Losing Mum and Pup: A Memoir (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

From The Washington Post

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by James Rosen That was such a nice surprise, your thinking to mention me when I pulled away last week," William F. Buckley, Jr., wrote me in 2004 after I had reported his retirement from National Review. More than 12 years had passed since our first meeting, shortly after which Buckley had given me, as he had so many others, my start in journalism. He had arranged for me to publish my first article, in National Review, and secured a grant from the Historical Research Foundation for me to begin work on a biography of John Mitchell. There had been periodic contacts, including an hour-long interview marking ("Who said I was celebrating it?" he quipped) the great man's 75th birthday and bloody marys to kick off an unforgettable four-course lunch at the Buckleys' East 73rd St. maisonette. I received a few encouraging letters and, later, e-mail messages, characteristically garbled ("I amnot drunk -- I type this way"). But I was never an intimate or protégé. "Thank you, my friend, and come soon to see us," he wrote in that last letter. For complicated reasons, I never did; nor did I seize upon his offer to visit him and his wife, Pat -- whom I never met -- at their home in Stamford, Conn. After Buckley died, in February 2008, at the age of 82 and less than a year after Pat's death, I swelled with regret at having squandered my opportunity to see the Buckleys dans leur élément. With the publication of "Losing Mum and Pup," a family memoir by the Buckleys' only child, novelist Christopher Buckley, I feel now as though I know what I missed. Breezy, witty, savvy and perceptive -- and occasionally bitchy and biting -- "Losing Mum and Pup" displays all the hallmarks of the younger Buckley's acclaimed fiction. As testimony to what Pat and Bill Buckley were really like, the book bears supreme witness and delivers many laughs; as an account of what it's like to watch one's parents suffer and die, it is moving to the point of tears. Still, there is something troubling about this book, a sense that it is unduly unkind to -- and thus unworthy of -- its subjects. "Christo," as Buckley called his son (whom I've met once, perfunctorily), clearly anticipated that a large number of his father's legion of fans would regard the publication of this memoir as something "other than an act of love," as the author told Vanity Fair. This is owing to the book's primary focus on Pat and Bill's final days, when they were aged, sick, grief-stricken, crotchety, sometimes mean-spirited or even enfeebled by dementia. It's a pitiful contrast to the days when the Buckleys were the toast of Manhattan and Gstaad, Switzerland, where the polymath conservative controversialist and the tart-tongued socialite repaired each winter to entertain the likes of Princess Grace and David Niven. As Christopher writes: "People just wanted to be around them. They were the fun Americans: the cool intellectual who wrote spy novels on the side and his beautiful, witty, outrageous wife." That the Buckleys were real people, with unattractive and hurtful flaws, should properly be recorded in any memoir about them, as with any famous figures. Bill, the peripatetic lecturer, "elaborately subcontracted" the duties of raising, clothing and feeding his son, and made no appearances at the hospital when Christopher, at age 11, spent three weeks there. It also turns out, according to Christopher, that the famous cosmopolitan and yachtsman, who had his limousine custom fitted so he could spend midtown traffic jams typing out his syndicated column, haggled over luggage fees at the Swissair check-in counter and refused to pay more than nine bucks for a bottle of wine. He was also prone to urinating in public spaces. Likewise, Pat, a Canadian heiress who became one of New York's preeminent hostesses and philanthropists, a fashion icon forever deflating her husband with the evening's most memorable bon mot, would accost house guests, after too much wine, with dubious factual assertions. Her rudeness could be withering: She once chased off her granddaughter's sweet young friend, a member of the Kennedy clan, Christopher reports, with an unprovoked disquisition on the Martha Moxley murder case (in which a Kennedy cousin was convicted). "There had been so many rocky times," Christopher writes, adding that his parents didn't speak to each other "about a third of the time" during their 57 years of marriage. Such anecdotes should have sufficed to cut the larger-than-life Buckleys down to size. But Christopher serves no legitimate literary or historical purpose by documenting, with lurid granularity, his father's sad decline, when the diseased and dying widower was suffering from emphysema, diabetes, sleep apnea, skin cancer, heart trouble and prostate problems. Thus we are treated to pathetic scenes of the octogenarian Buckley falling asleep over his dinner plate, projectile vomiting, absently wandering hospital corridors, mistaking his DVD player for a thermostat and demanding to have lunch with people long dead. The recounting of such tales tells us more about the son than the parents. It is as if Christopher, having said all the right things at the memorials he dutifully organized, now wants to show the world his parents at their very worst. He acknowledges having "spent a good deal of my life . . . trying to measure up to my father"; that he felt wounded by his father's inability in recent years "to compliment something I'd written, unless it was about him"; and that Buckley's extraordinary speed in writing, in contrast with the son's hard labor, once led Christopher to gaze upon "the .22-caliber rifle mounted on the wall, wondering if I could get the barrel in my mouth and pull the trigger with my big toe." Father, a devout Catholic, and son, a defiant agnostic, waged their "own Hundred Years' War over the matter of faith" and exchanged, by Christopher's count, over 3,000 contentious letters and e-mails. And when the aged Buckley abruptly announced he had something important to disclose, the son's anxious first thought, he confides, was: "You're leaving all your money to National Review?" Avid followers of the Buckleys will recall even more points of contention than Christopher enumerates. Christopher Buckley admits that his own sins "are manifold and blushful, but callousness [is] not among them." Readers may beg to differ. The very attributes he lists when articulating, in kinder, gentler moments, what made his father "great" -- unswerving faith and generosity, "deep and abiding" love for family -- make it impossible to imagine the elder Buckley ever penning such a book about his son, though one senses William F. Buckley, too, would have regarded the source material as rich and abundant.
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine

