Don't You Ever

Starred review from May 21, 2018
Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Bishop takes an honest and raw look at her family in this heartbreaking memoir. While Bishop grew up in a loving home in 1950s central Virginia and never wanted for much, her older, illegitimate half-brother, Ronnie Lee Overstreet, was sent first to a foster home and then to a mental institution. Ronnie was originally introduced to Bishop as a cousin; she learned the truth in 1987 when she was in her 30s after finding a notation on her birth certificate while applying for a passport. She decided to reconnect with him and found him working at a barbershop. She learned that Ronnie had developed in adulthood a rare pituitary disease, acromegaly, which “gradually expanded his jawbone and lengthened his chin by inches.” Bishop digs deep into her own past, exposing class structure (her parents worked as servants on a lush Virginia estate), genteel poverty, self-loathing, and self-doubt in a deeply honest manner. She eventually comes to realize that it was social mores of the time that forced her mother to place Ronnie in a home. Bishop tenderly describes how she became close with her brother, helping to secure finances to pay for his medical treatment until his death in 1991. This powerful tale lays bare the cancer of shame and its often devastating results.

May 1, 2018
In her early 30s, journalist Bishop accidentally discovered she had a half brother she had never known about, so she tracked him down to the barbershop where he worked in a small town in Virginia.Over the years until his death from complications of a hormonal disorder, the author got to know Ronnie. Ten years older than her, he had been born before her mother, Adria, married her father. The teenage Adria spent a year with Ronnie at a home for unwed mothers. When she couldn't care for him as she worked as domestic help, he was placed in foster care. By the time Bishop was born, her parents were working on a large estate, and the troubled Ronnie was with them. Adria told everyone, including her daughter, that the boy was Adria's cousin and warned him, "Don't you ever call me Mama." The narrative moves fluidly, and the author backtracks as she provides the details of her research into her family history and recounts her increasingly frustrating meetings with Ronnie, who dwelled on the harm that had been done to him and refused to deal with his illness despite many offers of help. For Bishop, the discovery of her brother's existence was--and apparently still remains--a source of guilt. While compassionate, she manages to distance herself occasionally from his suffering, making good use of her well-honed reporter's eye for detail and ability to research and interview. While readers see Adria and Ronnie through Bishop's eyes, they also get the perspectives of others who know or knew them, most of whom are not as emotionally involved with their lives. Both of the author's key subjects come across as baffling, complicated individuals, deserving of love and respect despite their flaws, shaped by a society that viewed a mother who had a child out of wedlock as shameful.A precise and honest depiction of a family wound that has still not entirely healed.

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Starred review from June 1, 2018
To the extraordinary benefit of readers, Bishop turns her prize-winning journalistic skills towards her family's history in her first book. As an adult, Bishop applied for a passport and discovered among the required paperwork that her mother had another child; her cousin Ronnie, 10 years her senior, was actually her half-brother. This newfound knowledge launched Bishop on a years-long quest to re-understand her mother, Ronnie's father, and her own happy childhood and wealthy, class-segregated Virginia hometown. When she sought out Ronnie after learning the truth, he was a broken man, enduring the late stages of a treatable disease but refusing medical help. For Bishop, reconciling her compassionate mother and the person who admitted Ronnie to a mental institution in which he received electroshock therapy proved almost impossible. Bishop's mother structured her entire life in opposition to her deep shame, causing her to reject her son repeatedly. While the effects were many and complicated, the truth, though hard, was simple: the shame that attached to unwed mothers ruined a good bit of Bishop's mother's life and nearly all of her brother's. Bishop's research and clear, heartfelt writing render her story deeply personal and culturally essential.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)