Fear was my gateway to becoming interested in stories. My nanny growing up, a Scottish expat named Jackie with a fox pelt of red hair and a manic...
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Knitter4d, January 2, 2013 (view all comments by Knitter4d)
Beautifully written memoir which is both a portrait of Russo's mother and an acknowledgement of the ties and burdens parents have on children throughout their lives.
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diane howard, January 2, 2013 (view all comments by diane howard)
Like all of Mr. Russo's work, his strong voice spoke to me from beginning to end. While his fiction is amusing, wry, and highly able to be pictured by the reader, this book is all of this and more. Being a memoir, he managed to craft a narrative that did all the amusing, and charming the reader, as well as, for this reader, evoking a very good cry especially from about mid-book to the end. How he makes the real pain of his life somehow entertaining to read is beyond this would-be author. My empathy was pulled out of me on every page it seemed. While it resonated with my long and painful issues with my own mother, this narrative brilliance could not fail to touch any reader. This beautiful writer has never let me down. (Also do read his collection called "Interventions" , such classics and beautifully packaged.
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Product details
256 pages
Knopf Publishing Group -
English9780307959539
Reviews:
"Publishers Weekly Review"
by Publishers Weekly,
"The Gloversville, N.Y., native and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist (Empire Falls) fashions a gracious memoir about his tenacious mother, a fiercely independent GE employee who nonetheless relied on her only son to manage her long life. Separated from her gambler husband, Russo's mother, Jean, resolved that she and her son were a 'team,' occupying the top floor of Russo's grandparents' modest house in a once-thriving factory town where 'nine out of ten dress gloves in the United States were manufactured,' the author notes proudly. Yet its heyday had long passed, cheap-made goods had invaded, and the town by the late 1960s was depressed and hollowed out; Russo's intrepid, if erratic mother encouraged Russo to break out of the 'dimwitted ethos of the ugly little mill town' and attend college at the University of Arizona, in Tucson. Except she came, too, on a hilariously delineated road trip in the 1960 Ford Galaxie Russo purchased and nicknamed the Gray Death. Despite the promise of a new job and new life, however, Jean was never content; many years later when Russo and his wife and increasing family moved from Tucson back to the East Coast as his job as an English professor and writer dictated, his mother had to be resettled nearby, too, in a long era of what Russo eventually saw as enabling her obsessive-compulsive disorder. Russo's memoir is heavy on logistical detail — people moving around, houses packed and unpacked — and by turns rueful and funny, emotionally opaque and narratively rich." Publishers Weekly Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
"Review"
by Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air,
"A gorgeously nuanced memoir about Russo's mother and his own lifelong tour of duty spent — lovingly and exhaustedly — looking out for her....Russo is the Bruce Springsteen of novelists...in a paragraph or even a phrase, he can summon up a whole world, and the world he writes most poignantly about is that of the industrial white working class."
"Review"
by Amy Finnerty, The Wall Street Journal,
"Moving and darkly funny...Russo mines grace from his gritty hometown [and] the greatest charm of this memoir lies in the absences of self-pity and pretension in his take on his own history."
"Review"
by Tricia Springstubb, Cleveland Plain Dealer,
"Heartfelt and generous."
"Review"
by Michael Schaub, NPR.org,
"One of the most honest, moving American memoirs in years....Russo's straightforward writing style is even more effective in Elsewhere [and his] intellectual and emotional honesty are remarkable."
"Review"
by Kevin Canfield, Minneapolis Star Tribune,
"Rich and layered...an honest book about a universal subject: those familial bonds that only get trickier with time."
"Review"
by Nicholas Mancusi, The Daily Beast,
"Russo conjures the incredible bond between single mother and only child in a way that makes his story particularly powerful."
"Review"
by Joanne Wilkinson, Booklist,
"Russo brings the same clear-eyed humanism that marks his fiction to this by turns funny and moving portrait of his mother and her never-ending quest to escape the provincial confines of their hometown."
"Review"
by Kirkus,
"An affecting yet never saccharine glimpse of the relationship among place, family and fiction."
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