Customer Reviews

From Our House

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Lee Martin's memoir "From Our House" is more than an unsettling portrayal of a unique American childhood or the clash of generational values that were the seeds of the Sixties. It aims beyond a painful depiction of how rebellion and cruelty, even betrayal, can be bound up and contained within the love of a family. In fact, at its most daring, it is a suggestion of the very nature of forgiveness: that even as an offense and heartbreak continues, the indictment is never made and final judgement, despite so much bitterness, never rendered. It suggests something about the human spirit very hard to believe and by the end of the book, impossible to deny.

Martin uses a strong grace to tell us of the accident that takes his father's hands on the farm. "I'm free to imagine that day anyway I'd like: a brilliant sun glinting off the picker, the dry leaves of the cornstalks scraping together in the wind; or perhaps it was overcast, the sky dark with the threat of rain, and perhaps the wind was cold on my father's face." It happens when Martin is a baby, this event that will shake his family so powerfully, releasing his father's terrible anger and shame, and his own struggle to understand, gain approval and finally forgive. Later in the book he imagines being present at the accident, older in this dream, and able to warn his father to turn off the tractor before manipulating the picker. He dreams of the power to prevent the accident that leaves the elder Martin with steel hooks to drive his car, hold a cup of coffee or touch his wife and son. Remarkably, at the conclusion, we're not sure Martin would want to change the past, or that we would have him do so.

"From Our House" hangs in the heart and mind's eye, this image of what we can be, drawn with the sharp lines of what we are. I read the book a second time because it is good news and true, true because it never cowers at our inhumanity.

Martin's father and he share a rare moment of understanding on the morning of his grandmother's funeral. Coaxing his reluctant boy into preparing for the morning, his father lays beside him on the bed. "Such a strange day," he says. "You'd hardly think it was meant for you." The same can be said of this book, a stunning and beautiful declaration of everything we are.

Do you have fond memories of the summers of your youth? Lee Martin does. Do you remember the sometimes silly, fun times with family and friends during your youth? Lee Martin does. Do you remember the onset of rebellion and its attendant problems? Lee Martin does. Do you remember your father beating you repeatedly with a belt and inflicting both physical and mental abuse? Lee Martin does. Have you gone to the extraordinary step of describing your most private family secrets to the world? Lee Martin does. This memoir is an elegant story about growing up on a small farm in southern Illinois with a submissive, meek schoolteacher mother and a violent, abusive father that lost both hands in a farming accident. The accident left his father a frustrated, bitter, violent man that robbed Martin of the compassion and love he desperately needed. This story of the struggle between a father and his adolescent son is at times painful, complex, affectionate, violent and heartbreaking. But it is also a wonderful story of redemption, love, inspiration and forgiveness that make it special among the seemingly hundreds of memoirs being published today. Martin has written a very personal story in a clear, compassionate way that will leave the reader thinking about this book for a long time. It is not a sentimental book. It is a compassionate, powerful book about the conflicts between a father and his son and the ultimate resolution of their rivalries.It is safe to say that virtually all children have experienced hardships while growing up. Some more so than others. The difference is that Martin has written his experiences down for the entire world to see. It is not always a pretty sight but his ultimate resolution is a story the entire world needs to hear. It should be noted that while this memoir is about the complex relationship between a father and son there is an underlying theme of the contributions made by his mother that ultimately allowed Martin to find peace and tranquillity in his life. His descriptions of the strenght and resolve of his mother are touching and unforgettable. While reading this book I was reminded of a book of poetry titled "There Are Men Too Gentle To Live Among Wolves." I suspect Lee Martin may be such a man. I wish I could have resolved my differences with my father, as did Martin. He is a special writer and person. When you look back on trying times in your childhood can you say,"In my memory, it was always summer?" Lee Martin does.

A must read! Lee Martin takes a deeply honest look into who is, where he has come from and how that will shape his identity. Never have I come away from a piece of literature and felt so moved. Martin's memoir has a sort of constant rhythm that propels you to take the journey with him into another time. He avoids with great dignity the "poor me" syndrome, and takes the time to reflect with honesty and integrity the struggles of life. While 1960s life on a farm in the midwest might seem a nostalgic and peaceful setting, Martin brings to life the kind of violence and true grit of living and emotion that takes place in this typically idealized setting. A pleasure to read in that you come away feeling that you've learned as much as about your own life as you have the author's.

I could not put this memoir down. Lee Martin describes the difficulty of growing up in a 1960s household with a father, who displaces his anger and frustration on his young son after losing both hands in a corn-picker, and a mother who allows it to happen. Yet Lee's own anger about his parents softens and melts away after faith, hope, religion, aging, time and distance do it's work. Amazing that these three people managed to put some closure to their past difficulties without benefit of modern therapy. Do read it.

