You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me: A Memoir

Amazon.com Price: $12.55 (as of 10/11/2019 05:51 PST- Details)

Categories: , , , , , , ,

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 creator 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 once more complex than most. She plunged her family into chaos with a drinking habit, but shed her addiction when it was once on the point 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 once regularly incapable of showering her children with the affection that they so desperately craved. She wanted a better life for her son, but it was once only by leaving her at the back of 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 kicked the bucket, 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 believe, much less live on. 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

An Amazon Best Book of June 2017: Sherman Alexie’s memoir, You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me, is an bizarre 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, infrequently cruel mother saved the family when she stopped drinking, but was once inexplicably tough on her kids – something Alexie traces back to mental illness, sexual assault, and the Indian experience of violence and oppression. Family memoirs regularly 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

Related products

Home » Shop » Books » Subjects » Arts and Photography » History and Criticism » History » Americas » Native American » You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me: A Memoir

Recent Products