Reviewers’ reactions to Losing Mum and Pup seemed to depend largely on the stake they had in the Buckleys and their legacy. Many critics did not care very much about whether William and Pat were actually the way Christopher describes. For them, the book was a refreshing take on parental loss that deviated from the usual clichés. But readers who knew the Buckleys, even if it was only through William’s writing, found parts of the memoir to be petty and unfair, though most still enjoyed the book as a whole. For both groups, though, Losing Mum and Pup fascinated because of the uniqueness of its characters who, despite their reputation as storytellers, are the kind of people you just can’t make up.
Copyright 2009 Bookmarks Publishing LLC

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Twelve (May 6, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0446540943
• ISBN-13: 978-0446540940
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (98 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #2,967 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

36 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Bittersweet--lots of laughs; a few tears, May 4, 2009

By	Ronald H. Clark (WASHINGTON, DC USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

I found this memoir by Christopher Buckley quite unlike any other book I have read. It recounts some of the life and a great deal about the deaths of his parents, William F. Buckley, Jr. and Patricia Taylor Buckley, which occurred within 11 months of each other during 2007-2008. It is at times hilarious; moving; and cuttingly sad. But mostly it celebrates their lives and his life with both of them. In the process it gives us some really inside views of Bill Buckley and his famous wife, and adds to our understanding of the human dimensions of this "Godfather" of the right. I think also anyone who has parents still living, or has gone through the experience of bidding "Adieu" to one's parents (as I have), will find much to learn from and identify with in this short book (251 pages). The book certainly sparked my interest in Buckley (not exactly an ideological compatriot of mine) and I look forward with great interest to the forthcoming biography by Sam Tanenhaus, editor of the New York Times Book Review and author of a fine book on Whittaker Chambers.

Christopher Buckley celebrates the lives of his parents, but also shares his mourning with us. He recounts with total frankness his disagreements and prickly relationships with both parents. Anyone who has buried their parents will recognize the combination of mourning, regret at not having straightened everything out (aka as "the talk"), and just the sense of being truly alone (not to mention, as the author points out, you become next in line in this endless procession of death). Buckley calls himself "an orphan" and I think we all fall into that designation. There certainly are very sad moments--I for one never imagined I would ever shed a tear for Bill Buckley but came close a couple of times. Yet the author, a "humorist" by trade, has mixed in scenes of exquisite comedy that make the sadness extremely tolerable. Bill Buckley's refusal to update his various computers from 1985 Wordstar struck a responsive chord with this adherent to WordPerfect 5.2. There are some wonderful private and public photographs included.

I disagree with those who say that one need only read the New York Times Magazine excerpt (April 26, 2009) to get the essence of the book. In fact, the book places everything into a meaningful framework and enhances our understanding of Bill Buckley far more effectively than the article, though it is a fine piece standing alone. One interesting facet is that the author includes throughout what might be termed "tips for burying your parents," which are only partially in jest. To bury a parent is to enter into a strange and sometimes irritating world of bureaucratic demands. A book that at once is funny, sad, and informative is a combination hard to beat.

73 of 86 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Outstanding Book by an Outstanding Author Caught in a Difficult Circumstance, April 29, 2009

By	George McAdams (Alabama, USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Losing Mum and Pup: A Memoir (Audio CD)

I usually cringe when I see that an author has decided to read his book. Writing is such a solitary task, and while research and other ancillary endeavors involved in writing are interesting, most authors cannot, for any length of time, read their own books well. This isn't always true, you have ones like Jean Sheppard or John Le Carre doing such a great job, others try. With Christopher Buckley, you get a good reader, who, because of his slight tongue-in-cheek manner sometimes, one wonders where I got that from, makes the book more humorous than the subject, losing ones parents, would normally be.

For me, LOSING MUM AND PUP: A MEMOIR stands as a testament to his parents, William F. and Patricia Buckley, and as such it is also a testament of himself: his parents were grand people standing on the grand stage of life, and while he has a certain amount of notoriety in the publishing world, he lives in shadows of them somewhat, especially his father.

