Domenica Ruta

This is a very well written beautiful book. Most of the memoirs I have read were written a good and safe distance from the period in question. This is the case even more so when the material concerns abuse and/or addiction. “With or Without You" feels raw and alive. The author writes with a minimal amount of distance. It is enough though that I believe she was taking a good sane look at her life. There is no self pity, accusations or (the worst) saintly forgiveness which make these types show more of memoirs difficult to read. Also, she successfully captures a feeling for the North Shore. I grew up there as well. Hopefully, the other three words “I can’t live” from the refrain “I can’t live with or without you” and left out of the title were not meant to be inferred!! I would love to see more of her work in the future. show less

Domenica Ruta has produced a realistic but still fascinating memoir of her very difficult childhood. Without the over-the-top humor of Burroughs or the almost saint-like forgiveness in "The
Glass Castle", the author shows the devastating effects of rotten parenting and how very difficult it can be to get beyond them.

Her obvioous sensitivity and her relentless repeated attempts to repair herself completely involve the reader in her life. I loved this story: it's gritty, revealing, horrifying show more and yet leaves the reader with a bit of hope at the end.

I'd recommend this to anyone. show less

For anyone who enjoys midlife or recovery memoirs, "With or Without You" will cover some pretty familiar ground. It features unstable living situations, irresponsible behavior, and a young person's slow but inevitable realization that others may not consider their home life typical. However, the book also goes to a few places that these sorts of books don't go to, most obviously Phillips Andover, but also deep inside the relationship the author had with her mother, who rivals "Mommie show more Dearest" Joan Crawford in her sheer emotional cruelty and Amy Winehouse in her enthusiasm for mind-altering substances. Predictably, as she's referred to directly in the title, the author's mother casts a long shadow over both this book and the author's life. Kathi -- yes! It's spelt with a "i"! -- comes off as an astonishingly vain, chaotic, and destructive personality. Like the author, she seems to have had an eye for telling social differences -- she's something of a stage mom without the stage, always on the lookout for what might help her to climb her region's social ladder, and to use a terrible neologism, she's also a sort of malevolent helicopter parent who keeps her daughter on a painfully short emotional leash. But, perversely enough, she also lends this book a lot of its energy. In "With or Without You," she often seems like an uncanny embodiment of the constant, exhausting struggle to survive at the lower end of the income scale in lots of less-than-glamorous New England towns. She lacks neither energy nor initiative -- at one point she turns a failing taxi stand into a million-dollar business -- but most of her energy's directed toward getting high, filling her house with random objects, and carrying on a messy and ultimately mercenary social life. The reader comes away from "With or Without You" with the idea that being raised on the wrong side of Danvers was, for the author, defined by fever-pitch emotional intensity and near-constant disorder. Perhaps readers shouldn't expect a completely unbiased portrait of any author's mother, but the fact that Domenica Ruta can describe her upbringing's emotional tone and often outlandish particulars more-or-less impersonally is really a credit to her skill as a writer. She made it out of her grisly childhood with something like a coherent narrative, and considering what we're told in this book, that's no mean feat.

The author, of course, faces the same challenges than most of her family did, and some that seem unique to her: how do you mature when nobody bothered to raise you? How do you get clean when your mother not only accepted but facilitated to most of your substance abuse experiences? At the same time, when you come from the wrong side of the tracks but have the sheer intellectual ability to drink and snort your way through a prestigious prep school and two liberal arts colleges, where does that leave you in terms of class? And in a sense, "With or Without You" is very much about class as it's currently thought about in America -- what it means to get ahead or fall behind in the twenty-first century. The author seems to have experienced both extremes in her comparatively short lifetime. She saves herself using a well-known grassroots twelve-step program, and people in the recovery community who dislike that approach may not love that section of this book. But as a reader and as a person, I can't remember the last time I was so glad to see a main character survive a narrative. You get a sense, at the end of this one, that she's found answers to questions that weren't put to most of the people she went to school with. And that's commendable in and of itself. show less

With or Without You is a fractured family fairy tale. Like Grimm's witches, giants, or evil queens, Ruta's cast of characters fairly crackle off the page. I can imagine them weaving down highways in rusty cars, stealing my watch, perhaps burning down a house.

Ruta's parents were young when she was conceived, and throughout this memoir practically everyone who is an "adult" seems permanently stuck in adolescence. Kathi, Ruta's mom, is an addict, and Ruta's childhood was peppered with incidents show more ranging from mildly dysfunctional to downright abusive. Ruta's backwards gaze is unflinching, her memory is strong, and the characters are described with great detail, so it's a compelling read. show less