Danielle Geller

This review is not going to address the writing skill, because I had too many internal responses to be fair to the author's skill.
This memoir was triggered by her mother's death, and focuses on life events that involved her parents and how being raised in a dysfunctional family affected her and her sister's lives. I don't think I've read before such a personal and brutally honest portrayal of the effects of alcoholism on a family. Even the time spent in foster care was insufficient to break the demands presented by a parent who needs caretaking.
The blurb I had read led me to assume that when she found her Navajo relations, they would help her heal, yet what she writes shows that life on the reservation was just as full of alcoholism as the life her mother was leading in Florida. Her mother was unable to escape her past, and her sister (so far) hasn't either. The book does lead us to believe that the author, by confronting and naming the damage, will.
The book was full of dialogue, and so moved forward quickly, but brought up thoughts of other people I've known which made me sad. Just the whole state of humanity can easily be overwhelming. This book doesn't have any answers, but does show how one person does her best. It seems that withdrawing to a fantasy world (in this case, online role playing games) helped her keep an emotional distance from the drama around her.
I have briefly been involved in the lives of people who have been stuck in addiction, and --seeing I could do nothing to change them--stepped back. For a child, even an adult child, it seems impossible to create that distance.
The final chapter seems to come out of nowhere: how could she have finally found a partner to trust, after her own years of falling in and out of love so quickly? Did she have any experience in maintaining friendships? I realized how the brief were the glimpses we received of the parts of her life where she was thriving, learning, and changing, but they were present. I look forward to more from this author where she explores this other dimension of her life, and focuses on her strengths.… (more)

My words feel inadequate. I had never felt that kind of love, but I had never learned how to write about happiness.

This is a very powerful book that tackles important topics such as family and identity in a poignant way. It is a meditation on the strength to choose your own path while coming to terms with a complex heritage and fighting the temptation to get sucked into the ongoing destructive cycle that has already claimed so many loved ones.

Geller’s writing is very unique in that it feels so factual and convincing, and at the same time deeply intimate and raw. The book is cleverly structured, with the backbone of the story unfolding in near-chronological order and the spotlight returning on important events in flashbacks. The archival documents, cards, journal entries, and photographs are inserted at just the right places to flesh out the story. I particularly enjoyed the instances where she compares her memory of an event with the respective entry in her mother’s journal.

The memoir is a masterclass in researching, reconstructing, remembering an entire life. Geller’s ability to write and tell a story and her varying confidence in her writing reflect her state of mind during the different periods she talks about. Those statements invite research into writing as therapy and as a way of coping with the weight of life, the weight of the suitcase with the belongings of Geller’s mother, the weight of a heritage that has to be understood and embraced. The descriptions of the Navajo reservation and Geller’s efforts to learn, understand, and connect make for some of the most compelling parts of the memoir.

There is a great honesty in this kind of writing that makes the reader seem almost like an intruder in somebody else’s life. It can be an overwhelming feeling, but it means that the author has done a great job of immersing us into the story, so much so that we seem to tag along on the long drives, curl up on couches between life decisions, feel the disgust when Geller’s father shows up drunk yet again, and shiver at the immense isolation that must have pushed her mother into her downward spiral.

It is by no means an easy book to read, and it can’t have been easy to write either, but it’s truly beautifully written and well worth the emotional investment.… (more)

It could have been subtitled “The Book I Wanted to Stop Reading but Couldn’t.” Danielle Geller writes a memoir in which she opens her life to readers and demonstrates amazing strength. Adopted by her paternal grandmother because her parents were alcoholics, her life was a mountain of hurtles. She was continually rescuing and providing shelter for her father and addicted sister. She moved from relationship to relationship. After her mother’s death, she reconnected with family members on the Navajo reservation. Her powerful story is illustrated with photos she found after her mother died. Using her archival training, she adds pictures in archival style as footnotes. She uses her education as a creative writer to write a heart wrenching story of her reconnection to her Navajo family and the future she hopes to have.… (more)