You Don't Have to Say You Love Me: A Memoir

by Sherman Alexie

Overview

The Instant New York Times Bestseller

Shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction

A searing, deeply moving memoir about family, love, loss, and forgiveness from the critically acclaimed, bestselling National Book Award-winning author of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.

Family relationships are never simple. But Sherman Alexie's bond with his mother Lillian was more complex than most. She plunged her family into chaos with a drinking habit, but shed her addiction when it was on the brink of costing her everything. She survived a violent past, but created an elaborate facade to hide the truth. She selflessly cared for strangers, but was often incapable of showering her children with the affection that they so desperately craved. She wanted a better life for her son, but it was only by leaving her behind that he could hope to achieve it. It's these contradictions that made Lillian Alexie a beautiful, mercurial, abusive, intelligent, complicated, and very human woman.

When she passed away, the incongruities that defined his mother shook Sherman and his remembrance of her. Grappling with the haunting ghosts of the past in the wake of loss, he responded the only way he knew how: he wrote. The result is a stunning memoir filled with raw, angry, funny, profane, tender memories of a childhood few can imagine, much less survive. An unflinching and unforgettable remembrance, YOU DON'T HAVE TO SAY YOU LOVE ME is a powerful, deeply felt account of a complicated relationship.
One of the most anticipated books of 2017—Entertainment Weekly and Bustle

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316270748
Publisher:	Little, Brown and Company
Publication date:	04/24/2018
Pages:	464
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 1.25(h) x 9.00(d)

About the Author

Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the PEN/Malamud Award for Short Fiction, a PEN/Hemingway Citation for Best First Fiction, and the National Book Award for Young People's Literature, Sherman Alexie is a poet, short story writer, novelist and performer. A Spokane/Couer d'Alene Indian, Alexie grew up in Wellpinit, Washington, on the Spokane Indian Reservation. Alexie has been an urban Indian since 1994 and lives in Seattle with his family.

Editorial Reviews

"I am mesmerized by this book that is painful as they come yet has me hooked. [...] I cannot put it down as his raw honesty and quirky style has gripped me in some kind of way that is hard to describe. [W]hen I do things like drive to work or make dinner I keep thinking about it..."—Sheryl Cotleur, Copperfield's Books (Sebastopol, CA)

"To say that I was moved by Sherman Alexie's memoir is a terrible understatement; in fact, there is a pulse in this book that has worked its way into my being and irrevocably changed how I think about my own life. Alexie's kaleidoscopic approach to storytelling is so representative of the feeling of being human, with childhood memory, relationships, love, trauma, and art all moving in and out of focus at once. At the center of YOU DON'T HAVE TO SAY YOU LOVE ME is a deep grieving, for Alexie's mother, for the ways in which parental love is imperfect, for unthinkable personal and cultural traumas. But Alexie's brilliance is in holding multiple truths, that one can experience simultaneously both trauma and hope, grief and humor, violence and love. I, like Alexie, "tend to fall in love with the unnamable," that nebulous complexity at the heart of the human experience that can only be understood by holding on to all of the pieces of your life at once, a practice both beautiful and terrifying. Alexie achieves this exquisitely, and YOU DON'T HAVE TO SAY YOU LOVE ME is an unforgettable work.—Kelsey O'Rourke, Literati Bookstore (Ann Arbor, MI)

On Reservation Blues:
"His talent is immense and genuine.... Sherman Alexie is one of the best writers we have."
- The Nation

"Hilarious but poignant...dead-on accurate with regard to modern Indian life."
—Publisher's Weekly

On Indian Killer:
"A haunting, challenging articulation of the plight and the pride of contemporary Native Americans."
- Kirkus Reviews, starred review"

Characters in Mr. Alexie's work are not the usual kind of Indians...They are not tragic victims or noble savages...they listen to Jimi Hendrix and Hank Williams; they dream of being basketball stars...And unlike most Indians in fiction, they are sometimes funny."
--The New York Times

On The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian:

"A Native American equivalent of Angela's Ashes."
— (starred review), Publishers Weekly

"Sure to resonate and lift spirits of all ages for years to come."
—USA Today

From the Publisher

04/03/2017
Intense but unspoken feeling suffuses the bittersweet relationship between a mother and her son in this poignant, conflicted, raucous memoir of a Native American family. Novelist and poet Alexie (The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian) remembers his complicated mother, Lillian, who kept the family together despite dire poverty on the Spokane Reservation but had a contentious relationship with her son featuring bitter fights and years-long silent treatments. He sets their story against a rich account of their close-knit but floridly dysfunctional family and a reservation community rife with joblessness, alcoholism and drug abuse, fatal car crashes, violence, rape and child molestation, murder, and a general sense of being excluded from and besieged by white society. Alexie treats this sometimes bleak material with a graceful touch, never shying away from deep emotions but also sharing wry humor and a warm regard for Native culture and spirituality. The text is rambling, digressive, and sometimes baggy, with dozens of his poems sprinkled in; it wanders among limpid, conversational prose, bawdy comic turns, and lyrical, incantatory verse. This is a fine homage to the vexed process of growing up that vividly conveys how family roots continue to bind even after they seem to have been severed. (June)

Publishers Weekly

★ 04/15/2017
When Alexie's mother passed away in 2015, his grief was complicated by memories of a difficult childhood. His family struggled with poverty, mental illness, and alcoholism, and his mother was both protector and antagonist. This latest account is an honest, wrenching, and incredibly moving story about all aspects of life. The story is deeply personal—as if National Book Award winner Alexie (The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian) needed to write it in order to untangle and understand his feelings about his mother and the lasting pain of her death. Presented as a series of vignettes, some in prose, others in poetry, about Alexie's life and family, the narrative transitions between styles, which feels natural as Alexie searches for the best way to present complex memories and stories. Readers familiar with the author's other works, such as Reservation Blues, will recognize many details about his childhood on the Spokane Indian Reservation. VERDICT Highly recommended for all readers. Alexie's portrayals of family relationships, identity, and grief have the universality of great literature.—Nicholas Graham, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Library Journal