After eight commanding works of fiction, the Pulitzer Prize winner now turns to memoir in a hilarious, moving, and always surprising account of his life, his parents, and the upstate New York town they all struggled variously to escape.
Anyone familiar with Richard Russo's acclaimed novels will recognize Gloversville once famous for producing that eponymous product and anything else made of leather. This is where the author grew up, the only son of an aspirant mother and a charming, feckless father who were born into this close-knit community. But by the time of his childhood in the 1950s, prosperity was inexorably being replaced by poverty and illness (often tannery-related), with everyone barely scraping by under a very low horizon.
A world elsewhere was the dream his mother instilled in Rick, and strived for herself, and their subsequent adventures and tribulations in achieving that goal—beautifully recounted here—were to prove lifelong, as would Gloversville's fearsome grasp on them both. Fraught with the timeless dynamic of going home again, encompassing hopes and fears and the relentless tides of familial and individual complications, this story is arresting, comic, heartbreaking, and truly beautiful, an immediate classic.
Elsewhere: A memoir
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Editorial Reviews
From Booklist
Pulitzer Prize–winning author Russo brings the same clear-eyed humanism that marks his fiction to this by turns funny and moving portrait of his high-strung mother and her never-ending quest to escape the provincial confines of their hometown of Gloversville, New York. All of her life, she clung to the notion that she was an independent woman, despite the fact that she couldn’t drive, lived upstairs from her parents, and readily accepted their money to keep her household afloat. She finally escaped her deteriorating hometown, which went bust when the local tannery shut down, by moving to Arizona with her 18-year-old son when he left for college and following him across the country right up until her death. His comical litany of her long list of anxieties, from the smell of cooking oil to her fruitless quest for the perfect apartment, is a testament to his forbearance but also to his ability to make her such a vivid presence in these pages. Part of what makes this such a profound tribute to her is precisely because he sees her so clearly, flaws and all. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Prizewinning author Richard Russo’s many fans will be lining up for his first nonfiction work, which has generated considerable prepublication buzz. --Joanne Wilkinson
Review
“It’s rare for a novelist to write candidly about the real behind the imagined. About a lifetime of work and the very person who inspired it. Yet that is precisely what Richard Russo has done in his memoir.... Redemption is always the prize in a Russo story. Nowhere do we see that more clearly than in Elsewhere, a brave little book in which a writer spins deprivation into advantage, suffering into wisdom, and a broken mother into a muse. Wanting him to be anywhere but Gloversville, Jean Russo did everything she could to make her son leave. And then, unable to feel whole anywhere outside it, she eventually brought him home.” —Marie Arana, The Washington Post
“Intimate and powerful...an impeccably told tale.” —Julia M. Klein, Chicago Tribune
“A gorgeously nuanced memoir about Russo’s mother and his own lifelong tour of duty spent—lovingly and exhaustedly—looking out for her. . . . Russo is the Bruce Springsteen of novelists . . . in a paragraph or even a phrase, he can summon up a whole world, and the world he writes most poignantly about is that of the industrial white working class.” —Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air
“Filled with insights, by turn tender and tough, about human fidelity, frailty, forbearance, and fortitude.” —Glenn C. Altschuler, The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Moving and darkly funny. . . Russo mines grace from his gritty hometown [and] the greatest charm of this memoir lies in the absences of self-pity and pretension in his take on his own history.” —Amy Finnerty, The Wall Street Journal
“Heartfelt and generous.” —Tricia Springstubb, Cleveland Plain Dealer
“One of the most honest, moving American memoirs in years... Russo's straightforward writing style is even more effective in Elsewhere [and his] intellectual and emotional honesty are remarkable.” —Michael Schaub, NPR.org
“Rich and layered... an honest book about a universal subject: those familial bonds that only get trickier with time.” —Kevin Canfield, Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Russo conjures the incredible bond between single mother and only child in a way that makes his story particularly powerful.” —Nicholas Mancusi, The Daily Beast
