Blue Suburbia: Almost a Memoir [Paperback]

Laurie Albanese (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 16, 2004

Blue Suburbia is a searing memoir so fresh, original, and honest that it will break your heart and renew your faith in the human spirit.

With each spare stroke of her pen, Laurie Lico Albanese paints a vivid portrait of the blue-collar landscape of her childhood -- rusted swing sets, auto body shops, greasy hands, home improvements -- taking readers along for the wild, treacherous ride that leads to her escape. Her mother may stand silently at the sink year after year, or lie in the basement weeping, but Albanese is determined to flee the deadening certainty of her parents' lives. Her story does not disappoint us.

By turns haunting, hilarious, tragic, and romantic, Blue Suburbia is the chronicle of a determined young woman who overcomes family limitations, socio-economic obstacles, and personal fears to build a happy -- and blessedly ordinary -- life. Written entirely in free verse, Blue Suburbia's cadence is a steady, rhythmic heartbeat, pulsing with pain, rebellion, love, and triumph. This is the story many of us might tell, if we had the courage.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Albanese's moving if predictable hybrid volume tells the story of her life in verse. As she seems to recognize, this author's key experiences resemble those of many other women. Albanese survives a working-class Northeastern family with an abusive father and a clinically depressed mother, struggles through college into an unsatisfying job in publishing, then marries and moves to Chicago, where she becomes a troubled stay-at-home mom, raising a boy and a girl. Later, Albanese grieves at her mother's death, moves to New Jersey ("unhappy/ to be back in the suburbs"), enters therapy, and discovers self-confidence in part through writing this very book. Readers may cavil at Albanese's verse technique; here, for example, she views a Picasso: "nothing prepared me/ for the day I stood face-to-face with genius/ hearing the man's message/ screaming in my soul/ but afraid to say a word." Though Albanese's novel, Lynelle by the Sea, won praise for its fine descriptions, her memoir can seem unpolished and unexceptional compared to many recent prose competitors, from Beverly D'Onofrio to Lauren Slater (whom Albanese calls "a personal/ hero of mine"). Yet Albanese's experience, and the straightforward ways in which she describes it, may well resonate with many who have felt, in her words, afraid "of the very life/ being sucked/ out of me," trapped in endless familial obligations, and just "barely/ hanging/ on."
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About the Author

Laurie Albanese is the author of the novel Lynelle by the Sea and the memoir Blue Suburbia, which was named a Book Sense Best Book of the Year and was an Entertainment Weekly Editor's Choice selection.

Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial (March 16, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060565632
• ISBN-13: 978-0060565633
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.3 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,735,599 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Unique and fresh, December 28, 2005

By 

TheBookcrosser (Tucson, AZ USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Blue Suburbia: Almost a Memoir (Paperback)

I started reading Blue Suburbia in bed, late one night. I read until my eyes were burning. I picked the book up again the next morning and sat outside with my coffee, reading until I reached the last page.

This book a marvelous break from same-old/same-old. The structure is unique and fresh. Albanese's judicious use of white space and line breaks forces the reader to pause and put emphasis in exactly the places she would have if she were speaking the words out loud. Her technique provides perfect timing.

The tone of the book is deeply personal, confidential really. The author's presence is palpable. You are pulled into her reality, listening to her share her life experiences over a cup of coffee, then she looks up at you and says, "So you see now why I forgave her?"... "...Do you get the picture now?" Her feelings resonate on the page.

I recognized some of the people in her world. The father who uses the belt to communicate and then, as an old man, edits his memories (an ex-husband's father). The cold, unhappy mother whose children would never be able to do the right thing, to make her happy (my friend's mother). And this (not using her spacing):
" Some folks say in the land of opportunity that the starting line doesn't matter, but let me ask, what was expected of you at fifteen? How wide was your horizon? Where were you destined? Who set the course? What were you told to dream of? How far was too far to imagine? What joy was yours to attain?"
I saw myself here. You can only appreciate how far you've come when you know where you started.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Blue Suburbia, March 31, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Blue Suburbia: Almost a Memoir (Paperback)

Laurie Lico Albanese has written a book of great beauty, which raises the quotidien and everyday to the level of great literature. In her final poem she asks, "Is anything ever truly ordinary?" and invites the reader to see their own lives in a new light. In her "almost-memoir" Albanese chronicles both the large and small events which shape her as a person, from her childhood in suburban working-class Long Island, to her initiation into sexuality, art, love and loss. Throughout, Lico has a brilliant eye for the telling detail, that make her poems breathe with life, even as she takes on the most compelling questions of existence. The reader's heart races along with Albanese as she experiences acute anxiety, crippling self doubt and crushing boredom. Her ability to experience life with such vivid force--from her overpowering love for her child, to her reignited passion for her husband, to her triumph as a writer--redeem her and reward the reader. That the arc of a life can be so well captured in a slim volume of free verse poetry, as accesible and haunting as a Bruce Springsteen album, is an incredible thing to behold.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Stark Reality..., March 28, 2004

By 

Marcia McCullough "Owl's Feathers" (Boston, MA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Blue Suburbia: Almost a Memoir (Paperback)

There are many books we've all read where the main character has endured many of the same things as are written about in Blue Suburbia. For some reason, however, that those same circumstances are written in free verse seems to make them slap a reader upside the head with the reality of it all. The language of Blue Suburbia is wonderfully sparse which, I think, emphasizes the actions...there are no flowery or minimizing adjectives or adverbs to take the sting out of the nouns and verbs. The word imageries linger long after closing the cover on Blue Suburbia.