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The Nearly Departed: Or, My Family & Other Foreigners

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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.

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.

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.

Far from prosaic and most definitely diverting, Brenda Cullerton's unabashedly candid memoir "The Nearly Departed: Or, My Family & Other Foreigners" is a refreshing departure from the autobiographical norm. Dancing between dark humour, stinging wit and poignant life realities, the author's recollections of her wildly outlandish family are often more bitter than sweet. To be sure, the collective confessions from the `Cullerton Family Crypt' will have you sobbing, guffawing, sighing, and feeling strangely schizophrenic - all in one chapter.

The truth is, Brenda Cullerton's family would raise anyone's eyebrow. At the forefront of these eccentric anecdotes are her parents - a social misfit mother who gardened in baggy black undies, lavish jewelry coupled with pop-it beads, and her hair bedecked in curlers; and an alcoholic father who was usually found anywhere but home, and amassed a hidden fortune as traveling businessman in the shoe trade (only to later hide his cash in their dilapidated barn, stuffed in the toes of moldy footwear).

Now in their winter years, Brenda Cullerton's parents - suffering from ill health - evoke her return to this alien landscape called "home". As the author painstakingly sifts through piles of family memories encountered along the way, not only does she learn more about these virtual "foreigners" who are family, but ultimately discovers herself and the all reasons for her insatiable desire to escape the past.

Artfully and intelligently captured on paper, it is Cullerton's ingenuous journey through introspection which makes "The Nearly Departed" quite nearly flawless.

"Nothing about my parents' lives or their deaths was neat or tidy. Everything was extreme, blown way out of proportion. But, my God, how unbearably alive and hugely human they were!"

I finished "The Nearly Departed," last night.

In her beautiful rendering of the story of her family, Brenda Cullerton writes with painful precision of the collisions at different junctures throughout their full and untold lives. The hidden is rediscovered in her passionate recounting of her own coming of age. She reflects upon her early flight, and eventual return, and then, her parents' final days. We follow them as they travel from youth to old age; worlds disappearing. The house and her mother, its mistress, as eccentric hostess, then recluse, lost in memories of her privileged and desolate childhood. Her husband abandoning her, and she him, and her children, yet in the end, both returning to inhabit parallel existences, yards from each other. The old homestead in Connecticut, sliced up like a piece of pie, eccentric relatives, friends, neighbors, and wanderers, all orbiting around this couple, Ms. Cullerton's "unbearably alive" parents. I was absorbed, achingly at times, in her search for home, and relief when she eventually finds it in her own world travels, and then her own little family where she dwells in lavish and welcoming splendor in her Village loft, a blend of the bunks of the ships she frequented, and grand old world castles. Returning to the wreckage, the old Ridgefield house, which in the frontispiece, is rendered in a child's stick-figure style map, the compound, elaborate, ramshackle, decaying, Ms. Cullerton steps in and preserves it on the page, for herself and for us. A backhoe levels the land, forever erasing the geography of home. The new faux McMansions and phony new people wipe out the color, bringing the bland to Ridgefield. The old world truly gone.

The agony of reading this memoir is the sadness when the demons, reversals, misfortune, alcoholism and a sort of madness, prevail. Mostly we don't look so closely, open the wounds. Here, Brenda Cullerton looks. Love and neglect, but much love in the memoir, preserved by her absence, and then before they go, her complete and clear eyed presence.

And this:

A woman who prefaced her every letter to me with "Dearest BBC-love of my life-Firstborn. Princess of princesses-Ave," signed, "Your devoted mother always, MMcL"

There ya go.

It's a crime that Brenda Cullerton isn't writing novels, because her style (reflecting years as a professional writer) is powerful and distinctive. So is her story of her upbringing by a pair of eccentrics protected by their talent and family wealth from any need to face reality. Cullerton, having escaped her parents after college, bravely decides to wade back in and come to grips with them in their declining years (which are every bit as colorful and maddening as their mid-life crises). I found her unvarnished account of her relationship with them enormously heartening. With the support of her husband, she got as close to them as she could and came away with some peace of mind--and a great book.

"As mother taught me, life was a stage - a real stage, with no metaphor intended - and everyone on it but us was an extra."
(-The Nearly Departed: Or, My Family & Other Foreigners)

Far from prosaic and most definitely diverting, Brenda Cullerton's unabashedly candid memoir "The Nearly Departed: Or, My Family & Other Foreigners" is a refreshing departure from the autobiographical norm. Dancing between dark humour, stinging wit and poignant life realities, the author's recollections of her wildly outlandish family are often more bitter than sweet. To be sure, the collective confessions from the `Cullerton Family Crypt' will have you sobbing, guffawing, sighing, and feeling strangely schizophrenic - all in one chapter.

The truth is, Brenda Cullerton's family would raise anyone's eyebrow. At the forefront of these eccentric anecdotes are her parents - a social misfit mother who gardened in baggy black undies, lavish jewelry coupled with pop-it beads, and her hair bedecked in curlers; and an alcoholic father who was usually found anywhere but home, and amassed a hidden fortune as traveling businessman in the shoe trade (only to later hide his cash in their dilapidated barn, stuffed in the toes of moldy footwear).

Now in their winter years, Brenda Cullerton's parents - suffering from ill health - evoke her return to this alien landscape called "home". As the author painstakingly sifts through piles of family memories encountered along the way, not only does she learn more about these virtual "foreigners" who are family, but ultimately discovers herself and the all reasons for her insatiable desire to escape the past.

Artfully and intelligently captured on paper, it is Cullerton's ingenuous journey through introspection which makes "The Nearly Departed" quite nearly flawless.

I stumbled on Brenda's blog by accident a year ago or so, and enjoyed it so much I thought I might as well give her memoir a spin. I'm not a big fiction reader, and certainly don't dip my toes in memoir waters often. Well, ever. So I don't have any advice to give you on whether the story of her family is "better" in some clinical sense than anyone else's story. But I am still dazzled when thinking about how much she learned about herself while revisiting her family and rethinking her childhood. I would love to be able to somehow perceive or understand things about my own life in the way she has. Other reviewers here have done a great job of talking about all the funny and crazy idiosyncracies of Brenda's family, but what made the book magical to me was how she meditated on all these nutty anecdotes and was able to say, "Ohhhh, so THAT'S why I'm like this!"

I'm hoping epiphanies are contagious...

I must say that I particularly enjoyed the review of the Fla. resident. I am a 23 year resident of this town that Brenda C
ullerton describes. I only wish I had known her, AND her family! The "McMansions", now an everday word here, are ridiculous! She saw it with the building of one behind her own home!!
But the most compelling thing about the book is the waste,of human lives!! These people were disfunctional, no doubt about it!And probably would be charged with "child endangerment" today. But the love that the author shows for her mother and father, NO MATTER THEIR QUIRKS, and her inability to express that love, makes a true study in the nature of human beings!Sometimes, we lose what we choose to. She chose to make it front and center in this book! I can't say that I agree with all the author did, nor her family!! Some people will go "AGHG"! But as a resident of this town for some time, it sure is nice to see the veneer crack, and people weren't so perfect I truly loved when she described her mother gardening in her black bra and baggy panties!! And her mother going to town in the pink foam rollers!!That would be a REAL NO- NO today! This is a town of "Stepford Wives"! Would THEY go to town in pink foam rollers and snap-it beads?? Thanks, Brenda, for bringing a little "real" back to Ridgefield!!!