“Russo brings the same clear-eyed humanism that marks his fiction to this by turns funny and moving portrait of his mother and her never-ending quest to escape the provincial confines of their hometown.” —Joanne Wilkinson, Booklist
“An affecting yet never saccharine glimpse of the relationship among place, family and fiction.” —Kirkus
“Intimate and powerful...an impeccably told tale.” —Julia M. Klein, Chicago Tribune
“A gorgeously nuanced memoir about Russo’s mother and his own lifelong tour of duty spent—lovingly and exhaustedly—looking out for her. . . . Russo is the Bruce Springsteen of novelists . . . in a paragraph or even a phrase, he can summon up a whole world, and the world he writes most poignantly about is that of the industrial white working class.” —Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air
“Filled with insights, by turn tender and tough, about human fidelity, frailty, forbearance, and fortitude.” —Glenn C. Altschuler, The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Moving and darkly funny. . . Russo mines grace from his gritty hometown [and] the greatest charm of this memoir lies in the absences of self-pity and pretension in his take on his own history.” —Amy Finnerty, The Wall Street Journal
“Heartfelt and generous.” —Tricia Springstubb, Cleveland Plain Dealer
“One of the most honest, moving American memoirs in years... Russo's straightforward writing style is even more effective in Elsewhere [and his] intellectual and emotional honesty are remarkable.” —Michael Schaub, NPR.org
“Rich and layered... an honest book about a universal subject: those familial bonds that only get trickier with time.” —Kevin Canfield, Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Russo conjures the incredible bond between single mother and only child in a way that makes his story particularly powerful.” —Nicholas Mancusi, The Daily Beast
“Russo brings the same clear-eyed humanism that marks his fiction to this by turns funny and moving portrait of his mother and her never-ending quest to escape the provincial confines of their hometown.” —Joanne Wilkinson, Booklist
“An affecting yet never saccharine glimpse of the relationship among place, family and fiction.” —Kirkus
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
61 of 68 people found the following review helpful
By Daisy B.
Format:Hardcover
If you want an "I did this, then I did that, and I . . . I . . . I" passive-read of a memoir, this book is not for you. Rather, Russo tells the story of himself through the story of the person who was the primary force in his life and continues to be, even after her death: his mother. As when reading a novel, the reader must interpret, draw parallels, and analyze words and actions to understand motivations and the subtext. Not only does the book tell the story about one guy who's a writer from upstate New York; like the best works, it also provides insight into the human condition, the inescapable influence of family, and the lifelong effect larger-than-life "characters" have on the children they raise.
In an era when too often the veracity of memoirs is called into question--just because of the voyeuristic, overblown adventures needed to keep contemporary readers engaged--this memoir is thoroughly original. If you have ever read a novel and wondered how much is the author's actual life and how much is fiction, and how the two influence each other, you will love this book.
In an era when too often the veracity of memoirs is called into question--just because of the voyeuristic, overblown adventures needed to keep contemporary readers engaged--this memoir is thoroughly original. If you have ever read a novel and wondered how much is the author's actual life and how much is fiction, and how the two influence each other, you will love this book.
34 of 36 people found the following review helpful
By Bookreporter
Format:Hardcover
From his Pulitzer Prize-winning EMPIRE FALLS to novels like NOBODY'S FOOL and BRIDGE OF SIGHS, Richard Russo has mined a rich lode of stories based on his childhood in upstate New York's Gloversville. Until now, he's held back from writing about his experiences there in a work of nonfiction. Thanks to an invitation several years ago from Granta to contribute to its "going home" issue, he's finally produced this quietly moving memoir. But as much as it reveals some of the pleasures and pain of Russo's early life, the heart of ELSEWHERE is the story of his loving but often fractious relationship with his mother, Jean.
