Sean Murphy (9)

After finishing this book, I liked the author more than the book. I liked his mother, too, although the book was as much about the author at various stages as about his mother. I liked the sweet note the author hand wrote in my copy.

The writing was confusing and disconcerting for much of the early part of the book. The odd punctuation and many phrases and paragraphs enclosed in parentheses broke up the flow of reading. Jenna Blum called the book "a mosaic love letter". Mosaic is accurate. Imagine breaking up a patterned plate with a hammer. Now arrange all the broken pieces of all sizes in an order that strikes your fancy -- a line, circle, grid, triangle. Stand back and ponder your art work. Would you hang it on the wall? Do you prefer the plate whole or in a mosaic pattern?

My first answer to that is mosaic because I'm an artist. This book doesn't work for me as a mosaic, not to the degree that the timeline is so widely scattered and mixed. A little would have been better, perhaps, but every reader is different. I suspect writing the book was therapy for the author, and if it works for him, that's what matters.

I believe Sean Murphy, the author, to be a good writer, capable of much more cohesive work than this. Other things that broke up the flow were the consistent use of double negatives throughout, which are awkward to most readers, a few spelling/typeset errors, and the chapter titles. There's no table of contents, and this book begs going to back to similarly named chapters, which are hard to find since chapters are short. The book probably makes perfect sense to the author and people close to him and the story, but to a cold reader, it's confusing.

Most of the items in parentheses were part of the story and didn't need to be in parens. Some of the items in parens were wordy and unnecessary. There's a chapter entitled, Fathers and Sons (Truth) and another entitled Fathers and Sons (Fiction). What? The fiction sounded like part of the story. Some of the book is philosophical ponderings, which I rather like in the right book. It seemed like a tangent here, though it IS part of who the author is and the book is about he and his mother.

This is a boldly honest memoir and I liked that about it. It has tender, vulnerable moments. It also has some gently told, but harsh in reality, criticism of the medical establishment. Reality is reality, and this book is real. Pictures sprinkled throughout added much to the story. The writing and chapters are stream-of-consciousness type, although no book gets published without plenty of editing. I wondered over and over what the editors thought of this and that and why it was allowed to stand in it's disconcerting way. Perhaps that was the intent. Usually I embrace something different, but this book didn't inspire me.

Recently I lost a close friend, like a sister, of 40 years to cancer. Currently my mother is in the hospital and it's not known if she will live. So I'm near enough to the subjects of the book to be sensitive to the author's words.

Nearer the end, there are some wonderful, quotable lines, and that section of the book was clearer, almost as if it was written at a different time with a different perspective. Perhaps the "mosaic" nature of the book was meant to portray how we feel after the death of a loved one, how our minds work and go from subject to memory.

With all the critique, I believe Sean is a good writer. The difference here is that this book is totally personal. That changes things. Would I recommend this book to someone? Maybe to the medical profession, so they understand how they affect people. Maybe to someone who has/had an extraorderinary relationship with a parent. The book has a glowing sensitivity to it that makes up for some of the ambiguity and obstacle reading. It's a beautiful tribute to a mother.
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