Book Review — NEVER SIMPLE: A Memoir by Liz Scheier
Liz Scheier’s darkly funny and touching memoir—with shades of Jeannette Walls’s The Glass Castle and Mira Bartók’s The Memory Palace—of growing up in ’90s Manhattan with a brilliant, mendacious single mother
Scheier’s mother Judith was a news junkie, a hilarious storyteller, a fast-talking charmer you couldn’t look away from, a single mother whose devotion crossed the line into obsession, and—when in the grips of the mental illness that plagued every day of her life—a violent and abusive liar whose hold on reality was shaky at best. On an uneventful afternoon when Scheier was eighteen, her mother sauntered into the room to tell her two important things: one, she had been married for most of Scheier’s life to a man she’d never heard of, and two, the man she’d told Scheier was her father was entirely fictional. She’d made him up. Those two big lies were the start, but not the end; it took dozens of smaller lies to support them, and by the time she was done she had built a farcical, half-true life for the two of them, from fake social security number to fabricated husband.
One hot July day twenty years later, Scheier receives a voicemail from Adult Protective Services, reporting that Judith has stopped paying rent and is refusing all offers of assistance. That call is the start of a shocking journey that takes the Scheiers, mother and daughter, deep into the cascading effects of decades of lies and deception.
Never Simple is the story of learning to survive—and, finally, trying to save—a complicated parent, as feared as she is loved, and as self-destructive as she is adoring.
Published: March 2022
My ThoughtsNever Simple gives us a glimpse into the life of a woman raised by a mother with mental health issues.
This memoir is both more and less than I expected.
While the maelstrom of Sheier’s life revolves around her issues with her mother, we don’t get a strong sense of her mother as a complex woman. Instead we see only glimpses, snapshots of behavior as a demonstration of the woman’s mental illness. I had so many questions, so much I wanted to know!
We do get a tremendous amount of insight into Sheier’s need for a connection with the father she never knew. She seemed desperate to piece him together and see herself in the man who’d been long dead by the time she was born.
Overall, this memoir is about a woman finding herself within the wreckage of a broken life. And while I would’ve loved answers to my questions, ultimately this wasn’t my story to tell. The author chose the pieces she wanted to put together, and perhaps those pieces are as revealing as the things she chose to keep to herself.
*I received a review copy from Henry Holt.*
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