Misgivings: My Mother, My Father, Myself [Hardcover]

C. K. Williams (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 2000

An Intense, Refractory Memoir By A Major Poet.

Misgivings is C. K. Williams's searing recollection of his family's extreme dynamics and of his parents' deaths after years of struggle, bitterness, and inner conflict. Like Kafka's self-revealing Letter to His Father, Misgivings is full of doubt, both philosophical and personal, but as a work of art it is sure and true. Williams's father was an "ordinary businessman"--angry, demanding, addicted to the tension he created with the people he loved; a man who could read the Greek myths aloud to his son yet vowed never to apologize to anybody. His mother was a housewife, a woman with a great capacity for pleasure, who was stoical about the family's dire early poverty yet remained affected by it even when they became well-off. Together, these two formed what Williams calls the "conspiracy that made me who I am." His account of their life together and their deaths--his father's with suicidal despair, and his mother's with calm resignation--is a literary form of the reconciliation the family achieved at the end of his parents' lives. And as literary form it is novel, a series of brilliant short takes, a double helix of experience and recollection. Few contemporary writers have understood their origins so acutely, or so eloquently.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Meditating on his parents' marriage as well as his own thorny relationship with them, poet C.K. Williams forsakes the conventional memoir format in favor of a succession of lyrical short takes, some hardly more than a page long, that accrue to form an impressionistic portrait of two often unhappy people. Williams's father was a businessman whose work was "the defining essence of his life," a man who was often cruel to his family and made it a policy never to apologize. His mother, self-centered and pleasure-loving, remained haunted by childhood losses (including the sudden deaths of her father and two sisters) and by the poverty she suffered in the early years of her marriage. It's the kind of family in which a wife can say to her husband, "You used to be such a nice man," a father to his son, "You're a bastard, just like your mother." Yet Williams's spare, elegantly written elegy also contains tributes to his father's financial generosity (however controlling) and to his mother's stoicism as she lay dying from lung cancer. In the end, it's less the particulars of their failures that matter than the author's ability to transform painful feelings into transforming ones: "peace for rage, affection for frustration, devotion and compassion for misunderstanding." --Wendy Smith

From Publishers Weekly

Award-winning poet Williams (Repair; The Vigil) forays into nonfiction with this meditative, tense memoir about family hurt, disappointment and rage. The book starts off promisingly with a philosophical, authorial distance, suggesting Williams's signature intelligence and concern: standing over his dead father, he exclaims, "What a war we had!" and then muses, both detached and pained, about why a son would think primarily of war instead of love at his father's death. But the narrative soon turns tedious as Williams lists the grievances he holds against his dead parents. His father, a successful salesman, was unpredictably angry, loving, cruel and generous; he "treated his children like employees" but gave away cars to relatives and friends (though he did finance his son's dream of becoming a writer). His erratic behavior was clearly disruptive and confusing, but Williams, taking the stance of the righteous son, seems more interested in defending himself than providing readers any real insight into his father. Similarly, he draws a vague outline of his mother, characterizing her as "essentially a child" who, having grown up poor, loved nothing more than shopping and acquiring material goods. These grievances come off as both petty and inflated. Although the author makes faint attempts to be sympathetic to his parents, detailing some happy childhood memories and wondering what went wrong, he seems obsessed with his father's failures, repeatedly speculating about the older man's questionable morality, his unhappy marriage and his Faustian bargains. In the end, all justification for his father's behavior fall away and what's left is the son's attempts to express his hurt. Williams's fans will have a difficult time watching such a characteristically direct and honest poet complain about a decades-old wound that clearly remains unhealed. (Apr.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 176 pages
• Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux; 1st edition (April 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374199841
• ISBN-13: 978-0374199845
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #699,738 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A family history that is also a poem, April 26, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Misgivings: My Mother, My Father, Myself (Hardcover)

This spare, 170-page prose work is not a memoir in the usual sense of the word: it is a collection of visceral memories, some extended, some quite brief, all of which hinge on the author/poet's intensely felt relationship with his mother and father. A wide-ranging portrait of a mid-century East Coast Jewish family, Williams calls his work an "autobiographical meditation." I began reading quite skeptically, wondering why a man of age 63 would still be so caught up with family issues -- especially his unblinking descriptions of his long-dead parents' worst characteristics. But as I proceeded, I was surprised to find this seemingly self-centered meditation seeping into the musty recesses of my own memory and experience. His language is burnished to a luster; he can conjure memories of a child's-eye view from the top of a see-saw or a momentary parental rage that has stayed with you over decades. Thus I came to find the work transformative; persuasive in the way that a poem can take you somewhere you weren't planning to go. I am going to recommend "Misgivings" to all my grown-up men friends.

4.0 out of 5 stars Making Sense of Flawed Parental Relationships, September 7, 2009

By 

Charlene Rubush "author and book lover" (Donalsonville, Georgia) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Misgivings: My Mother, My Father, Myself (Paperback)

C.K. Williams explores the unbreakable bonds between parent and child, in this most intimate book. Each chapter presents a scene, and a memory or observation. And those scenes tell a story of a father-son relationship rife with turmoil and misunderstanding.

Many will be able to relate to a complicated parent such as Williams father. The author notes (p.7) that there were years when his father treated his wife and children as employees, or worse. "He tormented all of us, sometimes by his criticism, by the way he had of letting you know you weren't meeting his expectations, sometimes by his inscrutability and unpredictability, you had no idea from one day to the next how he'd respond to you..."

Williams plumbs the depth of memory- the indelible hold that parents have on their children's psyche's long after their passing from the earth. He examines the ways in which he became like his parents.

"I have my mother's tendency to brood on causes, her passion to find reasons, and though I don't like having to say so, her need to lay blame. From my father the urge to despise and dismiss anything that doesn't meet my expectations" (p.130).

Williams then questions whether these tendencies were absorbed by having them taught to him, or somehow embedded deep within his genetic makeup. Aren't these questions we have all asked ourselves at one time or another?

And on his father's death, (p.168) Williams writes of forgiveness:

"Perhaps forgiveness is a process more than an emotion, perhaps it's meant to make us discover those other conditions within ourselves, love, belief in love, to which forgiveness itself is incidental: perhaps forgiveness once accomplished becomes a condition of existence, a reality as ineluctable as our physical and mental being."

I found this to be a book to be read when in a reflective, melancholy mood. It is deep, poignant and cerebral. I have returned to it at times, when thoughts of my own parents welled up. It honors that most monumental of ties, says much about the grieving process, and the ways we can understand, come to terms with, and in some instances, overcome our heritage.