Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Author:  Sherman Alexie

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Memoir

457 pages, published June 13, 2017

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me is the book that well known Native American author Sherman Alexie wrote after his mother’s death.  As he reveals in the book, he had a complicated relationship with his mother who could be alternatively kind and cruel.  Alexie also has a complicated relationship with his fellow Native Americans which he also explores.

Quotes 

“What about me?” I asked. “Am I mean?” “You aren’t mean to me with words,” she said. “You’re mean to me with your silences.”

 

“But a person can be genocided-can have every connection to his past severed- and live to be an old man whose rib cage is a haunted house built around his heart.”

 

“I TEND TO believe in government because it was the U.S. government that paid for my brain surgery when I was five months old and provided USDA food so I wouldn’t starve during my poverty-crushed reservation childhood and built the HUD house that kept us warm and gave me scholarship money for the college education that freed me. Of course, the government only gave me all of that good shit because they completely fucked over my great-grandparents and grandparents but, you know, at least some official white folks keep some of their promises.”

 

“An Indian’s wealth   Is determined by what they lose And not by what they save.”

 

“Scholars talk about the endless cycle of poverty and racism and classism and crime. But I don’t see it as a cycle, as a circle. I see it as a locked room filled with the people who share my DNA. This room has recently been set afire and there’s only one escape hatch, ten feet off the ground. And I know I have to build a ladder out of the bones of my fallen family in order to climb to safety.

 

“I don’t recall the moment when I officially became a storyteller—a talented liar—but here I must quote Simon Ortiz, the Acoma Pueblo writer, who said, “Listen. If it’s fiction, then it better be true.”

 

“My parents sold blood for money to buy food. Poverty was our spirit animal.”

 

“I cannot defeat cancer. Nobody defeats cancer. There is no winning or losing. There is no surviving or not surviving. There are only coin flips: heads or tails; benign or malignant; weight loss or bloating; morphine or oxycodone; extreme rescue efforts or Do Not Resuscitate; live or die.”

My Take

I decided to read You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me largely based the graphi nove that Sherman Alexie wrote about his childhood and teenage years:  The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.  I really enjoyed that clever, engaging and touching book and had high hopes for this one.  Unfortunately, I was disappointed.  In You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me, Alexie spends a lot of his time wallowing, blaming and casting aspersions.  I also found the book  to be relentlessly repetitive, a construct that did not work for me.  The upside is that I did learn about Native American culture in the modern world, an area I knew little about.  If that could have been done in a less negative manner, I think I would have enjoyed this book more.