You Don't Have to Say You Love Me in Around the World in 80 Books

Dec 31, 2018 marianne added it

Shelves: audio

Well shoot. With much apprehension, I listened to the audio version of this book, read by Alexie himself, just a couple of weeks after allegations of sexual harassment from multiple women came out and his admission to said allegations quickly followed (“These women are telling the truth,” he wrote in a statement he released). As a result, my experience with this book was naturally mired by the knowledge of his conduct behind the scenes of the book, so to speak.

At its core, You Don’t Have to Say Well shoot. With much apprehension, I listened to the audio version of this book, read by Alexie himself, just a couple of weeks after allegations of sexual harassment from multiple women came out and his admission to said allegations quickly followed (“These women are telling the truth,” he wrote in a statement he released). As a result, my experience with this book was naturally mired by the knowledge of his conduct behind the scenes of the book, so to speak.

At its core, You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me is a brutal and unconventional ode of sorts to a mother Alexie both loved and hated. I was awed by its raw honesty and power. Alexie’s relationship with his mother was intense and complex; she was not, by any accounts, a stable, warm or exemplary parental figure. She both saved and endangered her children’s lives multiple times over. In this book of 78 poems and 78 stories, one for each year of his mother’s life, Alexie explores every emotion he felt for her; sympathy, anger, amusement, resentment, gratitude, fear, love, sadness… the list goes on. Every moment or story, whether or not he felt resolution, whether it was horrifying or hilarious, was introspective and left a mark.

The moments I had the hardest time with and angered me the most were when he spoke of the heartbreaking abuse his own family members endured and suffered generation after generation, especially that of the women in his family - rape, harassment, limitations imposed by a male and/or European hierarchy, shame, loss of a culture and identity, etc. These passages, which were some of the most tragic in the book, felt disingenuous for obvious reasons. But feelings aside, this abuse was clearly a strong foundation of his mother’s personality and therefore of his relationship with her. While she was capable of caring for her children and sacrificing a part of her life for them, she could also be downright mean, dishonest, and unreliable. Sometimes she acted in ways that left lasting trauma in them. With this understanding of her background and consequent actions, and with knowledge about his own actions, I walked away feeling that Alexie proved to be a product of the cycle of abuse that he laments, which made me feel anger, resentment, a loss of trust… and, perhaps surprisingly, empathy for a boy who by his own accounts grew up in a broken community, was raised by broken parents, and turned into a grown man who succeeded against all odds but could not entirely escape the cycle of abuse that was pervasive in his childhood home and more broadly on the reservation. So it may be hugely disappointing but not entirely surprising that when he achieved fame, power and influence, he exploited it to coerce women into sexual favors or, when they refused, killed their careers as writers. It broke my heart for his victims, who were by and large people who looked up to him and hoped for his support. It also broke my heart for his wife and two sons, and yes, on some level, for him too.

It’s been almost a year since I read this book. Originally, I thought that it was probably wrong to read. I’ve always thought it better to give victims of abuse the power to speak and to have their voices heard… And then it struck me that the perpetrators are often victims themselves of some kind of abuse. In some dark and ironic way, this memoir was as much an unintended road map into the source of his worst behaviors as it was an ode to an imperfect mother. The cycle of abuse is a tragic one. ...more

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Jan 30, 2018 Danise rated it it was amazing

There's no other voice like Sherman Alexie's. He's piercingly honest and funny and heartbreaking often at once. No hiding, no front in his words. He hits hard on just about everyone in this memoir (Natives, whites, his mother), but he loves much more. Vulnerable and lovely. The book is structured like patches of a quilt. Loved it. ...more

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