Faded Pictures from My Backyard: A Memoir [Hardcover]

Sue Carswell (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 26, 2005

Sue Carswell grew up with two families: her own and the one comprised of the orphans living in her backyard. Though the Carswells’ house is on the grounds of the Albany Home for Children, where Sue’s father is an administrator and her mother a nurse, Sue and her four rowdy siblings are not permitted to play with the Home’s young residents. Instead, plagued by irrational fears, Sue observes these troubled souls from a distance. As she watches the orphans come and go, she fantasizes that in their unorthodox world a girl as unusual as she might just fit in.

Racked with insomnia and panic attacks, Carswell feels increasingly out of step with her so-called normal family. While lauded for her exceptional creativity, behind the gregarious mask is a frightened and depressed girl. Throughout her life, she remains fiercely attached to her gentle, compassionate mother who, like the children next door, grew up without parents.

With a structure reminiscent of Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, Sue Carswell’s remarkable book skillfully weaves together stories spanning the decades and capturing generations of both the Carswell family and the Albany Home. Curious about the past, Carswell tracks down some of the Home’s previous inhabitants, searching all the while for the ever-elusive happy ending. In the process, she revisits her own turbulent childhood and discovers the parents she never fully understood.

Writing poignantly about the tremendous void left by the death of a mother, Sue Carswell has created an utterly original rendering of family and loss, sharply observed, paradoxically tender, and illuminated by Sue a wry, witty narrative voice.

Faded Pictures from My Backyard parlays the literal orphan into a larger story about one woman’s triumph over fear. A study in emotional dislocation held aloft by humor, this is a stirring narrative about the times that matter most and the connections that last. Above all, this is the affecting tale of the lasting love between a mother and daughter.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In 1968, when Carswell was seven, her father became the executive director of the Albany (N.Y.) Home for Children, formerly known as the Albany Orphan Asylum. The family's backyard abutted the Home's playground, but Carswell and her siblings were forbidden to fraternize with the client children. From that fact, Carswell has spun a thin memoir of her life's "dramatic ups and downs." Ostensibly, the book celebrates Carswell's mother and includes a brief account of artist Bob Wygant, a quasi-orphan at the asylum before and during WWII, but both of these characters are given short shift in favor of the author herself, whose every childish mood and haircut is exhaustively chronicled. Disconcertingly, this is presented largely in age-appropriate prose: "I am nervous. I don't see them. My heart goes thump-thump. It thump-thumps fast"; readers will tire of chapter after chapter of Carswell's self-absorbed childhood reveries (she glosses more quickly over her adolescent and adult life). Though Carswell seems obsessed with orphans, she doesn't include much information on the Home, her mother's life or that of Wygant, whose life isn't relevant to her own or anyone else's, beyond the fact of his former residence at the Home. For most readers, the memoir will seem pointless, though writing it presumably helped the author deal with some emotional childhood issues.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Symptoms of cross-genre abuse crop up even in nonfiction, and this depression memoir/family history/local history is a perfect example. Carswell, a magazine editor and writer, spins the story of her own growing up, the child of an administrator of the Albany (NY) Home for Children. It's the story of what it felt like, watching the orphans across her backyard from the relative safety of her own home. It's the story of some of those orphans grown up, some who made lives and some who didn't make it. It's the story of her gentle and utterly beloved mother, her mother's dying, and the writer's episodes of depression and OCD. Carswell constructs all of this in a carefully woven narrative, although it sinks into bathos and mawkishness as often as it rises to limn a searing memory or tie a loose emotional end off neatly. Quotes from orphaned writers (so many of them!) provide echo and counterpoint to each chapter. GraceAnne DeCandido
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Ballantine Books; 1ST edition (April 26, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0345438566
• ISBN-13: 978-0345438560
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.6 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #477,931 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Sue Carswell is a reporter/researcher at "Vanity Fair." She is the author of a debut novel, "Paying For Glory," and the memoir, "Faded Pictures from My Backyard." (Ballantine 2005) She is a former, senior story editor for "Good Morning America," contributing launch editor for "O, The Oprah Magazine," executive editor at Crown, senior editor at Pocket (Simon & Schuster, Inc, and correspondent for "People" magazine. She is also currently a ghostwriter and speechwriter. Carswell graduated from The Albany Academy for Girls in Albany, New York, and the University of Vermont. She lives in Manhattan's West Village with her dachshund, Watson. She is available at [e-mail]

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars If you want your humanity button pushed!, June 8, 2005

By 

Armchair Interviews (Minneapolis, MN) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Faded Pictures from My Backyard: A Memoir (Hardcover)

Faded Pictures From My Backyard is the story of the Carswell family, told by oldest daughter Sue, using an age-appropriate child's voice through the years.

The father is an administrator at the Albany Home for Children. The family lived just this side of the home/orphanage-and they never, ever were allowed to interact with the children. The Carswell children never understood the "why" of this rule, and it was described as another "it's complicated" answer to some questions.

The orphans ranged from 6 to 18 (when they left to make their way in the world). The only parents these children knew were the houseparents paid to care for them. How they must have secretly envied the five Carswell children with both a mother and a father, especially at holidays ... and bedtime.

