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Summary
Summary
A searing, deeply moving memoir about family, love, loss, and forgiveness from the critically acclaimed, bestselling National Book Award-winning author of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian .
Family relationships are never simple. But Sherman Alexie's bond with his mother Lillian was more complex than most. She plunged her family into chaos with a drinking habit, but shed her addiction when it was on the brink of costing her everything. She survived a violent past, but created an elaborate facade to hide the truth. She selflessly cared for strangers, but was often incapable of showering her children with the affection that they so desperately craved. She wanted a better life for her son, but it was only by leaving her behind that he could hope to achieve it. It's these contradictions that made Lillian Alexie a beautiful, mercurial, abusive, intelligent, complicated, and very human woman.
When she passed away, the incongruities that defined his mother shook Sherman and his remembrance of her. Grappling with the haunting ghosts of the past in the wake of loss, he responded the only way he knew how: he wrote. The result is a stunning memoir filled with raw, angry, funny, profane, tender memories of a childhood few can imagine, much less survive. An unflinching and unforgettable remembrance, You Don't Have to Say You Love Me is a powerful, deeply felt account of a complicated relationship.
Author Notes
Sherman J. Alexie Jr. was born on October 7, 1966. His mother was Spokane Indian and his father was Coeur d'Alene Indian. Alexie grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Wellpinit, Washington. He decided to attend high school off the reservation where he knew he would get a better education. He was the only Indian at the school, and excelled academically as well as in sports. After high school, he attended Gonzaga University for two years before transferring to Washington State University, where he graduated with a degree in American studies. He received the Washington State Arts Commission Poetry Fellowship in 1991 and the National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship in 1992.
His collections of poetry included The Business of Fancydancing, First Indian on the Moon, The Summer of Black Widows, One Stick Song, and Face. His first collection of short stories, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, received a PEN/Hemingway Award for Best First Book of Fiction and a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award. His other short story collections included The Toughest Indian in the World, Ten Little Indians, and War Dances. His first novel, Reservation Blues, received the Before Columbus Foundation's American Book Award and the Murray Morgan Prize. His other novels included Indian Killer, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, and Flight. He won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction in 2018 for You Don't Have to Say You Love Me: A Memoir.
Alexie and Jim Boyd, a Colville Indian, collaborated on the album Reservation Blues, which contains the songs from the book of the same name. In 1997, Alexie collaborated with Chris Eyre, a Cheyenne/Arapaho Indian, on a film project inspired by Alexie's work, This is What it Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona, from the short story collection The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. Smoke Signals debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in January 1998, winning two awards: the Audience Award and the Filmmakers Trophy. In 1999 the film received a Christopher Award.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Intense but unspoken feeling suffuses the bittersweet relationship between a mother and her son in this poignant, conflicted, raucous memoir of a Native American family. Novelist and poet Alexie (The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian) remembers his complicated mother, Lillian, who kept the family together despite dire poverty on the Spokane Reservation but had a contentious relationship with her son featuring bitter fights and years-long silent treatments. He sets their story against a rich account of their close-knit but floridly dysfunctional family and a reservation community rife with joblessness, alcoholism and drug abuse, fatal car crashes, violence, rape and child molestation, murder, and a general sense of being excluded from and besieged by white society. Alexie treats this sometimes bleak material with a graceful touch, never shying away from deep emotions but also sharing wry humor and a warm regard for Native culture and spirituality. The text is rambling, digressive, and sometimes baggy, with dozens of his poems sprinkled in; it wanders among limpid, conversational prose, bawdy comic turns, and lyrical, incantatory verse. This is a fine homage to the vexed process of growing up that vividly conveys how family roots continue to bind even after they seem to have been severed. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
