You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me: A Memoir by Sherman Alexie (Epub)

Description

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.

User’s Reviews

Amazon.com Review An Amazon Best Book of June 2017: Sherman Alexie’s memoir, You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me, is an extraordinary look at the complicated relationship between a remarkable mother and an equally remarkable son, set, mostly, in the Spokane Indian Reservation where Alexie spent his childhood. His whip-smart, sometimes cruel mother saved the family when she stopped drinking, but was inexplicably tough on her kids – something Alexie traces back to mental illness, sexual assault, and the Indian experience of violence and oppression. Family memoirs often seem like an opportunity for score settling, but Alexie is so aware of his own fallible memory and his own imperfections that this one won’t make you bristle. His style is idiosyncratic – passages of verse lead to passages of prose — but it’s readable, unpretentious, funny and deeply compassionate. –Sarah Harrison Smith, The Amazon Book Review –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Reviews from Amazon users, collected at the time the book is getting published on UniedVRG. It can be related to shiping or paper quality instead of the book content:

⭐ I’m rarely at a loss for words in reviews. I don’t review frequently, but always review passionately, and “passion” usually comes easily for me. But though I feel as passionately about this book as I’ve ever felt about any other, my words have failed me anyway. I want, so much, to describe the way this book made me feel, but nothing I can even think to say seems adequate. I admit that I went to bed early, and then set an alarm to read this book. I’ve read none of the author’s other work, but with my own father in poor health, and a past between us I’ve never come to grips with, this memoir seemed to speak to me directly. I expected it to be personal, and it was…But in none of the ways I thought it would be.The blurp on this book says it’s about families, love, loss, and forgiveness, and it is about those things. Certainly. But what it didn’t say was that it would be a book that would challenge everything I think I know of white privilege, or that it would sweep me away into a world I didn’t know existed. Or that I would discover, that for all I care about equality, diversity, and tolerance, I still know so little about those who aren’t like me. This IS a book about families, love, loss, and forgiveness. But it’s also a book that taught me about who I am, and who I’m not, and who I want to become.And who I want to become, is someone who is not blind and ignorant to the injustice and suffering of those around me, no matter what shape that happens to take.I know this review is small and pathetic. It expresses nothing of what I feel, when what I feel is so large and all-consuming. But at least I can say that no book has moved me this much since I read the one written by the mother of one of the Columbine shooters.

⭐ Until this book, I’d only read Alexie’s THE LONE RANGE AND TONTO FISTFIGHT IN HEAVEN and heard him speak at an authors’ panel. I knew that he was something of a gadfly, in that he is unabashedly Native yet contemporary. I wasn’t prepared for how astonishing and powerful this memoir is–reading it was like reading a book I’ve been waiting for my entire life. Yes, it is long, and lumpy, and idiosyncratic. Alexie’s poetry may not be the most artful or poetically-traditional. But the candor and honesty on display in these pages feels like more than a person stripping himself and his life bare. It felt like watching him do surgery on himself without anaesthesia. Brave and bold, Alexie’s achievement is both personal and individual, but it feels like a vision quest a warrior undertakes on behalf of the entire tribe–in this case, us.

⭐ This book is raw and edgy.This book is compassionate and gentle.This book is sarcastic and funny.This book is sober and candid and take-your-breath-away, break-your-heart honest.This book is a “Native American” memoir.This book is not a “Native American” memoir.This book has much love and only a little lust.This book has much anger, only a little hate, but enough animosity to fill a few buckets.This book will make you laugh.This book will make you cry. And if it doesn’t… my heart will grieve for you, too.This book is filled with words that tell stories and make poems and repeat the stories only this time with an all new spin, all new heartache.This book is Sherman Alexie at his absolute best, his most broken… his strongest self.

