November Not Fiction Book Discussions

The theme of this year's discussions can be summed up in a phrase from Cheryl Strayed's memoir Wild: "There's no way to know what makes one thing happen and not another. What leads to what. What destroys what. What causes what to flourish or die or take another course." Yet that seems to be the nonfiction writer's task, to understand how the world came to be the way it is, how it is changing even as we observe it, and how people make their way in it, with curiosity, determination, courage, forbearance, forgiveness, humor, and not a little luck. Elsewhere: A Memoir by Richard Russo explores what Russo calls "the mechanism of human destiny" in his own life, inextricably intertwined with that of his mother, a bright and determined woman who was thwarted as much by her historical time and place as she was by her own mental illness, most likely an obsessive compulsive disorder. Russo, a devoted son, reflects on their life together and realizes that out of a sincere desire to support his mother, he unwittingly enabled her worst behavior, and, in spite of sharing many of her traits, became a successful and respected author while she restlessly looked for a better life "elsewhere."

Russo realizes after his mother dies that "Somehow, without ever intending to, I'd discovered how to turn obsession and what my grandmother used to call sheer cussedness--character traits that had dogged both my parents, causing them no end of difficulty--to my advantage. The same qualities that over a lifetime had contracted my mother's world had somehow expanded mine. How and by what mechanism? Dumb Luck? Grace? I honestly have no idea. Call it whatever you want--except virtue" (166). With great humility--and burdened by what one of our discussion members recognized as survivor's guilt--Russo refuses to take credit for his successes, while he is all too willing to shoulder responsibility for enabling his mother. Russo's conclusion is one that could offer real solace to any reader who takes responsibility for an aging parent or disabled family member or questions their own life's trajectory: "The mechanism of human destiny--that intricate weave of chance and fate and free will, as distinctly individual as a fingerprint--is surely meant to remain life's central mystery, to resist transparency, to make blame a dangerous and unsatisfactory exercise" (204).

Russo ends this double narrative of his own and his mother's life with an honest if not, for some readers in our discussion group, quite satisfying assessment of his efforts to understand and convey their connection: "Had I understood [his mother's great fear of poverty and abandonment and how it fueled her disorder] in time, had my moral imagination--any writer's most valuable gift, perhaps everyone's--not failed me, I could at least have . . . Could have what? The story ends here because I don't know how to complete that sentence. My family assures me I did everything that could've been done, and I don't know why it should seem so important that I resist the very conclusion that would let me off the hook. Maybe it's because I've never been a fan of grim, scientific determinism, or perhaps it's a writer's nature (or at least mine) to gnaw and worry and bury and unearth anything that resists comprehension. But who knows? Maybe it's just hubris, a stubborn insistence that if we keep trying one thing after another, we can coerce the ineffable into finally expressing itself. How tantalizingly close it seems even now, right there on the tip of my tongue before slipping away. But no doubt I'm misjudging the distance, being my mother's son" (242-43). If nothing else, Russo asks his readers to always consciously exercise their moral imagination.