If you enjoy regional writing and memoirs you will love this book. Martin's writing style is personal and intense but not overdone. Couldn't put it down!

Lee Martin is a writer who cares greatly about exploring the intricacies of human nature and our relationships with others. He gives his readers a compelling story of his struggling relationship with his family as well as his own self. I, too, am a former student of Martin's and am sorry to see that another reviewer misunderstands and misrepresents Martin's true vision, not only as a writer, but as a teacher. If you want to experience a master writer who brings the complexity of emotions and actions of a family trying to live in the sometimes lovely and sometimes harsh space they've created, then read this book.

I have read books of abusive childhoods before.To be honest I felt very empathetic for the father.I have never started a book and by the end had a totally different view for the book as I did with this book.
I still really liked the book.But did not have much empathy for the son at all.

Saw the author at our library so I had to buy it.
I can relate to the author's feelings. Even though his father was angry/abusive to him, as he grew older, he loved and forgave him. It must be a common problem in families!

I was very engrossed in this book as I read it. I came to understand the forgive and forget idea further by reading this authors take on it.

Written with extraordinary eloquence, elgance and honesty, Lee Martin's powerful memoir "From Our House" deserves a national reading audience. Revealing the horrible and enduring hurt regularly dished out by his angry and bereft father, the author journeys where few have the courage to go: to the depths of the human heart turned against itself, to the terrain where lives twisted by loss and regret recoil against each other, to the crooks and crannies of our soul where we try to forgive, to start anew, despite all evidence against hope. Whatever words of praise I write cannot begin to measure the profound respect I have for Lee Martin. This slender, compelling work will be recognized, I have no doubt, as a masterpiece, and Mr. Martin will be recognized as a skilled and compassionategeographer of how families can enter the darker regions of abuse.

Three characters dominate the narrative, which follows the life of the author from childhood through the ultimately redemptive acts of both father and son. Lee Martin interweaves his story with that of his mother, Beulah, and his father, Roy. The most poignant character is that of the mother, a woman who married very late in life and appeared to accept an existence of diminished possibiliites. Beulah emerges as an amazingly strong woman, whose faith and quiet optimism never flags in the midst of a household of anger and violence. Lee Martin describes her as "a woman of duty and endurance, selfless and without need, at least none she was willing to place before the obligation she felt toward her family." Earlier in her life, she battled against her father's alcoholism; her adult life would witness her constant attempts to broken a sense of peace between her enraged husband and alienated and terrified son. The author is acutely aware of her emotional exhaustion and the gnawing toll an abusive home exacted on her physical and spiritual life. Ultimately, if anyone triumphs in this memoir, it is she. Her quiet optimism, faith in the future and belief in the power of forgiveness transcend the violence, anger and mistrust which were the hallmarks of their home.

If Beulah symbolizes faith and redemption, Roy represents blasted hopes and unfettered violence. The author's evocative description of how his father lost his hands in a farming accident foreshadows the rage and sense of impotence that will become life's companions to his father. Roy regularly whips his son, and for those of us who have felt the anger of a father as expressed through whippings, Lee's understated pain permeates this novel. Yet, Roy is presented as a whole being. Lee knows his father is a "sensualist," whose passions for life were stripped from him by the accident. We can see Roy's jaws kneading in anger; we feel his hooks clamp into us when he grabbed his son by the throat; we know how he can use powerful words to sublimate the frustrations boiling underneath.

Yet, the son, Lee Martin, must be the focus of this memoir. We see him as a little boy, yearning for the caress and embrace of his father. Instead, "although he never really maimed me, he often left red marks on my skin, marks that faded more quickly than the heartache that filled me on those occasions." Lee senses that his family was skewed and recognized that difference in the other dysfunctional families he encountered in his childhood. He grows up with a sense of shame, both of his family and of his own apparent evil, for mustn't he by defintion deserve the abuse his father so unsparingly gives him. His family's move away from his rural origins brings only temporary relief to his family; Lee is an outcast, an outsider -- both in his new environment and in his own family. By his adolescence, Lee dallies with delinquency, involving himself in theft and arson. His eventual embracing of his mother's religious convictions provides the lever by which he may offset his own sense of existential anguish and family displacement.

Not only does the author carry the narrative with conviction and purpose, Lee Martin is an amazing writer. Each page is exquisitely crafted. His description of his childhood farm/home is Whitmanesque. As you read this novel, you will constantly comment at how hard this author has worked for you. Redolent with pain and anguish, "From Our House" instructs us in the manner of living.