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fbroom's review against another edition
It is heart-breaking in a way. This book revolves around his mother, her extreme behavior and how it affected his life. It is about their relationship over decades.
It is difficult to rate this book. I liked it and in fact I finished it in less than 3 days but I don't know if I loved it only because it is sad.
--------------- Spoilers / notes ----------------
- His grandmother has to sell the house for her medicare later in life which was sad and so real
- His grandpa had difficult jobs and lived through the depression era
- Richard couldn’t have his mother live with him in the same house and she had to live in an apartment by herself alone and he felt guilty about it but at the same time he couldn’t have her over for so long otherwise she’ll drive them nuts
- Richard’s mom wanted to live a happy life but couldn’t
- Richard’s daughter was diagnosed with OCD and when Richard started reading about it, he realized how his mom had the same disease all her life but no one had realized that. This made him feel guilty but at the same time it was understood that as a child, whatever you’re born into is considered normal to you and it’s very hard to see the difference
It is difficult to rate this book. I liked it and in fact I finished it in less than 3 days but I don't know if I loved it only because it is sad.
--------------- Spoilers / notes ----------------
- His grandmother has to sell the house for her medicare later in life which was sad and so real
- His grandpa had difficult jobs and lived through the depression era
- Richard couldn’t have his mother live with him in the same house and she had to live in an apartment by herself alone and he felt guilty about it but at the same time he couldn’t have her over for so long otherwise she’ll drive them nuts
- Richard’s mom wanted to live a happy life but couldn’t
- Richard’s daughter was diagnosed with OCD and when Richard started reading about it, he realized how his mom had the same disease all her life but no one had realized that. This made him feel guilty but at the same time it was understood that as a child, whatever you’re born into is considered normal to you and it’s very hard to see the difference
shannonw19's review against another edition
5.0
i adore his writing. and he tells a complicated fascinating story about growing up with a single mom whose mental illness shades her entire life
sparklethenpop's review against another edition
4.0
I have to agree with some reviewers that I felt a little mislead thinking it would be more about his life and growing up in Gloversville based on the cover descriptions. However that being said, although it was a very sad story, it was so well written. Richard Russo is still one of the best authors out there in my opinion.
cseibs's review against another edition
3.0
With a willful, but ailing grandmother, I found this book to be enlightening and comforting. I think Russo does a good job of communicating the angst of playing caretaker. It felt a little uneven and seemed to focus too little on Russo's own actions (which perhaps was a product of the overarching relationship with his mother). I also found it strange that Russo didn't consider his mother's mental illness until she had passed. Were all the warning signs described in the book the result if hindsight?
meghan111's review against another edition
3.0
Russo's memoir of his relationship with his difficult, mentally ill mother. A portrait of her unhappy life riddled with anxiety, in which she depended on her son, moving with him when he left for college and relocating to be near him again and again.
themadmadmadeline's review against another edition
3.0
Painful at parts, but extremely enlightening as to why Richard Russo is the way he is, and why he writes the way he does. I'm a big Russo fan (Empire Falls in particular) and in reading this memoir, it became very apparent that Russo writes about what he knows. Growing up in a small New England working class town set the stage for Empire Falls, and now it all makes sense.
Highly recommended for a Russo fan- an interesting account of the background of one of America's greatest modern fiction novelists.
Highly recommended for a Russo fan- an interesting account of the background of one of America's greatest modern fiction novelists.
arielml's review against another edition
4.0
A loving, bittersweet, starkly honest portrayal of Richard Russo's life with his mother. Proves that one of my favorite fiction writers can do nonfiction justice, too.
terrimarshall's review against another edition
5.0
This was a great memoir about the author’s mother and their unique relationship. She was a piece of work and was completely dependent on him, and at the end of the book he opines that he thought in hindsight she maybe had OCD. Russo is a great writer, and I loved his memoir.
crazy_mr_earl's review against another edition
2.0
What do I think? Well, I think that those who write book blurbs need to rein in their hyperboles...one said it was darkly funny. Maybe. Another said it was hilarious. Definitely not. It is a somewhat intriguing memoir, if only because it is so average. Everyone comes from somewhere, and this is where Russo comes from. I think he is a brilliant novelist. The take away from the memoir is that a novelist can come from anywhere...and that the somewhere the author comes from often informs their writing. Other than that, I felt like this was intensely personal introspection about the relationship...something best suited for his diary and not for public consumption. I love him even more that I know some of this stuff, but I did not love the book.
stevienlcf's review against another edition
4.0
I have long been a fan of Russo’s fiction; having read his memoir, I am a fan of the man (and would nominate his wife for sainthood). Russo was raised by his divorced mother, Jean, in a bleak upstate New York town that had been a thriving manufacturing hub until men stopped wearing hats and women stopped wearing dress gloves. The place was so depressed that by 1967, when Russo graduated from high school, "you could have strafed Main Street with an automatic weapon without endangering a soul.” Russo and Jean lived in a modest house with his maternal grandparents, but Jean valued few things more than her perceived independence. Despite the fact that she couldn’t drive and depended heavily on her family for financial support “because any surprise could push us into the red,” she ferociously defended her independence. Her seeming ingratitude caused her beloved father to remark, “Whoever said beggars can’t be choosers never met your mother.”
