3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An Unusual Opportunity to read a novel and the source thereof..., May 26, 2006
This review is from: If You Could See Me Now (Hardcover)
Having read Michael Mewshaw's novel - Waking Slow - in the year of its publication, 1972 and remembering it as one of the saddest tales of hopeless 'love' that I had encountered at the time, well...
It wasn't until a hatchet-job 'review' in a very recent Los Angeles Times, revealed to me that Mewshaw had chronicled the events of the novel, in a new non-fiction memoir: If You Could See Me Now.
So I reread Waking Slow, after lo, these 34 years. Then I read the non-fictional version.
Mewshaw has of necessity, excised the surplus situations/characters in his novel and cut to just the primary ones: 'Adrienne' and himself.
The story about them has been well-discussed by other reviewers here.
The amazing thing is that after so many years have passed for these two since the birth of 'Amy',and the relative professional and familial successes of both, the pain of Mewshaw's protagonist, Carter, is still very much evident in his creator.
It still hurts!
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Memoir that reads like mystery, March 14, 2006
This review is from: If You Could See Me Now (Hardcover)
One afternoon in the mid-1990's author Michael Mewshaw got a call he'd been half expecting for some thirty years: a woman in America--Mewshaw was living in London--had reason to believe that he was her biological father. The woman, Amy, was almost right: Mewshaw's name was in fact on Amy's birth certificate, and he'd been involved with her mother at the time of Amy's birth, while he was in college at the University of Maryland. But Mewshaw hadn't fathered the baby whose adoption he wound up being instrumental in arranging. Mewshaw's role in Amy's early life nevertheless left him feeling almost paternal toward her, and he wanted to help Amy reconnect with her birth mother.
In his memoir If You Could See Me Now Mewshaw chronicles his involvement in Amy's search for her biological parents, but his story is far from a straightforward account of his attempts to track down an old girlfriend. Amy's quest is rather the peg on which Mewshaw hangs an account of his life, or that part of it that bears on his relationship with Amy's mother. While detailing his efforts on Amy's behalf, Mewshaw writes about his fractured identity as a child, the result of his parents' divorce and his strained relationship with both father and father figure, and about his complicated history with the woman he calls "Adrienne Daly," his college sweetheart. Mewshaw's unpacking of that relationship, his attempts to uncover the truth behind Adrienne's pregnancy and behavior decades after the fact, make for a surprisingly compelling story that at times reads like a mystery.
Mewshaw does not identify Amy's mother by her real name in the book: as a public figure she would not welcome exposure as a former unwed mother. But he does provide a great many details about Adrienne that will send readers running to Google, most tantalizing among them that Amy's mother served as Undersecretary of State during the Reagan and Bush administrations. One wonders whether these same revelations won't send Adrienne running to her lawyers, as she will surely not be pleased with her presentation in the book. Adrienne is the clear villain of the piece, painted by Mewshaw as a calculating and disingenuous user of men, a woman lacking in maternal warmth, who valued--who continues to value--her own convenience over the life of her daughter. One can't help disliking her, even while bearing in mind that Mewshaw's account is necessarily a one-sided affair, and while wondering why he chose to reveal as much about Adrienne's real identity as he did. Is the book a form of retribution? If so, does that alter our response to it?
Though slow in its final chapter, If You Could See Me Now is an otherwise quick read. Tantalizing because of its near exposure of the misdeeds of the nearly famous, Mewshaw's book is interesting also as an example of how the small dramas of one's life, considered in hindsight, can make for good reading.
Debra Hamel -- author of Trying Neaira: The True Story of a Courtesan's Scandalous Life in ancient Greece (Yale University Press, 2003)
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Overall an Enjoyable Read, September 12, 2011
This review is from: If You Could See Me Now (Hardcover)
I enjoyed this book - I found the characters intriguing and the story had just enough twists to make it interesting without making it unbelievable. I was somewhat bothered about the amount of personal history that was shared about other people in the story - I have to believe they did not know this information was going to be given to the world. I'm sure "Adrienne" in particular was quite bothered, to say the least, at the information given in this book - especially since a couple of minutes on Google reveals who she really is.
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