Customer Reviews

Following the Tambourine Man: A Birthmother's Memoir (Writing American Women)

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When I read memoir, I scribble the margins full of notes about writing techniques that might apply to my own passion for recording my life as memoir.

Ellerby's Following the Tambourine Man: A Birthmother's Memoir inspired an abundance of scribbles. It's an excellent example of how to tell a story. Ellerby provides immediacy whether using past or present tense. She skips around in her life with ease, sometimes writing about her adult self and her sixteen-year-old self in the same sentence. And she reflects on an era by using political and cultural happenings and lyrics from the Beatles and other musical groups popular in the 60's. Although we belong to different time periods and Ellerby's story is quite different from mine, I identified with her heart-wrenching drama by imagining what if the accidental pregnancy had happened to me.

Yes, that big what if of my era and hers--before The Pill. Ellerby's privileged life in the conservative suburbs of Los Angeles wasn't protection enough. She and her boyfriend that she loved for way too long into her adult life did it only once, and when her parents found out she was pregnant, they did what any parent with wealth and status did back then. Overnight, they shipped her off to a home for unwed mothers and covered up the incident by constructing a lie that everyone, even the father of the child, was told. One lie led to another, all under the guise of what was best for their daughter.

Ellerby wanted to keep her baby, but it was taken from her after only a moment's glance. She didn't argue nor did she discuss her sadness with her parents or anyone else. Instead, she spent most of her adult life living a lie, feeling lost and lonely.

There is so much more to the story: the birthmother's guilt, her multiple marriages, and then finally the happy ending. I strongly recommend the book.

by Donna Van Straten Remmert
for Story Circle Book Reviews
reviewing books by, for, and about women

This is one of the best books written on the subject. I couldn't put it down. It's not just for those in the adoption triad, but something most people would enjoy. I highly recommend it.

This is an excellent book, My BF even mentioned how quickly I read it. I did not want to put it down. Excellent story. excellent writing, Excellent.

This was just a wonderful book that went from being heart-breaking to heart-warming, thank goodness. It's hard to understand the sexual ignorance of the 1950s and early 1960s, but it's all too true, and I know this because I was there. Looking back, I can barely believe how we girls were so naive and how the boys of that generation didn't understand our ignorance and so proceeded to act on their urges! It sounds very primitive, and I guess it was.

In almost the same year, my college roommate, also from San Marino, California as is Ellerby, also became pregnant by her boyfriend, but they were just a few years older and so made their own decision to keep the baby and get married. It was not an easy decision to make in those days, but she was spared the years of terrible psychic pain that plagued Ellerby.

I have read several books written by birthmothers and they tell the same general story and describe the same unrelenting pain, but this book is particularly well written and the photos of mother and daughter are very sweet.