⭐ Sherman Alexie’s massive memoir YOU DON’T HAVE TO SAY YOU LOVE ME is a book I will not soon forget. I also find it difficult to describe. If I had to sum the book up in two words, I would say it is brutally honest. At the center of the memoir is Mr. Alexie’s mother Lillian. Although they loved each other, it seemed never enough. (The author went for almost three years without speaking to his mother, but he cannot remember why.) He was not with his mother when she died and didn’t want to be although he had said his farewell to her earlier and told her he loved her. Mr. Alexie’s mother could at times be cruel to him and his sister and brother. She, however, may have been more sinned against than sinning. (Toward the end of the memoir he reveals two horrible events in both Lillian’s life as well as her mother’s that may have explained some of her cruelty.) In sharp contrast is Alexie’s feelings toward his alcoholic father who would be gone for days at a time but always love his son unconditionally.The author’s childhood living conditions were stark. In the first chapter of his sprawling memoir he describes the HUD house his family moved into in the early 1970’s. His comments later in the book: “I tend to believe in government because it was the U. S. government that. . . built the HUD home that kept us warm. . . Of course the government only gave me all that good s—t because they completely f—d over my great grandparents and grandparents but, you know, at least some official white folks keep some of their promises.”Mr. Alexie was also plagued by childhood illnesses. He was a hydrocephalic kid who had epileptic seizures until he was seven and had brain surgery twice by the time he was two. He also suffers from bipolar disorder. When the author was twelve, he asked his parents for permission to leave the Spokane Indian Reservation and go to school in Reardan, Washington because he wanted to go to college and become a pediatrician. His parents agreed to his leaving. “I think they knew I would never return, not in body or spirit, but they loved me too much to make me stay.” Mr. Alexie describes Indian reservations as being created “by white men to serve as rural concentration camps” and thinks “that’s still their primary purpose.”While the author is quick to call our whites for the injustices they have perpetrated on his people, he also points out all the problems in the reservations as well: the rapes, the bullying (he was a victim), and the alcoholism. Mr. Alexie also condemns the “strange Indian racism of my Native Americans” who over his twenty-five year literary career have fought to destroy his career and cannot believe that a reservation-raised boy could become the man he is.Mr. Alexie bloomed in his new school surroundings. The only Indian in school, he was elected class president. Now he wonders how many of his friends from high school voted for Trump since in the county where the school is located , he got 72% of the vote. He asks if his Reardan school friends remember how much they loved him and if they know how much they may have placed him “a public figure brown-skinned liberal, in danger.” Mr. Alexie concludes that in order to survive, he had to leave the tribe of his birth but also had to flee his other place of birth, “from all those white folks” at Reardan who became another tribe for him. And Mr. Alexie reminds the reader that his books are not taught in his high school because they are ”’inappropriate for the targeted audience.’”For the long and winding road the author takes his reader down—his successful literary career, his love for his wife and sons– he returns again and again to his mother who often fed her family by making and selling quilts and who often cared for other people but unfortunately not enough for her children. In a strange way Mr. Alexie honors his mother by writing this memoir. He has made her still live. When I finished this often troubling but always intense book, I wished I had known Lillian. But I have the next best thing—Mr. Alexie’s memories of her.

⭐ Sherman Alexie is a storyteller who uses his words to send the reader on a journey through the strains of a dysfunctional relationship and how that relationship weaved through both the destruction of a youth and the construction of a man, a project that is in progress. He sews images into the fabric of the indigenous people who are tucked away, put away, and out of the way on a .reservation near Spokane, WA. He reveals the 20th century lives, not as some mystical avatars, but as a people who have internalized the beratement and scorn of their conquerors, treating themselves in a harshness that is as raw as the winters which visits the land. The book does not invite pity or sympathy, but only acts as a reveal, showing the emotional life which serve as the backdrop for the life altering decisions of the writer and the decision to accept and to love.