Despite what the family referred to as Jean’s “condition,” she was a devoted mother, insuring that her son had a freshly laundered school uniform even if it meant staying up past midnight doing laundry, skipping dinners to meet with his teachers “to make sure I wasn’t just learning in school but flourishing, that I wasn’t being dismissed as an irrelevant, fatherless boy,” and instilling that “reading was not a duty but a reward.” Yet, although he was cared for, Russo felt that he was the cause of Jean’s “condition” and that her “health was in my hands.” Perhaps that is why it didn’t seem so extraordinary to Russo that when he was accepted into a college in Tuscon, Arizona, he and his mother decamped together from their decaying industrial town in a dubious vehicle known as the Gray Death. As Russo explains it, “One of the sadder truths of childhood is that children . . . are unlikely to know if something is abnormal or unnatural unless an adult tells them.” And he, being an only child, had no one to compare notes with.
Jean’s insistence that she was independent while becoming more and more dependent was a pattern that spiraled through her life with increasing intensity and fury. After a brief second marriage to a man who looked like Sam Shepherd and several failed returns to her parents’ home in Gloversville, Jean called Russo to ask “how long any human was expected to live in a cage.” As Russo straddled the life of a husband, the father of two college age daughters, a professor and an accomplished writer, he and his wife became increasingly more responsible for Jean, privately joking that they never went anywhere for longer than it took Jean’s milk bottle to turn sour. Russo ruminates that responsibility and guilt explained his willingness to jeopardize his marriage and, as the decades unspooled and his mother’s condition worsened, to refuse to acknowledge the primacy of other loyalties.
After Jean’s death, Russo comes to believe that his mother suffered from OCD. He recognized that her ongoing unhappiness was a symptom of her illness, and that the same genetic traits that bedeviled her he was able to parlay into a rich and satisfying career. He muses how her one claim to fame was getting him away from the “shambling, self-satisfied, uncouth, monumentally stupid people” of their hometown; yet, likes his characters in his fictional towns, Russo has never left: “I simply created Gloversvilles in my imagination.”
Despite what the family referred to as Jean’s “condition,” she was a devoted mother, insuring that her son had a freshly laundered school uniform even if it meant staying up past midnight doing laundry, skipping dinners to meet with his teachers “to make sure I wasn’t just learning in school but flourishing, that I wasn’t being dismissed as an irrelevant, fatherless boy,” and instilling that “reading was not a duty but a reward.” Yet, although he was cared for, Russo felt that he was the cause of Jean’s “condition” and that her “health was in my hands.” Perhaps that is why it didn’t seem so extraordinary to Russo that when he was accepted into a college in Tuscon, Arizona, he and his mother decamped together from their decaying industrial town in a dubious vehicle known as the Gray Death. As Russo explains it, “One of the sadder truths of childhood is that children . . . are unlikely to know if something is abnormal or unnatural unless an adult tells them.” And he, being an only child, had no one to compare notes with.
Jean’s insistence that she was independent while becoming more and more dependent was a pattern that spiraled through her life with increasing intensity and fury. After a brief second marriage to a man who looked like Sam Shepherd and several failed returns to her parents’ home in Gloversville, Jean called Russo to ask “how long any human was expected to live in a cage.” As Russo straddled the life of a husband, the father of two college age daughters, a professor and an accomplished writer, he and his wife became increasingly more responsible for Jean, privately joking that they never went anywhere for longer than it took Jean’s milk bottle to turn sour. Russo ruminates that responsibility and guilt explained his willingness to jeopardize his marriage and, as the decades unspooled and his mother’s condition worsened, to refuse to acknowledge the primacy of other loyalties.
After Jean’s death, Russo comes to believe that his mother suffered from OCD. He recognized that her ongoing unhappiness was a symptom of her illness, and that the same genetic traits that bedeviled her he was able to parlay into a rich and satisfying career. He muses how her one claim to fame was getting him away from the “shambling, self-satisfied, uncouth, monumentally stupid people” of their hometown; yet, likes his characters in his fictional towns, Russo has never left: “I simply created Gloversvilles in my imagination.”