With or Without You: A Memoir

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 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 show more 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 and yet leaves the reader with a bit of hope at the end.

I'd recommend this to anyone.

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 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 show more 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 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.

thank you library thing! A most excellent 5 star read

OMG…. This book blew me right out of the water. It touched a little close to home as well.
This is a brilliant mother daughter memoir, one of the best I have ever read, do yourself a favor and go out today and pick up This book!

As one reviewer put it “Freakishly brilliant, brilliantly freakish”
This is the heartbreaking story of Domenica (Nikki) and her mother Kathi as they careen Through life in the 90’s trying to find purchase somewhere.
Kathi is a sometime drug dealer who is addicted to drugs, alcohol, damaged men and hard times.
Nikki is right behind her sharing her mothers drugs when offered or even worse pushed on her. They live in a crusty house filled with trash inside show more and out in Boston. Kathi goes through men and jobs, Nikki goes though schools and friends. Both trying to find their way.
This book is filled with damaged love…a mother on a course of self destruction who tries to save and destroy her daughter all in the same day. Mother & daughter are extremely close in a not right kind of way. Kathi does try to instill in young Nikki that life sucks but, if you look real close and try really hard you might get lucky and see something beautiful out of all the ugliness.
Nikki learns later in life that to truly love her mother she must let her go and forgive.
Domenica is a truly gifted writer and I look forward to her next book. show less

With or Without You is a powerful, disturbing, honest memoir by Domenica Ruta. Domenica suffered through a trash-strewn squalid childhood with her single mom, Kathi, in Danvers, Massachusetts. Kathi was a drug addict, dealer, and alcoholic. She was unpredictable and unstable. Even though I had an uncorrected proof, please allow me to share how Domenica describes Kathi:

“Mummy wants to show off her boobies right now.” Her hair was almost black, but she insisted on bleaching it Deborah Harry blond. She had one tattoo, a small but regrettable crab on her left ring finger. It was her astrological sign—the Cancer. Even she was ashamed of it, I know, because she hid it under a gold wedding band long before she ever married. What else do show more you need to know about this woman before I go on with the story? That she believed it was more important to be an interesting person than it was to be a good one; that she allowed me to skip school whenever I wanted to, and if there was a good movie on TV she wouldn’t let me go to school because, she said, she needed me to stay home and watch it with her; that, thanks to this education, I was the only girl in the second grade who could recite entire scenes from Scarface and The Godfather by heart; that she made me responsible for most of my own meals when I was seven and all the laundry in the house when I was nine; that her ability to make money was alchemical; that she was vainer than a beauty queen, but the last time I saw her she weighed more than two hundred pounds and her arms were encrusted with purulent sores; that she loved me so much she couldn’t help hating me; that at least once a week I still dream she is trying to kill me. (Location 98-107)

As a child Domenica quickly picked up reading on her own. In a family "where people stumbled—and stumbled proudly—over three-syllable words, such a drooling little fiend for literature was endearing to no one. (It should be noted that even the most illiterate of my clan knew their way around a food-stamp application, a subpoena, and a workman’s compensation claim. We were nothing if not adroit at manipulating the system.)"

Kathi would work menial jobs to keep the cable on, get pain killers, and buy good clothes. They also were frequently on welfare. Kathi tried to share her pain killers with Domenica and wanted her daughter to experiment with more drugs at an early age. Domenica, however, resisted much of that (not all) and tried to focus on doing well at school, in spite of her circumstances, although she later succumb to the temptation of addiction. While Kathi's parenting skills were lacking, the whole family had addiction problems. Her grandmother was a dealer, although she wasn't a user. Everyone also swore loudly and often. "And, like movies, bad words were another resource in which my family was truly rich." Domenica also was sexually abused by a relative who was also a pedophile. While her family knew, they choose to remain firmly in denial about his activities.

Finally, Domenica describes her own ascension into drug addiction and alcoholism and how she struggled to overcome her addictions.

I did have a few issues with the book. Her early years began to feel like one bad story of neglect or addiction crashing into another. There was no good time frame or order established to help the reader follow when things occurred. The end felt disjointed and like a lot of information was left out in order to wrap the memoir up quickly. This rushed feeling may simple be due to the amount of time that separates her childhood struggles from her adult addictions and recovery, making the early years easier to reflect upon.

In any event, With or Without You is an emotionally wrought, highly recommended memoir that fans of The Glass Castle may enjoy (keeping in mind that it is not as well written as The Glass Castle).


Disclosure: My Kindle edition was courtesy of Random House and Netgalley for review purposes. show less

This is a harrowing and touching memoir that was well-written and heartfelt. I can't help it - I love childhood misery memoirs. What made this one stand out for me was the ambiguous and heartbreaking relationship of the narrator with her mother. Her struggles with despair and addiction are depicted realistically and touchingly. Her style is elegant, tone is perfect. And if you are an animal lover, her chapter about her dog will choke you up. Despite a couple of confusing narrative glitches, I found this book to be engrossing and moving.