Ordinary Paradise: A Memoir [Hardcover]

Laura Furman (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this sometimes haunting memoir, novelist Furman (Tuxedo Park) describes the first 13 years of a life geographically divided between an apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side and a summer house in New Jersey and temporally bifurcated by her mother's death when she was just 13. Furman evokes the life of a relatively happy child who, in addition to her two sisters, lived with her outgoing, nurturing mother, Minnie, and her responsible but reclusive father, Sylvan, who liked to be left alone to paint when he returned home from work. Diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 1958, Minnie took less than a year to die, during which time neither parent ever mentioned the seriousness of her condition to their children. Stricken by an intense grief that she could not express to her emotionally distant father, Furman repressed her feelings about her mother's death and her father's remarriage. Later, when she cut herself with a razor in a plea for attention, Sylvan had her admitted to a mental hospital where she was treated with thorazine. Upon her release Furman began writing, but it was only when she moved to Texas and met her husband-to-be (with whom she adopted a son) that she was able to come to terms with her mother's death. Although moving, the writing can be a bit awkward ("I caught myself and truncated the sensation," or on the same page, "That summer kissing began, full of saliva and juicy lips"). Also, because Furman's grandmother and mother both died of ovarian cancer, she elected to have her healthy ovaries removed. Greater exposition of this unusual decision would have made for a more complete portrait of Furman's maternal legacy. Author tour.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Furman grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and in a summer home in New Jersey. She was 13 when her mother died of ovarian cancer; that fact has been the transforming key to Furman's life. She limns her mother as she saw her, and she describes what followed as she, her sisters, her father, and later, her stepmother simply ceased to talk about her. It's one way of coping, a bad way, and Furman takes us through her adolescence and writing career hiding from and seeking her mother's life and memory. The ordinary paradise of the title is the life Furman didn't expect to have, with a husband and son. Some of the vignettes along the way--corn on the cob, spilled milk, a silver ring that had to be cut from her finger--are a bit too small, or recounted too narrowly, to resonate widely. Still, the larger aspect of Furman's need for a way to cope with her mother's illness and death is spun out with steely clarity. GraceAnne A. DeCandido

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 176 pages
• Publisher: Winedale Publishing; 1st edition (August 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0965746844
• ISBN-13: 978-0965746847
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.8 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,295,426 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Anyone who has suffered loss will be touched by this memoir., September 18, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Ordinary Paradise: A Memoir (Hardcover)

Laura Furman's "Ordinary Paradise" will touch anyone who has ever suffered loss, and will be almost as meaningful to someone who has been lucky--thusfar--to have escaped loss. Furman herself, a novelist with a spare yet poetic style, paces her memoir with all the narrative skill of someone who knows how to tell a story: what to say, and what not to say. Although the story deals with the central event in her life--the death of her mother from ovarian cancer when Furman was thirteen--it never succumbs to tearfulness, narcissism, or any form of self-indulgence. It takes a cold and sober look at life. As she admits at the very start, this is not a story with spine-tingling events: "Nothing out of the ordinary happened. My father did not molest me. My stepmother did not send me into the woods with a hired killer." This is not the stuff of tawdry daytime tv shows. Instead, it is about the loss of ordinary family happiness and the hard-won effort to piece together a whole life after decades of family repression and denial. The paradoxical title tells us much: all paradises are eventually lost, but some can be re-gained. The best ones are those that allow us the freedom and the happiness to live, love, and grow under perfectly ordinary conditions. These are the conditions of happy family life, and it is to Furman's credit that although fearful of the same fate her mother met at an early age (we now know much more about the genetic predisposition of some people to cancers) she has been able to achieve the "ordinary paradise" that for decades she thought she would never have. She has won it through common sense, good luck, persistence, clear-headedness, patience and labor. She has made art out of her life, and made of her life a work of art.