There are few memoirs as revealing as Sherman Alexie’s.
MEMOIRS ARE SUPPOSED TO BE SURPRISING, BUT FEW ARE SO REVEALING
Sherman A lexie has developed an exemplary career as a writer. This month, he’s the author of You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me: A Memoir ( Little Brown), an often touching and sometimes funny account of his life as an American Indian and his difficult relationship with his mother.
His tone makes me want to read him, his deadpan acceptance of life’ s harshness. He writes, typically, about knowing a certain boy during sixth grade. “We never punched each other, which qualified on the reservation as close friendship.” His willingness to set down an intimate account of his experience has won him many admirers.
He writes stories for The New Yorker. He co-authored the script for Smoke Signals, a movie based on one of his stories. The British magazine Granta listed him among the Best of Young American Novelists.
His personal history leaves me breathless. He was born in 1966 to a poor family on the Spokane tribal reservation in the state of Washington. At one point, his parents and the six children moved into a one-bedroom house without indoor plumbing or electricity.
At birth he had hydrocephalus, which causes fluid to swell the brain. He had brain surgery at six months and was not expected to survive. He had seizures for seven years and many visits to the hospital. With little else to do, he spent much of his childhood reading.
In the reservation school, he opened a math book and found his mother’s name written in it. “I was looking at a 30- year- old math book!” he recalls. This was the moment when he realized he needed to change schools. The one on the reservation couldn’t prepare him for further education. It couldn’t even discuss that possibility.
He persuaded his parents to let him transfer to Reardan High School, 32 kilometres away, where most students were white. He went from there to Gonzaga University, then to Washington State University. In college, he began writing but also began drinking heavily. In 1990, his work appeared in a magazine called Hanging Loose. That inspired him so much that he quit drinking and has since stayed sober.
He’s always plotted his career. He studied scores of young adult novels before he wrote The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, which won the National Book Award for young people’s fiction. “The most dedicated readers in the country are teenagers,” he said. “If a 15- year- old doesn’t want to read me, what good am I?” In that book, the narrator leaves his reservation high school for an all-white public one.
Alexie describes his own suc- cess among the whites, academic as well as social: “I was successful and acceptable and loved.” But his schoolmates valued whatever in him could be separated from his race. In his new book, he recalls remarks that his new friends thought were kindly and he considered condescending or even racist. He remembers someone saying, “Sherman, I don’t think of you as Indian, I think of you as a person.” He had to embrace the white world while white friends rarely spent even a moment inside “my indigenous world.” He wanted them to understand that he’s “the genetic, artistic and political descendant of my mother and father and thousands of years of salmon-fishing ancestors.”
On that point he offers a historical note: “After the Grand Coulee Dam murdered our wild salmon, we stopped being Spokane Indians. Our identity has been clarified for us. We are the Unsalmon People.” Or, he adds, the Un, for short.
Alexie’s memoirs are oddly shaped, with 142 numbered chapters. Some are poems, some are brief stories. Others are longish accounts of people fail- ing each other. The main character is the author’s mother, Lillian Alexie, verbally cruel, emotionally unpredictable. Sherman and Lillian angered each other so much that for three l ong years they didn’t speak, even if they were in the same room. Yet Sherman can’t remember the original cause of this epic silence.
Both parents were alcoholics but Lillian stopped drinking when Sherman’s father became a hopeless drunk. She emerged as the breadwinner, making lovely and highly salable quilts. The endpapers of You Don’t Have to Say are reproductions of the quilt Lillian made as a wedding present to Sherman and his wife, Diane. When his mother died in 2005, Alexie sat down and wrote 100 poems. “Grief makes you obsessive,” he says.
Grief continued to affect his dreams. “I assumed I’d be freed from my mother and her endless accusations, falsehoods, exaggerations and deceptions. But I was mistaken. My mother continues to scare me.” He doesn’t believe in ghosts, though he sees them. “My mother kept appearing in my vision. I’d see her in the supermarket. I’d be trying to find which apples I wanted, and my mom would be looking at me, judging my apple- picking ability.” However much she annoyed him, he speaks of her now as a great, complicated human being.
In retrospect, he thinks he didn’t do enough to reconcile, to talk about their lives. “As much as this book reveals how complicated and difficult and terrible my mother could be, it also reveals how difficult and complicated and terrible I can be.”
Memoirs are expected to be surprising, but few manage to be as revealing as this one.
OUR IDENTITY HAS BEEN CLARIFIED FOR US. WE ARE THE UNSALMON PEOPLE.