You Don't Have to Say You Love Me

April 3, 2017
Intense but unspoken feeling suffuses the bittersweet relationship between a mother and her son in this poignant, conflicted, raucous memoir of a Native American family. Novelist and poet Alexie (The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian) remembers his complicated mother, Lillian, who kept the family together despite dire poverty on the Spokane Reservation but had a contentious relationship with her son featuring bitter fights and years-long silent treatments. He sets their story against a rich account of their close-knit but floridly dysfunctional family and a reservation community rife with joblessness, alcoholism and drug abuse, fatal car crashes, violence, rape and child molestation, murder, and a general sense of being excluded from and besieged by white society. Alexie treats this sometimes bleak material with a graceful touch, never shying away from deep emotions but also sharing wry humor and a warm regard for Native culture and spirituality. The text is rambling, digressive, and sometimes baggy, with dozens of his poems sprinkled in; it wanders among limpid, conversational prose, bawdy comic turns, and lyrical, incantatory verse. This is a fine homage to the vexed process of growing up that vividly conveys how family roots continue to bind even after they seem to have been severed.

Sherman Alexie narrates his powerful memoir with acute emotion and vulnerability. His story of his grief after the death of his mother is rooted in the brutal experiences of Native Americans in the United States. He has composed a repeating patchwork of stories inspired by his family, life on and off the reservation, and poems born of his visceral reaction to his loss. Alexie's mother, Lillian, was among the last four speakers of their tribal language, and he mourns the loss of her and her knowledge while simultaneously struggling with their shared history of abuse, neglect, and resentment. Alexie's narration is extremely personal. He will make you cry, yes, and then make you laugh hard enough to wake your sleeping children; be warned. E.E.C. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award � AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine