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T. spent the day with the sitter. A. and I hung out. I mostly read the book for book group and actually got through the whole thing. I also revisited the NPR coverage of Alexie’s intersection with #MeToo, to try to better understand what had come out already, and whether more had come out when I wasn’t looking. I also checked the status of the paperback publication date. While I was on Amazon, I skimmed some reviews as well.
_You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me_ is a crazy quilt of a book. Really. It says so. Well, not quite. What it says, in Chapter (?) 71 in the middle of the book is that it is a quilt, and then Alexie promptly distracts from the obvious type of quilt it is — a seemingly haphazard and definitely not preplanned to a geometrically pleasing design mashup of different kinds of fabric of different sizes and shapes and textures — by talking about squares and repetition.
But it is a crazy quilt of a book, and it is a crazy quilt of a book written to support the author’s family, much like Alexie’s mother made quilts to support her family. There are a lot of stories, and most of the stories point in a particular direction: the author is trying to tell you, without coming out and saying it, that he is so unreliable, that he cannot even consistently decide whether to rely on his own memories or not. The Seinfeld story is perhaps the most pointed, the closest approach to this theme or motif. Alexie remembers his wife saying something that she repeatedly says she never said and would never have done, but until they are watching a Seinfeld episode where Elaine does what he attributed to his wife, he doesn’t really believe her. And even after watching the episode, he has difficulty committing to what has just happened.
Alexie is unreliable. It is a common problem with memoir and, I increasingly believe, memoirists. As I was discussing this with my husband, he reminded me about the woman who claimed to be raised by wolves in Nazi Europe, and I pointed to the man who said he spent a lot of time in jail, and the white woman who claimed to be raised by an African-American woman. We’re not sure precisely how the white woman who claimed to be black fits into this — I didn’t read her memoir, if there was one — but unreliability of detail, of story, and of character is entirely too characteristic of memoir.
_You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me_ is obsessive in excavating why the memoirist has such difficulty separating from his mother, even after her death. It’s pretty clear that the problem is on his side. His (living) siblings don’t seem to have the kinds of problems he has, and their knowledge and understanding an insight — while difficult to get a clear view of through the myopia and cataracts of the memoirists vision — seem at least substantially greater than his. But for all the mommy issues, what really stands out in this book is how many times the memoirist projects his own petty grudge-holding onto other people.
It has been many years now that the progressive political community has understood racism to be a power dynamic, and thus racial animus directed against those _with_ power by those _without_ power is not racism. It may be race-based animus, but it isn’t a systemic deployment of power to marginalize, exploit and abuse. Because the people doing it don’t have that standing. This message is nowhere to be found in Alexie’s recounting of all the times he was subject to racist treatment by others of his own marginalized group.
I don’t think I’ll ever read anything by Alexie again. I’m moderately interested in reading at least a few books by Native women, especially ones from the PacNW. The familiarity of the terrain is a point of access for me. But I think I would also like to really avoid reading books written by people who come from a history of significant substance abuse and are still in treatment for disorders involving ability to connect with shared reality. There is a particular warping of characters and relationships, whether in fiction or in memoir, which occurs when the author is or has been a long-time abuser of alcohol or other mind-altering substances as a result of unaddressed mental health issues involving primary attachments. It is too familiar, and too banal to help me gain further insight.
There were three of us at book group. None of us much cared for the book, altho we had an interesting conversation. Two of us finished. We find it difficult to attribute malicious intent to Alexie, even reading the #MeToo coverage involving him; but we also find it pretty difficult to believe much of anything he says. He seems too shattered a personality.
#34 (I know, I haven’t posted #33 yet)
_You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me_ is a crazy quilt of a book. Really. It says so. Well, not quite. What it says, in Chapter (?) 71 in the middle of the book is that it is a quilt, and then Alexie promptly distracts from the obvious type of quilt it is — a seemingly haphazard and definitely not preplanned to a geometrically pleasing design mashup of different kinds of fabric of different sizes and shapes and textures — by talking about squares and repetition.
But it is a crazy quilt of a book, and it is a crazy quilt of a book written to support the author’s family, much like Alexie’s mother made quilts to support her family. There are a lot of stories, and most of the stories point in a particular direction: the author is trying to tell you, without coming out and saying it, that he is so unreliable, that he cannot even consistently decide whether to rely on his own memories or not. The Seinfeld story is perhaps the most pointed, the closest approach to this theme or motif. Alexie remembers his wife saying something that she repeatedly says she never said and would never have done, but until they are watching a Seinfeld episode where Elaine does what he attributed to his wife, he doesn’t really believe her. And even after watching the episode, he has difficulty committing to what has just happened.
Alexie is unreliable. It is a common problem with memoir and, I increasingly believe, memoirists. As I was discussing this with my husband, he reminded me about the woman who claimed to be raised by wolves in Nazi Europe, and I pointed to the man who said he spent a lot of time in jail, and the white woman who claimed to be raised by an African-American woman. We’re not sure precisely how the white woman who claimed to be black fits into this — I didn’t read her memoir, if there was one — but unreliability of detail, of story, and of character is entirely too characteristic of memoir.
_You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me_ is obsessive in excavating why the memoirist has such difficulty separating from his mother, even after her death. It’s pretty clear that the problem is on his side. His (living) siblings don’t seem to have the kinds of problems he has, and their knowledge and understanding an insight — while difficult to get a clear view of through the myopia and cataracts of the memoirists vision — seem at least substantially greater than his. But for all the mommy issues, what really stands out in this book is how many times the memoirist projects his own petty grudge-holding onto other people.
It has been many years now that the progressive political community has understood racism to be a power dynamic, and thus racial animus directed against those _with_ power by those _without_ power is not racism. It may be race-based animus, but it isn’t a systemic deployment of power to marginalize, exploit and abuse. Because the people doing it don’t have that standing. This message is nowhere to be found in Alexie’s recounting of all the times he was subject to racist treatment by others of his own marginalized group.
I don’t think I’ll ever read anything by Alexie again. I’m moderately interested in reading at least a few books by Native women, especially ones from the PacNW. The familiarity of the terrain is a point of access for me. But I think I would also like to really avoid reading books written by people who come from a history of significant substance abuse and are still in treatment for disorders involving ability to connect with shared reality. There is a particular warping of characters and relationships, whether in fiction or in memoir, which occurs when the author is or has been a long-time abuser of alcohol or other mind-altering substances as a result of unaddressed mental health issues involving primary attachments. It is too familiar, and too banal to help me gain further insight.
There were three of us at book group. None of us much cared for the book, altho we had an interesting conversation. Two of us finished. We find it difficult to attribute malicious intent to Alexie, even reading the #MeToo coverage involving him; but we also find it pretty difficult to believe much of anything he says. He seems too shattered a personality.
#34 (I know, I haven’t posted #33 yet)