You Don't Have to Say You Love Me

April 3, 2017
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.

Starred review from May 1, 2017
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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

January 1, 2017

Honored for his punch-in-the-gut writing with PEN awards and a National Book Award medal for The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Alexie coped with his mother's death at age 78 by writing a raw memoir comprising 78 poems and 78 essays. With a 100,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from April 15, 2017

When Alexie's mother passed away in 2015, his grief was complicated by memories of a difficult childhood. His family struggled with poverty, mental illness, and alcoholism, and his mother was both protector and antagonist. This latest account is an honest, wrenching, and incredibly moving story about all aspects of life. The story is deeply personal--as if National Book Award winner Alexie (The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian) needed to write it in order to untangle and understand his feelings about his mother and the lasting pain of her death. Presented as a series of vignettes, some in prose, others in poetry, about Alexie's life and family, the narrative transitions between styles, which feels natural as Alexie searches for the best way to present complex memories and stories. Readers familiar with the author's other works, such as Reservation Blues, will recognize many details about his childhood on the Spokane Indian Reservation. VERDICT Highly recommended for all readers. Alexie's portrayals of family relationships, identity, and grief have the universality of great literature.--Nicholas Graham, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 15, 2017

When Alexie's mother passed away in 2015, his grief was complicated by memories of a difficult childhood. His family struggled with poverty, mental illness, and alcoholism, and his mother was both protector and antagonist. This latest account is an honest, wrenching, and incredibly moving story about all aspects of life. The story is deeply personal--as if National Book Award winner Alexie (The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian) needed to write it in order to untangle and understand his feelings about his mother and the lasting pain of her death. Presented as a series of vignettes, some in prose, others in poetry, about Alexie's life and family, the narrative transitions between styles, which feels natural as Alexie searches for the best way to present complex memories and stories. Readers familiar with the author's other works, such as Reservation Blues, will recognize many details about his childhood on the Spokane Indian Reservation. VERDICT Highly recommended for all readers. Alexie's portrayals of family relationships, identity, and grief have the universality of great literature.--Nicholas Graham, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.