When the 18-year-old Russo was admitted to the University of Arizona in 1967, Jean took advantage of the opportunity to flee her compulsive gambler husband and the upstairs apartment she shared with her only child in her parents' Gloversville home. Driving a 1960 Ford Galaxie he christened the "Gray Death" (a vehicle that could not go in reverse, in a nice bit of symbolism), Russo and his mother embarked on what turned out to be a death-defying cross-country trek. Jean's quixotic decision to abandon a secure, well-paying job with General Electric in Schenectady, expecting she'd easily land a comparable position with the same employer in Arizona, was emblematic of what Russo calls her "intractable determination that was responsible for her seemingly endless suffering."
Soon their prospects diverged. Richard, with his Ph.D. in English, eventually left academia to become a full-time novelist. When Hollywood discovered his work, he added well-paying screenwriting jobs to his resume. But after a brief period of independence in Phoenix, Jean's life turned into a dispiriting odyssey, trailing her son and his extraordinarily patient wife and children from Tucson to Carbondale, Illinois and eventually to Maine. In describing it, Russo offers ample evidence for his belief that his mother "never considered us two separate people but rather one entity, oddly cleaved by time and gender, like fraternal twins somehow born twenty-five years apart, destined in some strange way to share a common destiny."
After Russo accepted a position at Colby College in 1991, it's easy to lose track of his mother's series of moves from one apartment to another, each experience seemingly unhappier than the last. The sequence becomes mind-numbing, perhaps in the way it felt to Russo as he lived it: his mother's complaints about a newly-chosen home; the difficulties of a move; a too-brief period of relative calm and then a crisis that began the cycle all over again. It doesn't take long to realize that something more than what the family referred to vaguely as Jean's "nerves" lay at the root of her psychological turmoil. Russo's patience in parceling out those details displays an admirable economy in both its content and its prose.
The account of his mother's final days in Maine and Russo's reflections on the complicated drama he and his mother acted out are similarly understated and all the more moving as a result. There's no false note of closure or facile comprehension in resigned observations like this one:
"From the time I was a boy I understood that my mother's health, her well-being, was in my hands. How often over the years did she credit me, or my proximity, with restoring her to health? My rock, as she was so fond of saying, always there when she needed me most. My own experience, however, had yielded a different truth --- that I could easily make things worse, but never better."
As Gloversville, when hats and gloves went out of fashion and the low-level factory jobs involved in making them began to move overseas, its economy, dependent on those goods, quickly collapsed. The modest existence the town's workers were able to scratch out before that happened was anything but pleasant. There's a gruesome description of work in the beam-house, the place the animal hides first were processed at the tannery where his grandfather worked as a glove-cutter, and a catalog of the toxic brew of by-products the chrome tanning process released into the town's air and water. Russo's home town was the "canary in the mine shaft" for other small towns where "you could have strafed Main Street with an automatic weapon without endangering a soul." His obituary for Gloversville is as moving as anything he's written in his acclaimed novels and an apt companion to the family story.
Whether it's his clear-eyed portrait of the mixture of warmth and frustration that marked his relationship with the woman who called him "Ricko-Mio" or the depiction of his hometown, in its heyday and in its desolation, ELSEWHERE is notable for its lack of sentimentality. That doesn't mean it's lacking in emotion. There are deep feelings coursing through this book. As we learn some of the story of Richard Russo's life, we can begin to appreciate the roots of his skill in transforming it into fiction.
Reviewed by Harvey Freedenberg
When the 18-year-old Russo was admitted to the University of Arizona in 1967, Jean took advantage of the opportunity to flee her compulsive gambler husband and the upstairs apartment she shared with her only child in her parents' Gloversville home. Driving a 1960 Ford Galaxie he christened the "Gray Death" (a vehicle that could not go in reverse, in a nice bit of symbolism), Russo and his mother embarked on what turned out to be a death-defying cross-country trek. Jean's quixotic decision to abandon a secure, well-paying job with General Electric in Schenectady, expecting she'd easily land a comparable position with the same employer in Arizona, was emblematic of what Russo calls her "intractable determination that was responsible for her seemingly endless suffering."