With LOSING MUM AND PUP: A MEMOIR, their only son, Christopher, has given us, in this case the listener or reader, an excellent account of what he went through when he lost both of his parents within a year. This account, while perhaps too personal for some, is nonetheless honest and forthright. It speaks of the flaws of the author as much, if not more, than the subjects of his writing, his parents. And, what I find so remarkable was how his loss was so much more expressive when the words sometime came out of his mouth somewhat reluctantly, often skating to the edge of quivering (in the audio version), but never quite doing so, at certain points, such as reading his father's letter to others after his mother's passing.

I only knew William F. Buckley through his writings, his guest appearances on the talk shows and his interview show "Firing Line." In everything he did, he tackled serious subjects with tenacity and wit, and just when it looked as if the person he was talking to or interviewing was going to get a valid point-in, Mr. Buckley would open his mouth, touch the tip of his tongue to his top lip and say something, usually very economically, that would shoot down the other's point as if it was a clay pigeon hit by both shots of a double-barreled shotgun...>BAM< Got you!

As for Patricia Taylor Buckley, she was just as remarkable. She had to be because Bill and she were married for 57 dull-free years, and while this book deals with her passing, too, it is with the loss of William F. that we learn as much about the son as we do the father.

For Christopher dealt and interacted with his father as his health declined, like many caught in this situation, you witness a week-to-week, sometimes day-to-day, deterioration in what they can do, what they can remember, and in how they treat you. You learn as much about Christopher as you do his father, as William F. Buckley goes through the whole Elizabeth Kubler-Ross stages of death: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance, and experience his exasperation, at times.

In closing, let me say there are some who may feel that Christopher has done a "hatchet" job on his parents, or he did a disservice to them by telling us as much as he did. I disagree with those readers. In my eyes, he has given us a glimpse into the wonderful lives of his parents, and a understanding of what a person, in this case an only son, goes through when he becomes an "orphan" within a year. How he deals with his dad is similar to what many children have had to deal with when a parent, especially a parent who pretty much got their own way before, is dying. Only, in this case, instead of ones sister or a cousin calling you to hear how ones parent is doing, you have Henry Kissinger calling to say, "I miss your reports (on your father's health)." With that message, you realize even further that William F. Buckley was no normal man with normal friends).

If you can, buy the audio version, but if you cannot, or do not have the time or facilities to listen to the audio version, buy the book. If you have enjoyed William F. Buckley in the past, you will enjoy hearing or reading about him through the eyes of his son. And, if you haven't read anything else my Christopher Buckley, this book will, like it did for me, encourage you to read this other works (I am on my second, of what I hope are many more).

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Poignant Memoir, May 29, 2009

By	James D. Zirin (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Christopher Buckley's "Losing Mum and Pup" joins Philip Roth's "Patrimony," Geoffrey Wolff's "Duke of Deception," and Alexander Waugh's "Fathers and Sons" (there are a number of other examples) as a masterpiece of the contemporary parent genre. Is there a happier way to grieve than to write a book?
His loving memoir of two difficult parents, the account at times hilariously funny, at times outrageously irreverential, draws his outsize father and mother, Bill and Pat Buckley with the eye of a portraitist uniquely in a position to know.
Both parents were at times difficult for Christopher Buckley. As his mother comatose lay dying, he said, "I forgive you." Much as Geoffrey Wolff lovingly said, "Thank God," when informed of his father's death.
What is so interesting is that the very style of his parents is reflected in the style of the portrait. The account is breezy but incisive reminiscent of his mother. One can almost hear her saying, "Pul-eeze, excuse me while I go out and buy a Stradivarius" in parrying some filial jeremiad. The outside-the-box thinking is vintage Bill Buckley. I paraphrase: "I wanted to tell each eulogist at my mother's memorial service at the Temple of Dendur that I had snipers hidden in the Temple with orders to shoot if any exceeded four minutes." Who, but a Buckley, thinks like that? It's what makes them so exasperatingly delightful. You can almost see the arched eyebrows. The ideation is of a piece with the father's famous quip during the 1965 New York City Mayoral election. "What will you do if you win, Mr. Buckley?" "Demand a recount."
The book particularly resonanted with me since, like Christopher Buckley, I am an only child who in his fifties lost both parents (mother first) within a year of each other. The author, like me, accepts the profound sense of loss in being orphaned in such a short time.
So I was moved to tears as he writes something like, "In my dreams they are still looking after me, and I am orphaned no more." Or as Fitzgerald put it, "So we beat on, boats against the current...." It is all about memory, isn't it? Christopher Buckley has forced himself to remember and write about it. In this there is catharsis, hope and the expression of deep and abiding love.
A must read!