Customer Reviews

How I Came Into My Inheritance: And Other True Stories

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Dorothy Gallagher applies dry-eyed wit and candor not only to her fiercely difficult parents and their numerous associates but also to herself, which makes "How I Came Into My Inheritance" a lesson in revelation. What sets this book far above the usual memoir is the author's abiltity to tell a story, her instinct for the telling detail, the killing choice of a word. She knows how to write, and the reader cannot resist her.

While she is exceptionally good (and funny!) at illustrating the politics that defined her childhood (she would have been surprised to learn that all children didn't go to socialist summer camp), Gallagher is mesmerizing when she writes about her parents aging. She captures the exquisite heartbreak and confusion both for child and parent, and she does it with no sentimentality whatsoever.

In this age of the lazy, glossy-mag confessionals, Gallagher's book is a triumph of sophisticated observation and highly skilled prose. It will raise your standards for anecdote, memoir and family history.

This brief memoir can easily be sandwiched into our busy lives, and what a reward it is for those who read it. It is a partly sad, partly funny, very engrossing story of the end of Ms Gallagher's parents' lives and the effect on her, which we come to understand gradually as she reveals more of her past. Her bizarre childhood is revealed with a light touch, and her unique perspective on the time period is fascinating. It will make you smile, it has a familiar ring to anyone dealing with aging and loss, and is both a good read and a comfort. What more could one ask for?

This book is fiercely honest, reads like a hardboiled swoon, with dark, delicious, surprising humor throughout. The first chapter, which involves a hilarious bit of deathbed hustling on the part of the author, is a defiant shot that says: judge me, go ahead, I dare you. Born into an eccentric family of Russian immigrants, the author's earliest remembrances are seasoned with the tarnishing legacies of Trotsky, Stalin, Marx. How these ideas filter into a child's mind and then play out in her adult life is what makes the rest of the book so touching, and often, so funny. The chapter about her job inventing star gossip for tabloid mags is alone worth the cover price. Highly recommended.

HOW I CAME INTO MY INHERITANCE by Dorothy Gallagher is a story of family, or rather, episodes from a family history. About halfway through, I realized that Dorothy's immediate forebears had a history much similar to mine. Around the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, her maternal grandparents and their youngest children emigrated to the U.S. from the Ukraine, following their three eldest children sent over previously. About the same time, my paternal grandparents emigrated to America from Romania with their youngest offspring, the oldest son having gone on before. In both cases, additional children were born in the States. There was a shared experience there, however nebulous, that made me appreciate this book more than I might have.

Unlike the five-star SLEEPING ARRANGEMENTS by Laura Shaine Cunningham, HOW I CAME INTO MY INHERITANCE is less of a warm and fuzzy celebration of family. The latter is perhaps more interesting than engaging, more poignant than charming. Each exhibits its author's own brand of humor, Gallagher's being a bit drier. Cunningham's pivot is always herself growing up, while Gallagher's stories often focus on her mother, father, and various aunts with only tangential reference to herself. Gallagher's have a discontinuous feel, although there is a broad, overlying time frame.

The politics of Dorothy's parents and aunts is perhaps unusual among written memoirs of the U.S. between the world wars. They were passionately Red. Lenin's photo had a place of honor on the wall; Uncle Joe Stalin and the victories of the Soviet armies against the Nazi invaders were much admired. During the Depression, capitalism in America appeared to be moribund, and the family was prepared to welcome the new socialist world order. Oddly, Gallagher doesn't mention how much of this revolutionary spirit she retained. Apparently, it just failed to take, as the political and religious passions of parents often do in their offspring.

For me, HOW I CAME INTO MY INHERITANCE hit its stride and was at its most interesting when Gallagher recounts her early efforts as a writer, first scribbling dubious stories about celebrities in such scandal mags as "Screen Stars" and "Movie World", forerunners of today's checkstand tabloids. Then, there was the agony of her first book, ALL THE RIGHT ENEMIES: THE LIFE AND MURDER OF CARLO TRESCA. Saddest is the second-to-last chapter, "The Last Indian", about her youngest aunt, Rachile, otherwise mostly ignored up to that point. Rachile outlived all of her siblings, dying convinced that she'd been terribly wronged throughout life by her brothers and sisters.

HOW I CAME INTO MY INHERITANCE suffers greatly from not including a section of visual snapshots. While Dorothy can see with her mind's eye, the reader needs to be shown faces. While it might not have made the narrative more joyful, it would've put flesh on the past and given it a more balanced perspective. (I remember my own maternal grandmother dying as a bitter, unhappy old woman. It's good that I have photos of her cheerfully and vibrantly young. One forgets from where the aged come.)

It appears to me that writing this book was the author's way of seeking closure. In the very last chapter, she recounts visiting Romania - as near as she could get to the Old Country - five years after her parents' deaths, and writes in the last paragraph:

"And now, in this odd and wracked corner of the world, on this hill ... grief slipped away. I felt happy as the day is long."

