Legacy of love, anger for mother

“Did she love me?” Sherman Alexie asks about his mother in his memoir of their complicated and conflictual relationship.

“When I gather up all the available evidence, I have to say, ‘Yes, Lillian Alexie loved Sherman Alexie Jr.’ But I can only render that verdict with reasonable doubts.”

In “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me,” Alexie serves as both prosecutor of and defense counsel for Lillian. He also takes turns as judge ruling on the admissibility of evidence. Early on, he highlights both his mother’s and his impeachability as witnesses: both known storytellers, both having bipolar disorder, both formerly active alcoholics.

Writer, poet, filmmaker and performer, Alexie is best known for his classic “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian,” which won the National Book Award for young people’s literature in 2007. His new memoir mixes short prose chapters with related poems. In both modes, he’s compulsively readable, a literary writer with the guts of a stand-up comedian.

He grew up in brutal poverty on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Washington state. Lillian was a Spokane, the writer’s father a member of the Coeur d’Alene.

He credits Lillian with saving his life twice: once in 1973, when she stopped drinking and made the family home “relatively safe,” and in 1979, when she and Sherman’s father gave him permission to go to the white high school in town.

Yet they fought bitterly — he recounts in literary slo-mo the time (he claims) she fired a can of Pepsi at his fragile post-surgical head. At one point, they did not speak for a three-year period, even when they were at the same events.

After she dies, he mourns her, complicatedly, seeing her ghost everywhere and questioning what he did and didn’t do for her.

In piecing together his mother’s history from the stories she told him and his siblings (and more than once he refers to her as a liar), Alexie concludes that both she and another family member were children of rape, leading to some of his soberest, open-ended reflections on how mothers would feel about children born from those incidents.

A child of poverty, racism and addiction, Alexie nonetheless sees that his parents left him a legacy. In “Tyrannosaurus reservation,” he concludes “… they left me a trust fund // Of words, words, and words / That exist in me / Like dinosaurs live in birds.”