The Blessing: A Memoir

This is Gregory Orr's painful memoir of not only the terrible moment when he shot his brother to death in a hunting accident, but the uncharacteristic way he and his family, tight lipped and stoic, dealt with the pain. Only one week after the tragedy the Orr children were back in school as if nothing happened. Gregory was in the seventh grade at this point. When Orr's father uprooted the family and took them to Haiti, Gregory, as an adult, is able to look back at the episode and as delve briefly into Haiti's turbulent political history and conflicting cultures (a mention of Castro and Papa Doc Duvalier) as a perfect comparison to his own family's unsettled time. It is unbelievable, but even more tragedy followed the Orr family after show more arriving in Haiti. Once in full adulthood, Orr tries to make sense of his past and his responses to all of its shocking heartache. For example - when his mother died, none of her children were invited to the funeral. Father, a man Gregory once worshiped and wanted all to himself, is later described as having "not a nurturing bone in his body." What father gives bottles of amphetamines as going away presents to his son while he carrying on a relationship with a girl barely older than Gregory? All of this sounds like a book unbearable to read. It is not. In the end, Gregory is able to find his way through the maze of mixed emotions and come out with the determination to become an accomplished poet. show less

A difficult one to rate. The number is not meaningful in this case. A few years before I started writing my own book, I wrote to Greg Orr, as someone had given me one of his poems and it struck a chord. Kindly, he replied and was encouraging about my writing. Now, having read this memoir, I will contact him again, and, send him my own. Because of the nature of trauma, there are connection points in our two unrelated books. There are many moments and feelings that he described that are oh so familiar.