Soon their prospects diverged. Richard, with his Ph.D. in English, eventually left academia to become a full-time novelist. When Hollywood discovered his work, he added well-paying screenwriting jobs to his resume. But after a brief period of independence in Phoenix, Jean's life turned into a dispiriting odyssey, trailing her son and his extraordinarily patient wife and children from Tucson to Carbondale, Illinois and eventually to Maine. In describing it, Russo offers ample evidence for his belief that his mother "never considered us two separate people but rather one entity, oddly cleaved by time and gender, like fraternal twins somehow born twenty-five years apart, destined in some strange way to share a common destiny."
After Russo accepted a position at Colby College in 1991, it's easy to lose track of his mother's series of moves from one apartment to another, each experience seemingly unhappier than the last. The sequence becomes mind-numbing, perhaps in the way it felt to Russo as he lived it: his mother's complaints about a newly-chosen home; the difficulties of a move; a too-brief period of relative calm and then a crisis that began the cycle all over again. It doesn't take long to realize that something more than what the family referred to vaguely as Jean's "nerves" lay at the root of her psychological turmoil. Russo's patience in parceling out those details displays an admirable economy in both its content and its prose.
The account of his mother's final days in Maine and Russo's reflections on the complicated drama he and his mother acted out are similarly understated and all the more moving as a result. There's no false note of closure or facile comprehension in resigned observations like this one:
"From the time I was a boy I understood that my mother's health, her well-being, was in my hands. How often over the years did she credit me, or my proximity, with restoring her to health? My rock, as she was so fond of saying, always there when she needed me most. My own experience, however, had yielded a different truth --- that I could easily make things worse, but never better."
As Gloversville, when hats and gloves went out of fashion and the low-level factory jobs involved in making them began to move overseas, its economy, dependent on those goods, quickly collapsed. The modest existence the town's workers were able to scratch out before that happened was anything but pleasant. There's a gruesome description of work in the beam-house, the place the animal hides first were processed at the tannery where his grandfather worked as a glove-cutter, and a catalog of the toxic brew of by-products the chrome tanning process released into the town's air and water. Russo's home town was the "canary in the mine shaft" for other small towns where "you could have strafed Main Street with an automatic weapon without endangering a soul." His obituary for Gloversville is as moving as anything he's written in his acclaimed novels and an apt companion to the family story.
Whether it's his clear-eyed portrait of the mixture of warmth and frustration that marked his relationship with the woman who called him "Ricko-Mio" or the depiction of his hometown, in its heyday and in its desolation, ELSEWHERE is notable for its lack of sentimentality. That doesn't mean it's lacking in emotion. There are deep feelings coursing through this book. As we learn some of the story of Richard Russo's life, we can begin to appreciate the roots of his skill in transforming it into fiction.
Reviewed by Harvey Freedenberg
37 of 42 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
I have believed for several years now that Richard Russo-- I'm embarrassed to say whose novels I keep buying and have yet to read one of them since life keeps getting in my way-- is the most decent of human beings. I first came to that conclusion when I did read SHE'S NOT THERE by Jennifer Finney Boylan, one of his teaching colleagues at Colby College. Then I heard him read from THAT OLD CAPE MAGIC and my original opinion of him was set in concrete. And as everyone knows, that is not always the case when you actually meet a writer. His decency and kindness seep through in every page of ELSEWHERE as he remembers his mother's life and his taking care of her throughout her many years of undiagnosed obsessive compulsive-disorder. He says in the "Prologue" that he calls this book a memoir because he does not know "what else to call it--a story of intersections: of place and time, of private and public, of linked destinies and flawed devotion. It's more my mother's story than mine, but it's mine, too, because until just a few years ago she was seldom absent from my life."
