Living elsewhere

Even with all the evidence to the contrary, I must insist that I am not a memoir junkie. I would probably go so far as to describe myself as "not a fan" of the autobiographical narrative, but in the past few years I have read so many that I should admit that, yes, I read memoirs.

There's a certain genre of memoirs, too, that I really cannot believe I have been drawn to read. I call it "Great Writers with Crazy Parents" memoir (full disclosure: my parents are quirky but sane). There are so many that I must believe that Barnes and Noble might need to assign a shelf for this category as well. I've even joked on this blog and on twitter that my goal is to give my children such boring, sane childhoods that they will never grow up to become writers. Too bad for them.

Within the last few years I've read The Liar's Club, Lit, and The Glass Castle, all of which have Texas connections. Just after Christmas I finished Let's Pretend this Never Happened (a Mostly True Memoir) by Jenny Lawson, another Texan with crazy parents. I was beginning to think that perhaps "Great Writers with Crazy Parents" might all have something to do with Texas, until this week I finished Richard Russo's Elsewhere, proving to me that crazy parents aren't just from Texas.

I've grown to be a fan of Russo's fiction, so when I read that Elsewhere was available, I was intrigued. 

More after the jump

Most of Russo's book is about his relationship with his mother, an anxious and occasionally delusional woman who would have been diagnosed and treated for such psychological afflictions as OCD had she been born later. In this way, Russo's life parallels some of the other memoirists' listed above, save the Texas angle. As a testament to Russo's love for his mother, he is able to express his lifetime of frustration without making his mother out to be a Mommie Dearest. 

In other parts of the book Russo deals more with his relationship to his hometown, the small industrial city of Gloversville, New York, that has faced a decline of fortunes since he was a child. As an adult, Russo has rarely returned to Gloversville, though the places he has created in his fiction, like Empire Falls and Mohawk, resemble it in many ways. Gloversville was once a prosperous city supported by tanneries and glove factories that have now abandoned the US for other shores.

In one scene, Russo is at his daughter's wedding, sipping champagne and as far removed from his childhood in Gloversville as he can possibly be. His mother has already passed away. One of his cousins from his hometown is also at the reception. The conversation among a group turns toward the subject of worst jobs ever. While Russo relates some fairly dangerous and grueling non-union construction jobs he held down in the summers when he was an undergraduate, the cousin describes his brief tenure in a glove factory beam house. Animal carcasses assaulted the senses and dangerous chemicals ruined the health of beam house workers. Had it been a competition, the cousin would have won the prize for worst job held by an attendee at this wedding.

Often in the book Russo reflects on how much of the Gloversville industries affected the workers, including his grandfather. Despite having what was considered a better and safer job in the glove-making process far removed from the actual tanning, he developed emphysema because of the hide dust he inhaled his entire adult life. Russo's grandfather took this diagnosis in stride, as just a matter of life.

Bitterness and recrimination weren't worth the little breath he still had. In his way my grandfather was a philosopher, and he would've wanted me to be suspicious of any bitterness I harbored on his behalf, just as he would've reminded me of the terrible possibility that what nourishes us in this life might be the very thing that steals that life away from us. (page 239 and emphasis mine)

It seems so strange to me that in 2013, our family is faced with a similar situation, wondering if we will be experiencing long-term effects from our years in Shenzhen and especially Beijing. Near-term difficulties we think we mitigate by furnishing our apartment with a bank of air cleaners and taking regular trips home to the US. We depend on Randy's job there in Beijing, a job that does not exist at all in the United States. When people ask us why we haven't packed it in yet, all we can do is ask, for what? We aren't in Beijing because of a sense of adventure or to take advantage of a more luxurious and leisurely lifestyle than we could afford anywhere else in the world, though at times I wish we were. More people would understand these reasons rather than the much simpler truth, Randy needed  a job, preferably in his field of expertise, to maximize his earnings. This is the life we are tied to now, regardless of whether what is keeping us fed and clothed today is robbing our future.

There is another passage from Elsewhere that also gave me pause. Russo is contemplating his attitude toward Gloversville and its demise and how much of that was nurtured by his own mother and her dissatisfaction with life.

Though I can't justify doing so, it appears that on this topic I've taken my mother's part. Gloversville got what it deserved. So what if this opinion isn't really mine? So what if it's contradicted by all my novels? It's still the oldest opinion I know. Surrender that one, and it would be like she was never here.

Russo remains loyal to his mother, even if he knows the evidence would point him to a more sympathetic view of his hometown, like I've read in Russo's own Empire Falls. It was exceptionally interesting to me this admission of Russo's, especially for those of us who also grew up in small industrial towns but were encouraged to leave (escape even) as the only definition of success, or at the very least survival. I think this idea of ambition and hometowns and on what terms one chooses to stay or return will come up again for me later this year once Rod Dreher's The Little Way of Ruthie Leming comes out. That will be a very different kind of memoir.