Customer Reviews

In Spite of Everything: A Memoir

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When I picked up this book, I was skeptical of the whole GenX divorce generation argument, but it turns out Susan Gregory Thomas expects GenX readers to be skeptical - it's part of our profile. While I was prepared to find generalizations about our generation annoying, I was not prepared for the incredibly funny, thoughtful, well written and moving personal story I encountered. My background couldn't be different - I'm a GenXer of an intact nuclear family and very little drama. But Susan Gregory Thomas masterfully weaves her own heart-wrenching story of family abandonment, early rebellion and later experience as a parent with an analysis of our generation that somehow I still recognized and fully appreciated in the context of her experience. I definitely related to her description of the affluent urban parenting culture she found herself in as an adult, and the emotional challenges our generation faces as parents.

Strangely, I had also recently read Claire Dederer's GenX parenting (and yoga) memoir, Poser, which I found unengaging and irritating. Thomas hits many of the same themes - including what it's like to be a parent after being a child of divorce and the lure of "attachment parenting" for many of our generation -- but her book blows Dederer's out of the water both in the quality of the writing and the depth of her self-knowledge and emotional experience. I was so drawn into the story of her family -- then and now -- that I read the book in two days and haven't stopped thinking about it since.

This is a book I have been waiting for and I didn't even realize it. Susan Gregory Thomas truly has a fantastic ear for dialogue. The memories she recounts of her parents divorce and then the sad realization that her own marriage is in trouble, is deeply compelling. There are fantastic riffs on the facts of Generation X, how divorce has affected their social and interior lives, all mesmerizing. She blends studies of Gen X with her own experience in such a tale of humor and sarcastic woe, I couldn't bear for it to end. Lucky for me, I just noticed this author also has a funny ass blog. Get it.

Thomas strips her experience bare in a (successful) effort to provide us all with an object lesson in capital-D Divorce. I found her ability to clearly extrapolate societal trends (attachment parenting, high-end home renovation, etc) from a generation's unsupervised floundering toward adulthood rang true to me throughout the book, while her personal story grounded these bigger picture issues in the true pain, confusion and struggle we "abandoned" kids were left with. As a divorced Xer with kids, I found her explaining myself to me -- helping me more clearly see the context in which I grew up and in which my marriage dissolved. And, despite the difficult scenes in which Thomas immerses the reader, her love and devotion to her kids and her former husband offer hope for those of us really slogging through the midst of it.

As for the reviewer who found the book irritating because of the upper-middle class trappings presented, I feel that Thomas was pretty straightforward about who she was and where she came from. The book is not a request for sympathy, but one, well-thought-out, at times excruciatingly painful, example (her own upbringing / adulthood) of a greater trend she has observed (how divorce has impacted Gen X'ers current family lives & structures).

And, the expensive renovations and purchase of a single family home in an expensive neighborhood seemed to me to represent less what Thomas was upset about during that period of her life, and more her scrambling to gain every sign of external (X-ternal?) stability and safety when, internally, she had been raised without the capacity to believe in these things. In my reading, these were examples of what she WAS getting since she couldn't find any safety or stability internally.

And, as she explains in the end, she seems to now have more of the latter than the former. And that seems to be a better place for her.

I really recommend this book.

I recommend this book as a complex piece on a sociological phenomena, but also an entertaining and at times very, very funny read.

I read the excerpt for this book that was included in the Wall Street Journal and immediately ordered the book. I was hopeful that the book would provide insight into my generation (Generation X), divorces and parenting styles of the '70s and '80s, how that affected the author and her marriage, and the lessons we can learn and things we can do to move on. Though the author provides some interesting insights into a segment of Generation X, I think the book is burdened with too many "clever" inside asides to make it appealing to a very broad audience (i.e., other generations), which is unfortunate. Loads of references to philosphy, psychology, and the classical cannon of literature did not help enlighten the reader so much as let the reader know that the author is educated. It has the feel of a group of gen-xers sitting around commiserating about their lousy childhoods, which were indeed lousy, and how it just affects everything. I'll admit, it's a quick read and for sure a tell-all, but I was looking for something deeper.

I found this book to be profoundly irritating. At several points along the way, I had to put it down due to overwhelming frustrating. You bought a really expensive apartment in Park Slope? Aww, booo hoo!!! Oh no, you decided to spend 100 THOUSAND DOLLARS on a kitchen renovation, and now you're totally sad? Awwwwww. First world problems, indeed.

She speaks from a place of extreme privilege, and whines her way through what is laughably called a "memoir". A memoir of what? She recounts very little actually "happening" and the book is mostly a stream-of-consciousness one-sided therapy session from a narcissist.

Bottom line: read this book if you enjoy lots of whining with very little reflection.

I bought this book because I heard Susan Gregory Thomas interviewed about it on NPR, and I had high hopes that it would speak to the new raft of issues that Gen X children of divorce have in their own marriages. We are facing new challenges that I don't think have been articulated yet - and despite the hyper-connectedness of the social media age, many of us feel alone in our troubles when we shouldn't have to. In some ways, the book delivers - Thomas correctly calls the Baby Boom generation on the carpet for their failings. For so long, Gen X-ers' gripes with their parents have been drowned out by the Boomers protestations that they would get things right with their second marriages, without ever really atoning for their original sins. Thomas is the daughter of an English professor, and she has a highly attuned sense for the resonant metaphors of her generation: she's amusingly shameless about boiling down our world views to the tropes of our touchstones - Star Wars, The Breakfast Club and, weirdly, Eminem, who is more Gen Y than Gen X. Her very brutal honesty is equally alarming and disarming.

