Blood: A Memoir

Allison Moorer wrestles with her childhood demons surrounding the tragic deaths of her parents in a murder-suicide. Her father was a raging alcoholic with a strong sadistic streak. Her mother was loving but frustratingly forgiving. Moorer is conflicted about both and harbors some serious guilt feelings about their deaths. Music is her salvation. This she acquired from both parents. Despite their shortcomings, she clearly loved both of them. Her lyrical memoir not only tells their stories, but also serves as an internal monologue analyzing her parents' large influence on her life. Her more famous sister, singer Shelby Lynne, unfortunately has a minor role in the memoir. This was probably intentional as more detail on her life surely show more would have overshadowed the important issues Moorer addresses in this excellent memoir. show less

On the day that their estranged father shot and killed their mother on the front lawn of their little Alabama house before doing the same to himself, Allison Moorer was just fourteen years old and her sister, Shelby Lynne, was almost eighteen. What happened on that August 12, 1986, morning may not define their lives, but it forever changed who they were and who they would become. Allison Moorer’s Blood: A Memoir is their story.

“There are parts of a heart that can never heal once they are broken. There is no glue that will hold.” (Allison Moorer, page 14)

Blood is Allison Moorer’s book of memories, and as such, it is told from her point-of-view, but one of the book’s most touching parts is the short “Foreword” written by show more her older sister, Shelby. Shelby has also written about her parents and their marriage but she says that she “always wondered where Sissy was in it.” She realized that each of them always had their own memories about living with their parents, but that in her memories Allison is always “in the background.” Now having read her sister’s book, Shelby knows exactly where Allison was all those years ago:

“While I was trying to protect Mama and watch our failing parents’ every move, Sissy was there scared, worried, alone, suffering, and I never knew it. She was there hanging back, hanging tough, watching, observing, worrying, testing the waters of her world, waiting…We were together.”

There is no doubt that the sisters know where each other are now. They are best friends, bonded forever by what they endured and experienced as children. Somehow, even though they can never forgive their father for taking their mother from them when she was only 41, neither of them hate the man. Instead, they hate what he did.

Allison Moorer’s father was an alcoholic who felt that he had married the most beautiful woman in the world. And he was a jealous man, one convinced that there was a man “around every corner” who wanted nothing more out of life than to steal his wife away from him. He wanted, and he had because his wife couldn’t stop him from taking it from her, the authority to “approve her every action.” But according to Moorer, although never diagnosed as such, her father may have had other issues. She almost hopes he was bipolar, schizophrenic, or suffering some other kind of borderline personality disorder because she does not want to believe that it could have been just plain old “meanness” that made him “erase” her mother the way that he did.

Allison Moorer and Shelby Lynne may have survived the trauma of their teen years, but they did not come out of the experience whole. They are, and will always be, emotionally scarred by the actions of the first male role model in their lives, an impatient, angry man who was disappointed in himself and his failure to earn an independent living for his family. Moorer recalls how, “He always seemed to have something on his mind. I was always careful about what I said around him. I never wanted to bother him and risk him directing his anger at me.” As the older sister, it seems Shelby was not so fortunate, and she was more often struck by their father. One of the saddest segments of Blood is the barely-two-pages-long one titled “What happens when you hit your daughter” detailing how a daughter’s personality will forever be changed for the worse by an abusive father who strikes her – especially when it comes to how she deals with every man with whom she will have any kind of relationship for the rest of her life. Those two pages are among the most difficult to read pages I’ve ever encountered in my life.

Bottom Line: Allison Moorer and Shelby Lynne are lucky to have had music in their lives to help them through the most difficult days of their childhood and their adulthood. Both women have enjoyed successful music careers - although Shelby seems to struggle to see it that way sometimes - in the music industry, but even their music is influenced by the childhood trauma they suffered. Blood tells the story of two remarkably strong women who are always there for each other, two women determined not to repeat the all too common mistakes of their parents. They are trying to break the cycle for good. show less

Blood is a heartbreaking memoir by Allison Moorer, the country musician. I love music and have a few of her albums, but I had no idea about her history. I didn’t know she was Shelby Lynne’s sister, or that she married Steve Earle and later, Hayes Carll. I am a huge fan of Earle and Carll, but had no idea of their connection to Moorer. I also had no idea that Lynne and Moorer’s father murdered their mother before killing himself.

Battered woman are most likely to be killed when they leave and she was leaving—and he must have believed she was really leaving. Moorer was just fourteen and Lynne a recent high school graduate. What a devastating thing to happen and at such a young age. She talks about decimation, how it is losing a show more tenth, but she lost her mother and father. She lost half her family. She also grew up in a home terrorized by the whims of an angry man. Of course, he could charm, he could be fun, and of course, there was love. But there was also fear. That is a hard thing.

Moorer writes about her memories, trying to unearth the reality of her mother and her father. There is the natural and unrewarding effort to ask what if. There is the natural and unrewarding assumption of complicity and blame. She recounts the times she thinks she should have done something or said something—but we know and she, in her mature wisdom, knows that this was a death dance that began before she was even born. There were two actors who could have changed the trajectory and they are both dead.

Blood excells at capturing the chaos and unpredictability of living with a violent alcoholic. The chapters skip from past to present and from happy memories to terrifying ones. Moorer is a songwriter. Songwriters are poets. She has the poet’s felicity with language. Reading her memoir is at times beautiful and at times harrowing. I loved her memoir and yet will not recommend it to everyone. If reading about violence and the abuse of women, children, and animals is traumatizing, this book will be traumatic. However, I do think there is much of value to reading this memoir.

Moorer reveals her manifest coping skills, even as a child. She reveals the negative effects of growing up with an abusive father, how it affects adult relationships, though she speaks in general, not specific terms. She asks why her mother stayed and comes to understand the threat—her father threatened to kill not just his wife, but their children and her parents. It seems to be possible her mother put her life in jeopardy to save her children. Protection.

This memoir is informative, harrowing, and hopeful—in the end, it is hopeful more than anything else.

I received an ARC of Blood from the publisher through Shelf Awareness.

https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2019/11/12/9780306922671/ show less

Allison Moorer is an excellent singer/songwriter and when I discovered that she had wrote a memoir, I was intrigued. She had a terrifying childhood, growing up in Alabama and experienced the murder/suicide of her parents. This is a memoir about strength and survival. The writing is beautiful. This is also a very good audio edition, with Moorer narrating herself.

If you are fans of the talented musicians Allison Moorer and Shelby Lynne, this is a must-read. The story of their parents' murder-suicide has at times unfairly overshadowed their music careers. I'm glad Moorer decided to write this definitive account so that the focus can return to the sisters' music.

As some critical reviews have noted, Moorer does not follow a linear timeline when recounting her childhood. She moves from past to present reflections. I knew this going in and didn't have trouble following the narrative.

This book touches on so many tough themes that we still grapple with today: abusive relationships, child abuse, alcoholism, economic struggles, post traumatic stress disorder, forgiveness. It is understandably not an show more easy read, but I found Moorer's personal account of the darkest day of her life impactful. show less

This story of Shelby & Allison Moorer is a rich, brutal, and a complicated combination of terror, survival and and love in an abusive home ending in the murder-suicide of her parents. Somehow she manages to write beautifully about this life. Trying to get over wishing she had a better past or could fix things in it, she's made a life of the music her family shared. Never had heard of her, but now I listened and she and her sister very talented!