Stay Here with Me: A Memoir [Paperback]

Robert Olmstead (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 15, 1997

Olmstead journeys back to his youth on his grandfather's New Hampshire dairy farm to confront the ghosts that continue to afflict him, laying bare the acute pain of his father's alcoholism and the decline of his grandfather, the family patriarch. Authentic, intimate, and intense, Stay Here with Me is about growing up and leaving home and about the acts of rebellion that free the body even as they bind the soul to a place forever.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Stay Here with Me is really a fictional "memoir" of Robert Olmstead's life. Though the main facts are true--he grew up on a farm, went to college at 19, and performed a variety of odd jobs in between cross-country motorcycle adventures--Olmstead is gifted in the art of embroidering facts. He describes in amusing detail how he and two other farm helpers lifted a ton stone, by hand, and boasts that he was so adjusted to natural time on the farm, he didn't learn to read a clock until he was 14. Readers will want to believe the brilliant and tender rendering of a youthful romance, though the young lady in question just might object to Olmstead's recollection of it. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

A novelist's sometimes lyrical, sometimes taut reminiscences of the summer of 1972 read very much like an appealing, slightly old-fashioned coming-of-age novel. It was the summer before Olmstead's senior year in high school, the summer he fell in love, the summer his alcoholic father lost his job, the summer his autocratic grandfather learned he would die of cancer. The setting is the grandfather's New Hampshire farm during the frantic-and sometimes comically irrational-preparations for getting the place in order for an aerial photograph. A few flashback memories-within-memories cover such things as a cow-buying trip to Canada and a hitch-hiking jaunt to his girlfriend's college campus in upstate New York. Flash-forwards suggest what will happen to most of the people involved. The lush and adjective-filled descriptions of Olmstead's first serious affair are lovingly rendered, but the book is strongest and most effective during its more austere moments, such as an evocative description of the finesse required to drive cows for their morning milking and a scene in which the author-with weary understanding-deals with his hungover father. With its remembered conversations and novelistic touches, this is a quietly moving adolescent memoir in the tradition of William Humphrey's powerful Farther Off from Heaven.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Holt Paperbacks (August 15, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805053581
• ISBN-13: 978-0805053586
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,830,577 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars READ IT! Beautiful prose, wonderful images, October 25, 1999

By 

weight watcher (Boise, ID USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Stay Here with Me: A Memoir (Paperback)

I purchased this book on a whim after reading another of Olmstead's works. When I began reading, I found myself moved by the book's honesty and intimacy. Familiar & new experiences balance one another in the book - and Olmstead perfectly captures those moments when new experiences are so very new and wonderful that they are more important - almost - than breathing. I can still remember passages with crystal clarity, months later. Lovely, lovely work.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars into the depths of young man's mind, new hampshire haymow, November 28, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Stay Here with Me: A Memoir (Paperback)

Anyone who's ever written about their youth would have to be impressed by the perceptiveness and imagery with which Robert Olmstead weaves this tale. It captures the New Hampshire summer landscape in a thousand hues and textures, and it perches on the brink of leaving home, of irrevocable change in a family, in a way that abrades the reader's remembered growing pains. Is it possible that so many things happened in one week, played themselves out so poignantly? Maybe not. Is the girl he describes too perfect to be true? May be, (but young love captures the beloved's perfection in amber, so her portrait is true.) Is the writing style so poetic it sometimes makes me gnash my teeth with envy, and sometimes makes me want to groan, enough already, it's not the Song of Solomon? Yeah. But, man, oh, man. You got to admire the craft.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars from a gifted writer, October 26, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Stay Here with Me: A Memoir (Paperback)

This book is staying with me, well over a week since I finished. It captured me, not so much for what Olmstead shares but how he does. His writing is intimate and rich; he writes alot about how he feels as life happens. This book is much more than a detailing of events, it's like coming inside his personal journal and is mesmerizing. For me it was an experience somewhat like Mary Karr's "Liar's Club". I highly recommend this -- his writing couldn't be better and flows like water or air.