Mr. Russo was born and grew up in the mill town of Gloversville, New York. If you can write a memoir about a town, then Gloversville is the third subject of this book. It's where the author got his title from: as both he and his mother Jean moved from place to place-- Arizona, Illinois, and finally Maine-- she couldn't wait to get out of Gloversville. Then when she was "elsewhere," she always wanted to move back and did for a short time after she had lost a job in Tucson. When Russo decided in 1967 to go to college in Arizona, she just loaded up their newly-purchased 1960 battleship gray Ford Galaxie and moved with him. Their real-life cross-country trip from upstate New York to Arizona is one of the hilarious parts of this memoir-- and every bit as funny as the fictional one from the movie "Little Miss Sunshine"-- that in many ways will break your heart. Mr. Russo hardly knew how to drive, (his mother could not although she later learned) had had practically no experience on interstate highways and certainly none pulling a trailer. He quickly learned that he should never park the car and trailer anywhere that required him to put the car in reverse. He admits to having a love-hate relationship with Gloversville, himself, and keeps writing about the town in his fiction.
In the 1950's, Jean Russo's condition was simply called "nerves." "This was something the whole family seemed aware of, but no one talked about it." Sound familiar? She was medicated with Phenobarbital after she told her family doctor that the stress of being a single mother and a fulltime worker at GE was causing her "condition," and later with other drugs like Valium. Over the years her condition worsened. Perhaps Mr. Russo should have seen the danger signs; others did. His father, who was separated from his mother, once told him when Russo was twenty-one and both he and his father were very drunk that "I couldn't be your father without being married to that crazy woman." And his father-in-law gave the following advice to his daughter Barbara, upon learning that the newly-wed couple planned to let Russo's mother move in with them until she could find a job and start a new life in Tucson: "Don't do it. If you let that woman in, you'll never be rid of her." When it was too late, Mr. Russo learned, after his daughter was diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder and he read a book on the subject, that his mother had been suffering from OCD all these years.
In spite of Mrs. Russo's many problems that threatened to shipwreck her life and those of Richard and his wife Barbara, who surely must be a saint, the author says in a recent interview that all the blessings in his life-- and he admits to many-- and the things he values most is because of his mother. When her troubled life was finally over and she was no longer in a cage, as she had described herself so many times over the years, Mr. Russo scattered her ashes in Martha's Vineyard, and unable to say anything else after both his daughters had spoken, recited that glorious Shakespeare poem that begins "Fear no more the heat o' the Sun/Nor the furious Winter's rages." Not a bad sendoff.
When memoirs-- often by someone the world does not know and should not-- are being published all over the place, it is refreshing to read one by someone like Mr. Russo-- so completely honest-- who has something to say and says it so well.
Mr. Russo was born and grew up in the mill town of Gloversville, New York. If you can write a memoir about a town, then Gloversville is the third subject of this book. It's where the author got his title from: as both he and his mother Jean moved from place to place-- Arizona, Illinois, and finally Maine-- she couldn't wait to get out of Gloversville. Then when she was "elsewhere," she always wanted to move back and did for a short time after she had lost a job in Tucson. When Russo decided in 1967 to go to college in Arizona, she just loaded up their newly-purchased 1960 battleship gray Ford Galaxie and moved with him. Their real-life cross-country trip from upstate New York to Arizona is one of the hilarious parts of this memoir-- and every bit as funny as the fictional one from the movie "Little Miss Sunshine"-- that in many ways will break your heart. Mr. Russo hardly knew how to drive, (his mother could not although she later learned) had had practically no experience on interstate highways and certainly none pulling a trailer. He quickly learned that he should never park the car and trailer anywhere that required him to put the car in reverse. He admits to having a love-hate relationship with Gloversville, himself, and keeps writing about the town in his fiction.