Humour and anger combine in this story of the Native American experience Sherman Alexie has emerged as one of the USs greatest writers. And because he has always written of the terrible beauty of Native American life with an honesty and humour that makes white people uncomfortable, his work has been deemed controversial. Alexies young adult novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, has appeared near the top of annual US banned books lists. Each year, new challenges arise to his thinly veiled autobiography of his years growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation in eastern Washington state. In addition to his fiction, Alexie is also well known for his poetry. All told, he has written 26 books, and he wrote and co-produced the film Smoke Signals. You Dont Have to Say You Love Me is his long-awaited memoir. In it, he focuses much of the story on one particular year the year in which his irascible mother, Lillian, died, but also the one in which he underwent brain surgery to remove a large tumour. Those who are familiar with his novels will relish the true-life stories behind some of his fiction; those who arent will find that his writing provides a powerful alternative to the stock figures of the mythological wild west the brave cowboy and the stoic, noble Indian. At the centre of the book, though, is his relationship with his mother, a difficult, abusive woman who could perform acts of enormous maternal sacrifice on behalf of her children at the same time as treating them shockingly badly. Alexies recounting of his mothers death differs from standard grief memoirs, most of which are accounts of love or at least move towards reconciliation. He is angry at his mother, even after her death and despite his efforts to forgive. However, although he comes to realise that the reasons for her rages were understandable and even though he is now a parent himself, Alexie still resents the impact her rage had on him and his siblings. The book is infused with laugh-out-loud humour. Some of the funniest moments are his writings about basketball, the game he made the centre of the drama of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. He also writes about the variation of the game of exchanging insults, the dozens, that Indians play among themselves, especially when wrestling over whose suffering has been worse. Other moments are more typical: that first phone call from the deceaseds phone, for example: On the morning of her funeral, my phone rang. The Caller ID announced it was MOM. For a moment, I believed it was her calling from the afterlife so I pondered what I would say. And I decided I would go with, Hey, Lillian, gotta say Im impressed with your resurrection, but is it a Jesus thing or a zombie fling? It turns out, of course, that its his sister caling him from his mothers house. Alexies mother was Spokane while his father was a member of the Coeur dAlene tribe. Both his parents were born into a world where the creature on which their tribes were reliant, and about which their holy stories were told, was the salmon the magnificent fish whose five-year life cycle is the stuff of legend. Alexie writes about the salmons journey with characteristic wit. I pointed out to an audience of 800 that salmon go on their epic journey from ocean into the insane mouths of rivers and up those rivers against the currents, over dams, dodging bears and fisherman and a lot of those fishermen are Indians by the way and then through and over and around trees and rocks and pollution and garbage swimming hundreds, even thousands of miles in order to fuck. Alexies audience doesnt find his crudeness all that funny, but he is correct: the salmons mythic journey is driven by the need to reproduce. Salmon, I said, are the most epic fuckers in the animal kingdom. I have never forgotten sitting on rocks next to the shore of the Stillaguamish River, where the water was only a few inches deep at the edges. The water roared and tumbled over boulders in the centre of the river, but in the shallows I watched dozens of Coho salmon in their death throes after they had fulfilled their journeys. But on the Columbia River the series of dams created barriers that even the most motivated salmon were unable to pass. The Grand Coulee Dam was constructed in the 1930s. The Interior Salish, my people, had worshipped the wild salmon since our beginnings, Alexie writes. That sacred fish had been our primary source of physical and spiritual sustenance for thousands of years. But over the course of five years following the dams construction, the salmon vanished. My mother and father were members of the first generation of Interior Salish people who lived entirely without wild salmon. My mother and father, without wild salmon, were spiritual orphans. The loss of the salmon was just one of the great injustices in his parents lives. Alexies father drank himself to death, but his mother stopped drinking when Alexie was a boy. She made her living by making and selling quilts. Alexie recounts a time when, after the lights had been turned off because she couldnt pay the electricity bill, his mother sewed in the dark non-stop until she had made a quilt that would earn enough to get the power turned back on. And while she did such things, he also recounts the night when, responding to his 10-year-old anger, she threw a full can of soda at him, hit him on the forehead and knocked him unconscious. And then left him there to sleep it off without seeking medical attention. And yet, even as he writes about incidents such as this, he reflects on his mothers life, and begins a new poem for her: I want to reverse this earth And give birth to my mother Because I do not believe That she was ever adored. I want to mother the mother Who often did not mother me. I was mothered and adored By mothers not my own, And learned how to be adoring By being adored. Mothers and sons. Sons and mothers. Alexies memoir of his relationship with Lillian reflects the complicated love that many of us have for our parents. It is his gift to us, through his willingness to be honest without being vengeful, that those of us who have felt shut out of the grief memoirs in which parents and children had perfect relationships can read these pages and weep. - Lorraine Berry.