Started it on the bus home at 10:30. Took time out to walk the dog. Didn't put it down until I finished it at nearly 4a.m. E-mailed my friends about it. Loaned it to my neighbor: now there's a waiting list for my copy.
Every one here is fully alive, but their privacy is never betrayed. The swirl of the family life of large, committed characters, pulls the reader in, as if it were one's own. Their stories inform mine, but with tougher wit. The miserable uncle whom life always betrays until, widowed at the end, he gets a whole year of happiness with an ex-lover. The bossy aunt who runs everyone's life but, finally, does not have the courage to dump a featureless husband, chained to him in Art Deco Miami. The aunt & uncle who barely escape their return to a Russian worker's paradise. The author's own betrayal of her principles in order to avoid jail for having an abortion in the bad old days. Terry Southern, Mario Puzo & Bruce Jay Friedman have all written of their peonage at "True," but Ms. Gallagher fills in more of that story of creating reporting with no basis. These stories bring glamour to the lives of people who didn't have much, didn't get much & bothered the hell out of you, but had a large hunger for life & justice.

'How I Came Into My Inheritance' is both a quite sad and a quite funny biography. It explores the author's life by frequent reminiscence to the lives of the author's parents generation and her extended family. The prose is excellent and delightful to the reader. Ms. Gallagher chronicles her immigrant extended family and thus tells the story of that particular generation of early 20th century East European Jewish immigrants. The family dynamics are amazingly familiar: both extremely funny but also very sad. The grudges, the socialist ideas, the summer camps, the obsessive-compulsive relationships, it could have been written by my parents or any of my friend's parents who were all born in the Lower Eastside to Eastern European Jewish immigrants. Unfortunately, and I guess that's why I still find the story quite sad, is that Ms. Gallagher never really seemed to be able overcome the issues and deal in a positive way with the eccentricities of her parents and her relatives while they were alive.

Dorothy Gallagher's trim memoir, "How I Came into My Inheritance," reminds readers that autobiographical writing can indeed be morbidly funny and acidic in its portrait of family life. Never once stopping to worry about the level of acid in these wonderfully crafted stories about her Russian-Jewish immigrant family, Gallagher at one glorifies and criticizes the conflicts, expectations and ambitions her parents' generation manifest after having arrived in the promised land, the United States.

Gallagher rebels against her family's orthodox ideology, not of being Jewish, but of complete devotion to communism. She notes that "a photograph of Lenin hung on the attic wall (I used to think it was my grandfather)." Perpetually a disappointment to her cantankerous father and her sarcastic and manipulative mother, Gallagher fights to reconcile her "evidently selfish and frivolous nature" with her parents' zealous dedication to "the Struggle for a Better World [emphasis is the author's]." Despite Gallagher's evident creative, discursive personality, nothing she can do measures up to her mother's morally rigid standards. Thus, readers observe Gallagher as a disappointment to her parents and at odds with herself.

Not once does the author lapse into self-pity. Instead, her chaotic, sarcasm-laden life becomes grist for a vocation which at least sounds respectable, that of being a writer. Her account of her evolution as a writer is the highlight of the memoir. She rubs shoulders with such luminaries as Bruce Jay Friedman and Mario Puzo while pounding out bilge for pulp magazines. As she hones her skills, she dismisses her later books with a self-deprecatory wave. Her willingness to mock her own self-presumed failures -- as a daughter, as a wife, as a worker -- makes one wonder how much of her parents' lack of approbation she absorbed during her childhood.

Dorothy Gallagher would dismiss sympathy for her life as misplaced sentiment. Instead, she writes her memoir with enough tartness to make any reader's mouth pucker. Her relatives are rough-and-tumble greenhorns who may or may not make peace with their new land. Foibles, failures and faults flow throughout this slender, wry memoir. As to her inheritance, Dorothy Gallager permits the reader to discern what wealth truly exists in her family.

Thought I was going to enjoy this book; fast paced and clever insights to real people, but the further I read (about the 9th page), I found Gallagher to be very shallow and hollow in her "insights" to these family members & friends. Billy Crystal shows more heart and soul with his humorous characterizations of his background than Gallagher. Sorry, one more Yuppie bites the dust. Yes, I did finish the book much to my frustration as it was getting worse and worse. I always hope. Sue Few

I've read any number of books -- memoirs and novels -- about women growing up in the late thirties/early forties in New York City, with immigrant parents involved in Communism. This was among the best -- clever, ironic, touching, laugh-out-loud funny. Only complaint: too short. I wanted to know more and more about Dorothy Gallagher and her family.

I loved this collection of stories. As much a family history as an autobiography. It might be titled "How I Came To Be The Way I Am And What's It To You?" Family members aren't treated as "eccentric" in the good old Southern style but presented with humor, compassion and not letting them get away with a thing. I highly recommend it.