Customer Reviews

Faded Pictures from My Backyard: A Memoir

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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!!!

What a pleasant surprise! Not being a huge fan of non-fiction, this book caught my interest. I couldn't put it down.

Sue Carswell's writing makes you feel as if you are part of the story - that you can actually see the people and places she describes. Her style of writing makes you feel as if you are sitting with her as she tells a story.

The heartfelt story she tells of her love for her mother is so poignant that at some points it is almost painful to read - her emotions are so raw and real. The other part of the story is Ms. Carswell's amazing candor as she describes her own problems and obsessions which haunted her throughout a majority of her life. The fact that she has perservered and become a major literary success is a tribute to her strength of character.

This is one of the best books I have ever read. It is destined to become a book club favorites and is already scheduled for discussion in my own book club.

Veronica Mathers

I am the author of this memoir. Although PW has every right to slam my book if they so feel, they also have a responsibility to get their facts right. This is not a thinly veiled memoir of my deceased mother but rather my love letter to her in the eight years since she has been gone. As I write in my book, her life story is richly textured and full of lessons on how to be a decent and caring parent. This is not a book about my hair-dos over time but a story of a family growing up with an unusual backyard, an orphanage. This is not a book that details the life of a "quasi orphan" it details the life of an orphan -- there is nothing quasi about that. Nor is it the the story of an orphan who becomes an "artist"...It is the story of a little boy who never once had a Sunday visitor throughout his entire childhood growing up on the grounds of the Albany Home for Children and who would later become a football star and esteemed school administrator. That orphan never painted a picture in his life. All said, please read what others have written about my book, but don't let PW whose cowardly reviewers never sign their names be your guiding source for me or other writers works. Thank you - Sue Carswell

"From childhood's hour, I have not seen as others were. I have not seen as others saw."

-- Edgar Allen Poe, "Alone"

A family is the bricks with which we are all built. They define us; they give us structure and something to cling to, or something from which to rebel. The family we grow up with stays a part of our lives forever.

In FADED PICTURES FROM MY BACKYARD, Sue Carswell reflects back on her own families --- the one she grew up with, and the one she would watch every day through the window looking out onto the backyard. Carswell grew up in a house bordering the Albany Home for Children, where her father worked as the Administrator and her mother was a nurse. Fearing the influence the troubled orphans could have on them, Sue and her four siblings were not permitted to play or really interact much with the residents of the Home. As the author grows up watching the orphans from the distance across her backyard, she beings to go through developmental troubles of her own --- suffering from insomnia, panic attacks, and depression. Sue and her own family become increasingly distanced by her troubles, and she begins to wonder if she doesn't fit in better with the lives she imagines the orphans must have, across the backyard.

Carswell's unique story is made up of pieced-together fragments, reflecting in some ways the fragmented lives of the Albany Home's residents. She skips back and forth through time in her own life story and interweaves her tale with stories of the Home's orphans. Carswell is a gifted storyteller with an eye for detail, although in early chapters dealing with her young childhood, the first-person narrative from the point of view of a young child does get a little tediously cute. She interweaves the stories of other orphans, growing up in the Albany Home during its different stages (when it was a more traditional orphanage, for example, during the Depression), but because Carswell could never really interact with those orphans, the stories feel somewhat impersonal. Kept, like many things, at a distance.

At its core, FADED PICTURES FROM MY BACKYARD is really about the family relationship Carswell knows and misses the most --- the relationship she shared with her own mother, who died in 1997. It's also the story of the strained relationship with her father, a man who --- like the orphans across the backyard --- she doesn't seem to be able to ever really understand.

Through FADED PICTURES FROM MY BACKYARD, Carswell shows us the many meanings of the word "orphan" and teaches us that it may never be too late to find our way home.

--- Reviewed by Lourdes Orive

I could not put this book down. I cried and cried at the end. Sue Carswell has an incredible gift as a writer. I loved Elaine and she has portrayed her beautifully. This may be an unintended result of the book, but it has inspired me to be a better and more patient mother. My daughter suffers from some of the same things Sue did as a girl. She sleeps on the floor of my room on an air mattress. It is incredibly wearing, as Sue's parents well knew. Her mother's love and patience are inspiring to me as a single mother of a foreign orphan adopted with the help of, of all places, Parsons Child and Family Center.

Despite some pre-publication buzz to the contrary, I didn't think Sue's father came off looking like anything other than what he is. A very good administrator, a dedicated husband and father, and a complicated person. I guess it would have been helpful to tell his story sooner rather than later, but I grew up in the same time in the same kind of family, it just wasn't the way then.

The tender love emanating from the pages of this book touch the depths of one's soul. Whether she knows it or not, Ms. Carswell has attained spiritual greatness, although the book does not seem to be written to that end. The love she has for her mother and the empathy she holds for the orphans are the true essence of its beauty.

Reminiscent of the style in which Harper Lee wrote To Kill a Mockingbird, the author so poignantly captures the voice of a child trying to make sense of the sadness which is her backyard; while at the same time she interjects bouts of comic relief that can only come from pure childhood innocence. As she ages in the book her voice does also. It is brilliantly done.

I highly recommend this book. You will cry. You will laugh out loud. And, because Ms. Carswell reveals her heart so openly, you will love.

Sue Carswell's Memoir Faded Pictures From My Backyard was a profound read. It touched my heart, my soul and made me realize how much my family means to me. When I picked up this book I can honestly say I didn't put it down until the very last page. I became engulfed, intrigued, enveloped into a little girls world so different from anything I could imagine.Faded Pictures will take you by surprise and maybe by wonder, too. A defininate book club winner that I am sure will be well known in a very short time.Trust me... Read it...And feel the beauty within.A Memoir worth every picture........

From December 1947 until June 1951 while I was a student at SUNY - Albany, I worked and lived at the Albany Home for Children as one of several Assistant Activities Directors. A week ago while googling "Albany Home", I came across this book and started reading it to learn more about what has happened at the home since I left. It didn't take long for me to become absorbed in the major thrust of the book as described by previous reviewers - especially Virginia Mathers. "The heartfelt story she tells of her love for her mother is so poignant that at some points it is almost painful to read - her emotions are so raw and real. The other part of the story is Ms. Carswell's amazing candor as she describes her own problems and obsessions which haunted her throughout a majority of her life. The fact that she has perservered and become a major literary success is a tribute to her strength of character."

I actually couldn't put the book down.

Although it was a minor part of the book, Ms. Carswell's descriptions of life at the home, both from her own experiences and Bob Wygant's, was right on. In fact, I learned more about the purpose and mission of the home by reading the book than I did while I was there.

I'm glad that she got to meet my boss, friend, protector, and straight shooter - Coach Huddleston.

Read this book!