⭐ I’ve been a fan of Sherman Alexie’s for about 10 years now so its nice to finally be able to get a peek into who he really is. The book doesn’t read like a linear biography, but the chapters skip around a to various life memories, poems, and short stories. He doesn’t try to make himself look good in his stories but instead tells his true thoughts and feelings so at times I found myself being disappointed and not liking him very much. However, he also shows us his endearing, and vulnerable side too so I guess it all balances out.Of course, his mother Lillian is center stage in his book and his memories describe a love/ hate relationship that many readers can probably relate to. Our Mothers are one of the few people in our lives who are with us from the very beginning, to the moment when one of us dies so they create a major part of our identities and personalities. They can hold your mind hostage and cause you a lot of grief but they can also destroy your soul when they pass away.I wouldn’t say this is a happily ever after memoir but I greatly enjoyed it and even though he made me mad at times, and some stories shared way too much information, I still love Sherman Alexie and will read whatever he writes in the future.

⭐ I have loved Sherman Alexie’s writing for a long time. It has seemed so familiar and it has always carried me along a path that gives me insight into my own life. But this book is even more intensely personal. I started it about the time I heard he stopped his book tour last June, but didn’t finish it until having time for a deep dive into it over New Years. The only other book I can compare this to is Paula by Isabele Allende. Alexie’s book is deeper, more honest, uncomfortable, comforting, revealing than any of his previous books. In the end, I found myself praying for Sherman and his family, listening to the music of John Boyd, looking up other people mentioned in the book, and hoping that he and his family are well. Going through this felt like examining every seam, pattern, and stich of his life quilt until finally, we are with his wife, examining the scars on his back. In the light, they are less terrifying than Sherman imagined.His mind and perspective has always been different, but his recent surgery seems to have opened up more to him. He has always revealed, in a humorous, self-deprecating way, the pain and often unexpected joys of his childhood – but this book takes us there. There were so many times I wished I could just talk with him or Diane, even though I don’t know them personally. I’m certain they are grateful that doesn’t happen!Opening up the wounds to the air to heal and sharing that in writing took a real personal power and a warrior spirit. I could go on – it will be painful for many young Native Americans and others to read some of this book, but, in the end, we all want to heal and it was an honor that he shared this profound work with us. It is a treasure. The only way to heal these, and our own, old wounds is to expose them to sunlight. But even if we want some thing to be done now, we have to be patient because some things take time.

⭐ A stunning memoir that grabbed me from page one and left me wondering where I was a few hours later, on p. 170. Anyone who has ever struggled with a parent will learn from this book. The writing is superb; several times I felt like Faulkner was part of this quilt. This won’t be the last time I read this book- it’s one I expect to revisit throughout my life and certainly when my mom dies.

⭐ Very disjointed writing style. The poems intermixed with the chapters was pointless and arrogant, he’s not a poet, not even close. This could have easily been edited down 100 pages or more, just repeats himself chapter after chapter. The relationship he has with his mother isn’t that enlightening either, lots of anger, unsaid feelings and unresolved issues. If this wasn’t on a rez, would it even get published?

⭐ I first came across Sherman Alexie’s work in grad school, as a fellow writing student was also American Indian and introduced me to his work. Later he emerged again when one of his short stories from the book The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist Fight in Heaven was made into the wonderful movie Smoke Signals by a good friend.I had him in my mind as a bit idealized and very successful and while attached to his native American past, he seemed more set in his life in these times. This brave book reminded me that we never leave our past, because it shapes all that we become and delivers all that we must overcome. I don’t know that many others, in all times, could have written a memoir as vivid as this, in all directions. Alxie’s memory of himself is baldly honest–life on the reservation, the difficult efforts to leave, his physical, mental and family challenges, and more than all of this, his complicated mother for whom the book is named. How did he have the courage and clarity to share the truths that he experienced with himself, much less with anyone who opens the book? It’s a feat.This book drew me in completely, taught me so much that I did not know, took me to another place, and asked me to feel what a life I never experienced felt like for this brave, honest and talented writer. I hope his future offers all that he has worked for and deserves.

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