A TOUGH PAST
Memoir recounts writer’s harsh upbringing
You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me: A Memoir Sherman Alexie Little Brown Sherman Alexie has developed an exemplary career as a writer. His latest is You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me: A Memoir, 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 Grade 6. “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-wrote the script for Smoke Signals, a movie based on one of his stories. The British magazine Granta listed him among the best of young U.S. novelists.
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.
He transferred to a school where most students were white, and from there to university, where 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 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 his memoir, he recalls remarks his friends thought were kind, but that 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.”
Alexie’s memoirs are oddly shaped, with 142 numbered chapters. Some are poems, some are brief stories. Others are longish accounts of people failing 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 long 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 coveted quilts. The endpapers of You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me 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.” 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. “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.