With all that said, the author's neuroses seem to run so deep that she only seems to scratch the surface, and many of her self-destructive tendencies seem to play as subtext rather than narrative. Thomas claims that Gen X's defining urge is to be a group of iconoclasts - to be "terminally unique." I think that misses it - Gen X is the most "self-aware" of any generation. Because our parents were so self-involved, and so disconnected from us, we were forced to be hyper aware of our emotional landscape to survive. While Baby Boomers valued being true to the self above all else, Generation Xers seek an ever-expanding global awareness - we want to have a truth that is as informed as possible. This "know it all" impulse shapes both our activism and our cynicism. And, sadly, Thomas comes off as being only narrowly self-aware, like a character in a Woody Allen movie. She has an extremely privileged upbringing, and her sphere of "normalcy" is bordered by Manhattan, the poshest part of Brooklyn and (gasp!) the Jersey suburbs.

When the Baby Boomers divorced, the Gen Xers became the parents to their parents, and in doing so to become existentially alone far before their time. Many kids tried to make it "okay" for the parents, and make neither parent the bad guy - and in the process, were forced at an early age to subvert their own egos for the good of others. The author's father, the deadbeat alcoholic, was unquestionably the bad guy - he was "Darth Vader" - so while her parents' split was deeply tragic and devastating to the children, it was a story that DID have a clear villain. And, while children are never, ever at fault for the way they handle divorce, the sad thing is that this part of her narrative may have obscured some of her own self-discovery, and gave her an excuse to bury some of the issues that would, as Jung said, "manifest themselves later as fate." She admits that she sought out her husband as a safe port in the storm, that she was content to rely on someone "capable" to improve her life, rather than stepping up herself. What's frustrating is that, at the end of the book, she still seems to be lurching forward to the next thing that will "save" her - still not completely aware, still running from her past rather than defining the world on her own terms. And that's a dispiriting place to end the story.

Still, Thomas makes it clear that she has never been a "joiner," and that she's deeply uncomfortable with casual intimacy. Maybe she consciously told her story in a way that would get her point across while subtly discrediting herself at the same time. If so, that might be the most impressive rhetorical trick of all.

I got this book based on the powerful, short excerpt in the Wall Street Journal. The theme of that piece -- of a generation united by the great personal tragedy of divorce -- resonated with me, and made me want to read more.

It quickly became apparent in reading the book, though, that Ms. Thomas' life experiences are much different than mine, and in some ways hard for me to sympathize with. She grew up very comfortably in some of the great places in the U.S., born to two parents who had been educated in our nation's top colleges. She had a birth father who was present and loving until she was at least 10. I can only dream of having had these kinds of advantages early in life. Yet she dealt with her father's leaving by turning to drugs, something I never did despite my much tougher circumstances...and something those of us who don't come from privelege can rarely recover from the way the upper middle classes can.

I was also turned off by the fact that the book veers into memoir territory, giving much more detail about her parents (before she was able to remember such things) than I cared about. It seemed like padding to turn what should've remained an essay into a book.

Thomas is a very good writer, but the book ended up disappointing my high expecatations.

While I am not part of Gen X, and I never experienced the trauma of parents' divorcing, I found this book completely engrossing and illuminating when it comes to relationships and how our generational experiences affect so much about who we are. Her thoughts on parenthood are also fascinating. Thomas' writing is so strong that I read sentences over again just to feel their impact a second time. Her honesty about herself and her life go far beyond even strong memoirs. I would definitely recommend this book.

Authors who pontificate upon the meaning of their lives and their place within their generation bore me. There have been enough books like this by and about the Boomer generation that there are probably no orginal words left to be said.

Fortunately, in this book, "In Spite of Everything", Generation X kicks the boomers off their soapbox and finally gives the Gen-X'ers a voice. Susan Gregory Thomas is unflinchingly honest in her assessment of growing up with an alcoholic father, and a mother who was brillant but really not cut out to be a 'mom'. The book is funny in many places, but also painfully real. So many women of the early boomer generation got married and had children because that was the primary path open to them, not because of a burning desire to be a mother. Not only is the author honest about her family, she is brutally honest about herself, and growing up in a time when the adults and role models in her life were more absorbed in their own situations as opposed to nuturing and parenting their children. Perhaps because of this boomer self-absorption, many Gen-X parents have put their children first, sometimes too much.

I loved this book. The author was able to put words to her experiences and clarify so much of what/how I felt growing up and then as an adult trying to build a life for myself that allowed me to avoid many of what I believed were my parents mistakes, only to find that in avoiding their mistakes I created my own.

My only wish is that I could be as articulate with my thoughts and memories!

Susan Gregory Thomas crystalizes Generation Ex's experience of divorce, from the perspective of the child and the contemporary divorcé. Her portrait of kids who grew in the 1970s and 80s divorce revolution is spot-on. She does a masterful job of weaving sociological analysis with her raw, heartfelt story of ending up exactly where she promised herself she'd never be: a divorced mom. An excellent contribution, and well worth reading for anyone touched by the trauma and dissolution of divorce.