Book: You Don't Have To Say You Love Me

Sherman Alexie's memoir of his dysfunctional relationship with his late mother has been getting a lot of press locally.  I heard an interview with him last week on NPR which brought me to tears.  His other works have all been very well written so I'm anxious to see where this one goes.

Why do writers all seem to think that the public is interested in reading about their personal problems - the same problems that countless people have? There is nothing unique about their problems. Fuck 'em.

It's not the stories, it's the telling.

Sherman Alexie wrote:

When people consider the meaning of genocide, they might only think of corpses being pushed into mass graves.

But a person can be genocided -- can have every connection to his past severed -- and live to be an old man whose rib cage is a haunted house built around his heart.

The book has occasional gems but it's way too long for what it is.  A lot of poems.  I'm not very fond of poems. And these aren't good poems either.

I skimmed the last half of the book, skipping over the poems completely. The book is a meditation, a quilt, with a lot of intentional repetition and circular story-telling.

Feels very improvised, almost hallucinatory. "Tossed off" even.

Not one of his best.

Sold it on Amazon.

Used the money to buy his big hit, the young adult novel "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian" which is mostly autobiographical.  It intersected at almost every point with the true stories he told in "You Don't Have To Say You Love Me" about his mother and growing up on the reservation.  In the novel he made himself a cartoonist instead of a writer, and added some made-up characters to his life (or composite characters).

If I hadn't already read the story, it would've had more impact.

He considers himself a part-time Indian because at 15 he started attending a white school 22 miles off the reservation, because they had better academics and a better basketball program.  He was considered a traitor by some tribe members, but lauded for his ambition by others.  Too many Indians live and die within yards of where they were born, and never endeavor to make a mark outside their communities.  Alexie has become one of the most famous Native Americans alive -- by telling tales of how he escaped the rez.