You Don't Have to Say You Love Me ~ Ms. Richards' Reads

Citation

Alexie, Sherman. (2017). You don’t have to say you love me. New York, NY: Little, Brown and Company.

Description

The Instant New York Times Bestseller

Shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction

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.
One of the most anticipated books of 2017–Entertainment Weekly and Bustle

Autobiography

Little, Brown and Company. (n.d.). You don’t have to say you love me details. Retrieved from https://www.littlebrown.com/titles/sherman-alexie/you-dont-have-to-say-you-love-me/9780316396776/

Scholarly 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.

Publishers Weekly. (2017). You Don't Have to Say You Love Me: A Memoir. 264(14), 67. Retrieved from http://web.a.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.uky.edu/ehost/detail/detail?vid=5&sid=2e57d74d-b161-4b0a-863c-7ea1b5fe9323%40sessionmgr4006&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZSZzY29wZT1zaXRl#AN=122695834&db=a9h

My Analysis

You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me was an interesting, haunting memoir. I read this book after I read The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, and I could definitely see parallels between Arnold “Junior” Spirit’s life and Alexie Sherman’s life. Both characters suffered hardships on the reservation, and both Arnold and Alexie made the decision to attend a public high school away from the reservation. Sherman’s memoir was haunting to me because of the wonderful combination of poetry and prose as well as the descriptions of the sexual abuse, alcoholism, violence, and poverty that occured while he lived on the reservation. While Sherman’s description of his relationship with his mother was moving, it started to get repetitive, and I found myself wanting the memoir to move forward instead of staying in this cycle. On further analysis, I think this represents his relationship with his mother. It was a cycle and not a straightforward progression. Even so, I would have liked this book a bit more had it not been so repetitive. I will, however, still recommend this book to others because it is beautifully written and portrays real-world issues and themes that need to be addressed.

Tags

#ghostmother

#NativeAmericanlit

#lifeontherez

Usage

It would be interesting to hold a culture week in the library and provide students with the opportunity to be exposed to multicultural literature and diverse perspectives. You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me used in conjunction with The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian would make an interesting culture study as well as expose students to life and cultures different from their own.

Awards

None.

Censorship

None.

References

Little, Brown and Company. (n.d.). You don’t have to say you love me details. Retrieved from https://www.littlebrown.com/titles/sherman-alexie/you-dont-have-to-say-you-love-me/9780316396776/