Customer Reviews

Eleanor's Rebellion: A Mother, Her Son, and Her Secret

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

i'm still trying to figure out why it took 31/2 weeks to ship.
i needed it for a specific purpose- and it took too long to be useful

Poignant, serious story of betrayal and a man's search for the truth, and for a way to come to terms. I felt tremendous compassion for all the major characters, probably because David portrays his parents with great depth. He also tells his story simply, without fluff - and that only adds power to his memoir. I found this book inspiring and enlightening.

I don't think I've ever read a more honest memoir covering such difficuly material. The author is unsurpassed in describing both his own, often bad, behaviors and the tough material of his family's life. Moreover, he shows very clearly what knowing "the truth" about family secrets can and cannot do.

I have studied what is called "the intergenerational transmission of trauma" and this book describes one form of it better than anything I've ever read. I also found the author's style to be both learned and lucid, often bringing in material from various experts in the field. I recommend it to anyone who has had to deal with family secrets or trauma, either in one's own life or as a professional.

David Siff is a brilliant writer whether under his birth name, or his well respected sports work as David Falkner. This autobiograpy has a new twist in every chapter, and since we know that he is Van Heflin's son from the start, we play along with his life knowing the secret he has yet to learn. A fascinating moment - lunch at a Hollywood studio commissary with Heflin in the room, and David invited to join the group.

Very well written; unusual and worthwhile firsthand story

David Siff's poignant odyssey in search of his true identity is ignited when he is forty and accidentally reads "Birth by Adoption" stamped on his birth certificate in the New York City registry. This elegantly written autobiography, more than a biography, engaged me completely as Siff painstakingly confronts his "parents" and family in order to learn the truth. Shrouded in secrecy, denial, half-truths and lies, he pieces the puzzle together. The last significant pieces finally turn up serendipitously long after his mother's death. The author's dogged pursuit contrasts to Eleanor's disingenuous parries as he lunges for the truth about his birth. Throughout, Eleanor appears veiled, silent about the details of her affair with David's biological father, a famous movie star, and evasive about Siff's first years. By the end of this fast-reading book, I had a profound sense of the author's sadness, yearning and disorientation from birth, and on the other hand, an equally profound respect for his mother's rebellious courage and solitary mission in the name of love and devotion.

This book was exceedingly well-written and seemed very honest, true to the time periods in which the story took place, had some humor and light-heartedness, all the while telling the poignant story of the author's mother, Eleanor, who bore him illegitimately but refused to give him up as the times and her family situation dictated, and so she consented to marry a man who loved her enough to keep her secret and together they "adopted" him and began a rather conventional life. The author was a somewhat difficult child (aren't we all?), raised in a somewhat dysfunctional family (aren't they all?), but the love and devotion were always freely given and freely taken. The story told here is absorbing and is told in an elegant fashion, but then the tone changed so drastically during the last 70 or so pages that I ended up finishing the book with a bad taste in my mouth. Turns out the boy--now a 40 year old man with a family of his own-- finds out about his birth and can't handle the fact that his mother was not truthful with him about who his real father was (or is that sperm-donor?) . . . So he does what most self-absorbed people do in one way or another, only he does it in spades. He drinks, shop-lifts, quits his profession, plays around on his wife, fathers an illegitimate child of his own (with whom he never has any contact), finally leaves his wife and children, and above all, is downright mean to his mother, the woman who basically gave up her future in order to keep this child. He is mean to her for the rest of her life and I find this so profoundly sad that I guess I am having trouble focusing on the book/story as an item to be reviewed, rather than an issue to be dealt with. My lingering question is: how could a woman (the Eleanor of the title), a daughter of immigrant parents, be so selfless and at the same time raise a boy/man who feels his perceptions/feelings/right to know/ supercede anyone else's feelings/right to privacy/right to live their own life? And what makes him think that the world revolves around him and his so-called problems rather than, say, the possible problems of the child he refused to acknowledge? Where did this profound selfishness come from? That said, I guess a book review should not take issue with the subject or tone of a book, and so I will say that in my opinion the book was well written, easy to read, but again proves that the secret adoptions of the early part of the 20th century did virtually no one any good. So sad.

An interesting story might lurk in "Eleanor's Rebellion," but a lot of it is lost in poor editing. This book is ruined by run-on sentences that point to the wrong objects, use of parentheses when another sentence would work better, and switching from past to present tense and back to past again David, the author (and protagonist) studied writing in college, but it's not evident in his book. The narrative sounds as though he recited into a tape recorder but did not tighten his sentences upon transcription. He discusses a scene and then goes back in time, and then jumps back to the present. He discusses wonderful photographs, which aren't included in the book. He also misuses a lot of long words in cases in which diminutive words would suffice. I was unable to read more than twenty pages at a time without cursing the editor. A final note on the format: the font used (for the first edition hardcover) is hard on the reader, in that commas look a lot like semicolons. This makes many hard-to-read sentences even harder to interpret.

David was put up for adoption by his biological mother, who visited him in the orphanage and who adopted him before his second birthday. David blames much of his life on the lie his mother told him. He cites journal reports of problems in other orphans of his time. He doesn't delve into his mother's obvious emotional problems that he might have inherited, nor does he discuss how his use of LSD might have led to some of his problems.

In the book, he is obsessed with the biological father he never knew. Perhaps some of his problems do stem from that. However, since he didn't know that he was adopted until he was middle-aged, he seems to mislay the blame of his apathy on this deep dark family secret. Instead of a victim, he comes off as a whiny brat.

David professes love for his wife when they first meet, but seems almost indifferent in her throughout the book - and in his children and siblings.

Again, I feel that a great story lies in "Eleanor's Rebellion," but the author is clearly not a writer. A spell check and a thesaurus do not an author make. There is no passion in a subject that always seems to be enveloped in enchantment.

The best virtue of this book would be its ability to teach. A high school composition teacher would do well to give copies to a freshman class to edit and correct. I may contact my high school comp. teacher; I think that he would enjoy the challenge.