Kirkus Review
The story of the popular Native American author's difficult upbringing.Alexie (Blasphemy: New and Selected Stories, 2012, etc.) won the National Book Award for his semiautobiographical young-adult novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007). Readers of that book will recognize some of those stories in this hardscrabble memoir about growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Wellpinit, Washington. In 142 chapters that combine poetry and prose, he goes back and forth in time as he riffs on his early years and his often verbally cruel and emotionally unpredictable mother and the conflicted relationship they had. In the early 1970s, Alexie's parents and six children moved into a one-bedroom reservation house that lacked indoor plumbing or electricity. Later they moved to a "shoddily constructed" HUD house. Both parents were alcoholics; his mother quit drinking a few years later. Born hydrocephalic, Alexie had brain surgery at 5 months and again when he was 2. He suffered epileptic seizures until he was 7. Four soft burr holes in his skull remain, as well as a "Frankenstein mess of head scars." He had "epically crooked teeth" and would "stutter and lisp." He was constantly ridiculed. Always poor, his mother quilted to make money. His father did odd jobs, spent time in jail, and had numerous car accidents when drunk. When Alexie was 17, his father disappeared on a drinking binge. After seven days, he had to go look for him: "It was a family rule." On the reservation, "violence is a clock, / ordinary and relentless. Even stopped, it doesn't stop." Alexie is related to "men who hit women, and to men and women who hit children." Written in his familiar breezy, conversational, and aphoristic style, the book makes even the darkest personal experiences uplifting and bearable with the author's wit, sarcasm, and humor. Despite some repetition, this is a powerful, brutally honest memoir about a mother and the son who loved her. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Alexie is a consummate, unnerving, and funny storyteller, no matter what form his tales take. From his 13 poetry collections, including What I've Stolen, What I've Earned (2014), to his many works of fiction, among them the children's book, Thunder Boy Jr. (2016), and Blasphemy: New and Selected Stories (2012), Alexie's writings are veined with autobiography and Native American life and history. He now presents his first all-out memoir, a profoundly candid union of prose and poetry catalyzed by the recent death of his Spokane Indian mother, Lillian, one of the last to speak their tribal language, a legendary quilter, and a fighter to the end. Alexie's deeply delving remembrance expresses a snarl of conflicting emotions, ranging from anger to awe, and reveals many tragic dangers and traumas of reservation life, from the uranium dust generated by nearby mines, which caused Lillian's lung cancer, to the malignant legacy of genocide: identity crises, poverty, alcoholism, and violence, especially rape, in which the epically wounded . . . turned their rage on each other. Alexie chronicles his own suffering as a boy born hydrocephalic and an adult diagnosed as bipolar, and tracks his flight from the rez and his life as a writer, pouring himself into every molten word. Courageous, anguished, grateful, and hilarious, this is an enlightening and resounding eulogy and self-portrait. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Best-selling and critically acclaimed Alexie attracts diverse and avid readers, and all will be reaching for this confiding and concussive memoir.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2017 Booklist
Library Journal Review
With his uniquely sing-songy cadence, almost-chuckles, and uncontainable tears, Alexie (The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian) gives a raw, superb performance. No one else could have narrated the stories of his difficult youth, his life-saving education, his struggles between familial obligations and leaving the Spokane Indian Reservation, the losses he faced and the gains he made to become "one of the Indians with the most social power," both lauded and criticized. His mother's 2015 death prompted Alexie to examine their complicated relationship. He bares his "spectacular show of hypocrisy," admitting he "spent [his] literary career writing loving odes to my drunken and unreliable father" while bypassing his "dependable...industrious" mother. Through poems, -vignettes, memories (some his, some belonging to others), Alexie delivers a book both "healing and wounding." Alexie's -latest will resonate with substantial audiences. VERDICT As the author abruptly paused his extensive book tour to "do most of [his] grieving in private," libraries will want to be even more prepared to meet demand in multiple formats. ["Alexie's portrayals of family relationships, identity, and grief have the universality of great literature": LJ 4/15/17 starred review of the Little, Brown hc.]-Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, -Washington, DC © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.