The Nearly Departed: Or, My Family & Other Foreigners [Hardcover]

Brenda Cullerton (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 2, 2003

Brenda Cullerton's parents were always eccentric. Her mother gardened in curlers, pop beads, and black satin underpants, while her father hid wads of cash in shoes in the garage. It was a family to escape from, and Brenda did. But advancing age and illness eventually made early behaviors look downright normal. When Brenda starts making trips home to care for her parents in their last years, she finds her brother installed in a tarpaper shack on the lawn, a barefoot caretaker from Ghana weeding with a machete, and her 73-year-old pot-smoking uncle hunting Canadian geese in the lake by their backyard. The neighborhood association is apoplectic with rage. After years of traveling the world, Brenda Cullerton comes home to the strangest land she's ever visited and finds that it is loving, not leaving, that saved her. The Nearly Departed is a haunting, heartbreaking, and incredibly funny book that is a love letter to parents, family, and home-however strange they may be.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Advertising slogan writer Cullerton tells the unexpectedly funny story of her "nearly departed," "brilliantly impaired" family. Picture her mom wearing "three pairs of glasses, one on top of the other," gardening in her Connecticut yard in her underwear. Or her formerly globe-trotting playboy dad, now bedridden, hurling curses worthy of a Tourette's sufferer, demanding his soda. As Cullerton meditates on her dotty family's eccentricities, she realizes there's a method to their madnesses. From her 71-year-old pot-smoking Uncle Larry, who "could be Hunter Thompson's version of a gonzo Santa Claus," to her ditsy Aunt Janet, who can't understand why the chickens in the butcher shop only have two legs, there's a desperate drive in all of them to escape the mediocrity of sameness, refusing to celebrate holidays and anniversaries ("commercial events invented by `Hellmark' ") or to live in the houses they actually own (more than one sleeps in the car with one hand on the wheel). While the anecdotes are amusing-e.g., her mother believes Barney is black, not purple; she parks in handicapped spaces, telling her daughter to limp as they leave-there's no mistaking it was often painful being raised by such people. Cullerton's mom enjoyed being difficult, seeing herself like sand irritating an oyster's membrane. But as this memoir shows, from such grit come pearls. By the time both parents are finally "departed," Cullerton begins to realize they haven't quite gone; they're with her, in her, still. Photos.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

"I did not come from a place that even remotely resembled a model home," Cullerton observes toward the end of her memoir. At first glance, her parents seem to be polar opposites of each other. Her agoraphobic mother rarely wanted to leave home, while her father jetted around the world on business trips. Now facing the impending deaths of both parents, Cullerton returns home, to the run-down house her mother inhabits, her brother's tarpaper shack, and the small house--just 50 feet from her mother's--where her father lives. Her parents' eccentricities have only increased with age, and caring for them causes Cullerton to examine both their younger years and her own. Cullerton traveled the world as a young woman (partially to escape her family), but she discovers her family to be as foreign as any of the people she met in those faraway lands. Nonetheless, she concludes with admiration, "But, my God, how unbearably alive and hugely human they were!" Both admiration and frustration shine through in Cullerton's straightforward, nakedly honest memoir. Kristine Huntley
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company; 1st edition (May 2, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316162531
• ISBN-13: 978-0316162531
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.9 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.1 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,553,141 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Through the mirror, darkly, May 14, 2003

By 

Elise L. Cagan - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Nearly Departed: Or, My Family & Other Foreigners (Hardcover)

Make sure you pick up this book when you are able to cut a large swath of time from your busy day, because once you start to read Ms. Cullerton's tome, good luck putting it down. Her incisive revelations of her family in specific and familial relationships in general will make you both howl with laughter and send you back into therapy.Yikes, talk about your double-edged sword. Well, how does the saying go: Nobody will ever love you like your mother; thank God. So, go, buy it, enjoy. I'll just sit here in the dark.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars ...and you think YOUR family is weird...?, May 25, 2003

By 

Peggy Vincent "author and reader" (Oakland, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Nearly Departed: Or, My Family & Other Foreigners (Hardcover)

Uh-uh. Brenda Cullerton's family makes everyone else's look like The Cleavers in the 50s. Always strange, eccentric, and downright dippy, the eclectic blend of people she calls 'family' descends to purely outrageous behavior as they age. Cullerton, who escaped the craziness early on to try to build her own life, finds it necessary to return to help care for them as they dwindle in death's inevitable direction. What she finds defies belief and has the neighborhood association in full battle stance.
Both hilarious and heartbreaking (sometimes we're not sure if we're laughing AT her or WITH her), Nearly Departed is an offering of love and a measure of belated understanding to her parents, however strange they may be.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It's all in the family....., June 18, 2003

By A Customer

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Nearly Departed: Or, My Family & Other Foreigners (Hardcover)

I read a review of "The Nearly Departed" in the Ridgefield Press, which I still have delivered to my new address in another state. The review had me laughing so hard, I decided that I simply had to get this book. Having spent 23 years in Ridgefield, CT was a plus as I could picture so many scenes as described and these are NOT things one would see in Ridgefield! Perhaps one would see people going down a Main Street in pink foam curlers elsewhere, but certainly not there. Now that that is in perspective, Brenda Cullerton has a wit that will get you laughing out loud, but the book is so much deeper than one might first think. I realize that the average family is dysfunctional to a degree. Unfortunately for Brenda, her family seemed to encompass every dysfunctional element known to man! Hopefully in writing this book, she was able to come to terms with issues in her life; I know that in reading it, she helped me to both understand and come to terms with some things in mine. Thank you Brenda, for both a terrific laugh and a learning experience.