Saturdays the Home's children were dressed in their best hand-me-down clothing to line up and wait for visitors who might be a parent or it might be a new mom and dad come to adopt them. Children were on display every Saturday, and seldom is one selected or even visited.

Some were truly orphans, others relinquished to the home for "adult" reasons, and others became residents because they had mental illness, or considered incorrigible.

The author herself has frequent childhood bouts with anxiety, baseless fears and worry, way beyond a normal child's. We later learn that although her father worked with troubled children - or better said, children with troubles, and the mother was a nurse there, both choose to minimize their daughter's maladies, and not get her treatment.

Her book follows these children and her family as they struggle, learn and grow up. At a 1989 reunion the former Home residents told wonderful stories of hope and love. Some were very successful, others succumb early to depression and misdirection. Some Home children had difficulty when adults because they never learned traditional relationships and what "mother love" is.

The author however has received tremendous "mother love" all her life - and had as one of her fears that her mother Elaine would die when she was young (as her mother had).

The famous quotes used are annotated that each writer also lost one or both parents while young.

The book is a great story as you cheer for them, worry for them, and then grieve with them all. In the 1960s such residential homes still existed. Kind counselors, houseparents and support staff cared for and about these children, and you will too. www.ArmchairInterviews says Faded Pictures From My Backyard is a very worthwhile read if you want your humanity button pushed a couple dozen times.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I couldn't put this book down, I read it in two days flat., May 25, 2005

By 

Elizabeth MacDonald (New York, N.Y.) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Faded Pictures from My Backyard: A Memoir (Hardcover)

Faded Pictures from My Backyard" is a compelling memoir of what it was like for a young, inquisitive and caring girl of a family of seven to live in a house on whose backyard sat an orphanage, a riverbank teeming with unruly life, where her father worked as its administrator and her mother its nurse.
This is a gripping and heartrending work, because Carswell has captured what often can't be captured or communicated later in adult life, the psychosomatic feel of what it's like to live among orphans. This book is tailor-made for a movie.
Especially forceful are scenes of how the orphans' fears were made manifest.
That includes scenes depicting an orphan who, day and night, breaks windows desperately trying to escape, but has no place to go. Scenes of orphans setting off fire alarms in their bedrooms every night, jolting everyone out of sleep miles around. Scenes showing a young, terribly burned, suicidal boy, whose mother tried to kill him in a house fire, who desperately wanted to join his mother in heaven--I know, I couldn't stop crying here--and who could only find value in his own life after the orphanage's administrators helped him enact his own wake.
Especially heartrending are the scenes where, every year at Christmas, Carswell would stare out her backyard window as orphans trekked across the snow in hand-me-down clothes to celebrate in the orphanage's gym with donated toys under a donated tree, alone, none of their parents in sight. Touching too are scenes about orphan Bob Wygant, who overcame painful obstacles to find success and love with his vivacious and kind wife Sally.
All of this is anchored by two powerful moral presences, Carswell's father, John, who selflessly and tirelessly gives of himself daily to the orphans, all the while running his own brood of five towheaded, rambunctious, loving children, including Carswell's bighearted, kind sisters Mandy and Sarah. Helping him along were Carswell's loving, smart Aunt Mary and fun-loving cousin Laurie.
And who really comes shining through is Carswell's mother, Elaine, a selfless woman who tirelessly gave herself totally in the clarity of love. Elaine is the heart of the book. Carswell deftly shows how her mother's life was simply about one, little three-letter word: Joy.
As Sue's mother's illness advances, as her body is hollowed out by cancer, you'll cry from the pain that echoes throughout these pages, a pain that feels much like a voice echoing in a house without furniture and curtains.
Carswell has accomplished quite a feat. She's carefully woven the stories of orphans in with her own feelings of what it was like for a young girl to absorb their pain and emotion. In so doing, Carswell showed how her genetic makeup of depression and sleep disorder was ignited by her backyard, conditions which were only dealt with as an adult living in New York City.
There's a timeless lesson here for parents, especially to be aware if their child needs help. And there's a lesson here about the value of showing children love every day, not just once a year at Christmas.
In the end, Carswell has written a book that is animated with those first visions of childhood in their original freshness and vigor.
It's hard to find in any work of fiction, much less a memoir, anything that's quite like the pure emotional punch of this book.
It's true, what someone once said, that the effect of intense, heartfelt emotions feels like going down two steps at a time. You feel as if you're drawing on the very source of life itself. That's what this book accomplishes.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I couldn't put this book down!, May 1, 2005

By 

D. Singer - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Faded Pictures from My Backyard: A Memoir (Hardcover)

This was a magnificent read. Knowing this family and loving Elaine made it an incredibly satisfying experience. Bob's story and the depiction of the children in care kept me spellbound. Sue's story is one that we can all appreciate. We are so formed, for better or worse, by our environment. Thank you for writing this book. It is truly a love letter to Elaine, to Bob and to your wonderful family. Sue, your sharing of your struggles will help so many people. READ THIS BOOK!!!