes to the fact that his father might have been discovered, but says that is a topic for another book. What the hell? That is definitely not enough for another book. Why not share the information in this book??
Both Michael and Philomena stalled in their efforts to find each other. The Catholic church and the Irish government were not helpful. In fact, if the book is correct, Philomena found out about her son when her daughter Jane spied a photo of a new gravestone on the convent grounds. That small lead led to this story.
I give the real Philomena Lee and Michael Hess, both fascinating characters with interesting lives, five stars. The book gets two or three, because the story was compelling...but loses a lot in the telling.
With the success of the movie "Philomena," this book was reissued as Philomena with a cover showing Dame Judi Dench and Steve Coogan, the actors who play Philomena Lee and Martin Sexsmith in the film. The book, which came first, is not really about Philomena. It's about her son Anthony, known as Michael Hess in the United States.
Although I found the book to be mostly fascinating, it is decidedly not nonfiction. As a fictionalized account of Michael Hess' life, British journalist Sixsmith took extreme liberties with the story...inventing dialogue and fabricating scenes that didn't actually happen. I looked in the back to see his sources, but no interviews, letters, or other paperwork were cited. We know he interviewed people, but one of his key sources, Susan Kavanaugh, has said that he made up a lot of what's in the book and painted Michael's character in an unflattering way. How could Sixsmith have known what Michael said confidentially to his therapist and priest in confession? He should have stated at the outset that this was a fictionalized account of Hess' life.
With that said, I found Michael's story to be moving and interesting. I learned a great deal about the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, the inner workings of the Republican party during Reagan's tenure, and the Irish Catholic church. I already knew about the Magdalene laundries and found the beginning of the book to be fascinating and heartbreaking, as Philomena Lee's beloved son is ripped away from her...and she was powerless to prevent it. I saw the film "The Magdalene Sisters" back in 2003 and know the Joni Mitchell song well.
The Catholic church has never taken responsibility for these abuses, and staunch Catholic defenders either defend the practices or deny that any abuses took place. In fact, young women and girls (such as Sinead O'Connor) were enslaved in these Catholic-run prisons until 1996.
In my research, I was glad to discover that Philomena Lee met Pope Francis recently, giving her a sense of closure:
"I felt such a sense of relief yesterday for the guilt I carried and that I still carry a little bit today," said Lee on Thursday, a day after the audience. "Because you were made to feel so, so bad about having a baby out of wedlock. "He really made me feel so good inside because I carried the guilt inside me for 50 years, without telling anybody."
However, the Catholic church has yet to issue an apology or validate the abuses suffered in its name.
Back to the book. One quibble I had, echoed by Michael's friend Susan Kavanaugh, is the author's near-obsession with Michael's sexual practices. He is portrayed as a sex-obsessed, promiscuous. and thrill-seeking gay man who is incapable of staying faithful to his partners. That might be true, but we have no way of knowing where he got his information. It's almost as if he's implying that Michael contracted AIDS because of his sexual behavior. He also infers that Michael is never satisfied and cannot make a commitment because he is tortured by being abandoned by his mother. That seems to underline every single activity in Michael's life...that he didn't deserve to be happy. In spite of this, Michael led a highly successful career (as a closeted gay man and supposed Democrat) in the Republican party and the White House. That must have been enough torture for him--as he heard all sorts of homophobia, hatred, and AIDS jokes from the party itself and the religious right. One Goodreads reviewers put it well:
"Having stuck this very bad book through to the end, I really would have liked to understand Michael/Anthony's true character but perhaps only glimpses of that can be extrapolated from Sixsmith's words. He portrayed Michael on the one hand to be generous, witty, fun loving, brilliant, sensitive and on the other to be moody, self destructive, dangerous and insensitive. Completely misleading and contradictory. If a writer can't truly get to the heart of someone's character, then do bereaved friends and family still living a courtesy and don't write about character at all. If Sixsmith had focused on Philomena's quest rather than trying to fabricate a dead man's personality, he would have been more in his element."
Finally, Sixsmith's writing was choppy and didn't flow together well. In a few early chapters, we learn about a civil servant who is trying to stop the tide of Irish babies being sent to the USA to be adopted...Sixsmith alludes to his man's unhappy marriage as well, but to what point? He drops out of the story. We also never hear about Michael's relationship with his brothers later in life...one of them mercilessly bullied him as a young child. We know he doesn't include them in his will, but that's about it. Sixsmith also wrote a couple of chapters in first person as he described how he wrote the book--this totally threw me off and confused me until I figured out who was speaking. These chapters would have been better put in an introduction.
I would have liked to have known more about Michael's sister Mary in her later years. She is mentioned a few times and comes to see Michael at the end of his life. Given the fact that she was the most important person in Michael's life--and she is still alive--why didn't we get more of her story? I can find little about her on the Internet.
Philomena herself doesn't come into the book again until the very end, which was a loss. I'm not sure why Sixsmith chose to portray the life of a man who had died...instead of the mother who was alive. Maybe so he could take literary license with the facts? Who knows?
I was annoyed by the ending, in which Sixsmith mentions Anthony/Michael's father...he alludes to the fact that his father might have been discovered, but says that is a topic for another book. What the hell? That is definitely not enough for another book. Why not share the information in this book??
Both Michael and Philomena stalled in their efforts to find each other. The Catholic church and the Irish government were not helpful. In fact, if the book is correct, Philomena found out about her son when her daughter Jane spied a photo of a new gravestone on the convent grounds. That small lead led to this story.
I give the real Philomena Lee and Michael Hess, both fascinating characters with interesting lives, five stars. The book gets two or three, because the story was compelling...but loses a lot in the telling.
Thought-provoking, heartbreaking story, written with a keen insight into the motivations, desires, and situations of the people involved. I read this in a marathon over a weekend, pausing to Google every so often. So I've read the background and some criticism of the work, the Wikipedia entries, and several articles and thought pieces. It seems to me that perhaps there were several truths, and the remaining loose threads were woven together by the author in as reasonable and plausible an effort as any other heavily researched he'd biography. It is frankly unfair to downgrade the work because a publisher decided to rename it after the movie. It is a story of mother and son, but it also a story of tempers and attitudes and patriarchal control, and the many ways this manifested in the twentieth century.
***SPOILERS BELOW***
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And it is a story of the personal and public issues that swirled in America during the early days of the AIDS crisis. In my opinion, for this alone it is a valuable historical work.
***SPOILERS BELOW***
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
And it is a story of the personal and public issues that swirled in America during the early days of the AIDS crisis. In my opinion, for this alone it is a valuable historical work.
Loved it. Better than movie (of course!) and movie was Oscar nominee. Heartbreaking and wonderful.
I enjoyed this book, but I find it interesting that it’s called “Philomena” when most of it centers on her son, Michael. I would have liked to hear more about Philomena’s life, in addition to Michael’s.
For me this book was disappointing and the title and synopsis is very misleading. I found that 99% of the book was a creative rendition of Anthony Lee/Michael Hess's life. His search for his mother, acceptance, praise, love, coming to terms with his sexuality, his adoption, abandonment, himself and where he fit in the scheme of his life. Only the last chapter and epilogue dealt with Philomena Lee. Though there were great insights into the inter workings of DC and the political world at this time.