In the 1950's, Jean Russo's condition was simply called "nerves." "This was something the whole family seemed aware of, but no one talked about it." Sound familiar? She was medicated with Phenobarbital after she told her family doctor that the stress of being a single mother and a fulltime worker at GE was causing her "condition," and later with other drugs like Valium. Over the years her condition worsened. Perhaps Mr. Russo should have seen the danger signs; others did. His father, who was separated from his mother, once told him when Russo was twenty-one and both he and his father were very drunk that "I couldn't be your father without being married to that crazy woman." And his father-in-law gave the following advice to his daughter Barbara, upon learning that the newly-wed couple planned to let Russo's mother move in with them until she could find a job and start a new life in Tucson: "Don't do it. If you let that woman in, you'll never be rid of her." When it was too late, Mr. Russo learned, after his daughter was diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder and he read a book on the subject, that his mother had been suffering from OCD all these years.
In spite of Mrs. Russo's many problems that threatened to shipwreck her life and those of Richard and his wife Barbara, who surely must be a saint, the author says in a recent interview that all the blessings in his life-- and he admits to many-- and the things he values most is because of his mother. When her troubled life was finally over and she was no longer in a cage, as she had described herself so many times over the years, Mr. Russo scattered her ashes in Martha's Vineyard, and unable to say anything else after both his daughters had spoken, recited that glorious Shakespeare poem that begins "Fear no more the heat o' the Sun/Nor the furious Winter's rages." Not a bad sendoff.
When memoirs-- often by someone the world does not know and should not-- are being published all over the place, it is refreshing to read one by someone like Mr. Russo-- so completely honest-- who has something to say and says it so well.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
1.0 out of 5 stars
Boring and who cares
First of all I hate Memoirs as a genre. But I loved Empire Falls and liked The Bridge of Sighs. Mr. Read more
Published 2 days ago by K. K. Davies
4.0 out of 5 stars
A little anticlimactic
I like Richard Russo's work but the memoir seemed to take a long time getting to the punch line. The most interesting part was how this dysfunction translated to the next... Read more
Published 4 days ago by JoAnn Copes
4.0 out of 5 stars
Satisfying
Thoroughly enjoyable! This is the first book by Russo that I have read and I now know why he is one of my mother's favorite authors. Elsewhere is thoughtful. Read more
Published 8 days ago by Mary Mara
5.0 out of 5 stars
Russo always a good read fo me
Russo is one of my favorites of all times. This memoir was about his mother, and it really opened up insigts to many of his characters in his other books that he has written. Read more
Published 14 days ago by sue knarr
4.0 out of 5 stars
Not a memoir, really
More the story of a mother, son and the small town that shaped them both. Has the humor of his other novels, but the pain of his relationship with his mother also shines through. Read more
Published 15 days ago by oaktown55
2.0 out of 5 stars
wonderful if the reader likes whining
Russo has penned some of the best fiction of the past decade, but this memoir reads like prolonged pubescent whining. Read more
Published 16 days ago by A. Painter
5.0 out of 5 stars
A moving, funny, beautifully written memoir
I simply loved this book. I listened to it on CD, read by the author, which I think greatly added to my experience. Read more
Published 23 days ago by J. Epstein
3.0 out of 5 stars
autobiographical/ biographical
I think this is a story Richard Russo needed to tell. It 's theraputic. As many of us need to tell the story of our parent and disintangle ourselves from their attachments to us... Read more
Published 24 days ago by kristine
5.0 out of 5 stars
Compassionate & clear yed
A fascinating memoir by a Pulitzer Prize winning author who was raised by his single mother. A difficult relationship and he showed such loyalty even in the midst of his mother's... Read more
Published 25 days ago by Kim Prentice
5.0 out of 5 stars
Sad story beautifully told
I've enjoyed Russo's novels and his lively writing, so I figured I'd also like his memoir. Still, I approached the book with skepticism since some of the memoirs I've read have... Read more
Published 25 days ago by Naomi Karten
