Customer Reviews

The Things Between Us: A Memoir

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This author can write -- Images are touching, sincere, and have depth. The book brought up memories and a new way to look at my parents. Love and compassion are great themes -- also it is clear the author was forged as a writer being brought up with a blend of influences -- a wide spectrum of life in the neighborhood!!!!
I love the language the author uses and felt I could touch every scene. Without giving too much away -- polywogs and fireflies, the smell of the garden and well-loved animals that inhabit the scenes...the clear/and representative perceptions of the characters.
Definitely helps me deal with mortality and parents and upbringing.
The author peels the fig and gives the reader the essence of life.
Think I will cruise down my own "Winch Street" and see the flowers next spring.
Fabulous writing!

I wish I'd read this book three months ago. I recently lost my father who had battled various illnesses during the last ten years of his long life. I live far away from my Dad and I came home to my childhood home more than I had in years to be with him during the final stages of his life. I could have learned so much about what goes on during these final weeks and days if I'd read Lee Mongtomery's book earlier this year. It's not only the gripping memoir of a loving daughter in a dysfunctional family...but it's essential reading for anyone going thru the final days with a beloved family member. It's truly an amazing time...filled with laugher, tears, anger and confusion...and thru this book I discovered that my family wasn't the only one going thru this odd roller coaster of emotions and frustration during a father's final days. Right down the road there was the Montgomery family who had gone thru this stuff in their own way, several years before us. It's the kind of thing no one ever talks about with such honesty and raw emotion. Every family member brings a different set of baggage to the household of a dying loved one. Everyone needs to be able to express themself as they need to...to patch up old wounds, find time for last minute hugs, and to say that last "i love you" however it works best for them. Kudos to Lee Montgomery for sharing her story. Her well-crafted words and her honesty will surely help others on similar journeys.

I'm normally not a fan of memoirs, but Lee Montgomery's novel is truly amazing. Her ability to engage the reader while offering honest insights into her life and that of her family, is powerful. Anyone experiencing death or dying of close friends or family will find support and insight. Those coping with cancer or alcholism in their family will also benefit from reading this book.

This is one of the best things I've read in ages. Terribly sad, but not the kind of sad where you have to stop reading -- on the contrary, I couldn't STOP reading. Certainly anyone who's ever dealt with aging, ailing parents and all the accompanying sibling problems that arise, should read this. I wish I could write like Ms. Montgomery. Since I can't, I want to read everything else she's written.

Slow reader that I am I thought it would take me a week or two to finish what turned out to be an absolutely astounding book...Time flew! Two days later (two 3 hr. rapid reading sessions; could not put it down!) I slumped over my reading table with my head on the book almost in tears feeling a sadness almost as purely as the writer must have felt herself.

But there are also deep, rediculously hilarious gut laugh moments. Other funny happenings throughout the book could have been sad had Montgomery not have injected her classic "oh well, let's just go with it" attitude you find throughout the book.

It's rare we can sit so on the edge of our seats despite knowing what ultimately is going to happen: her beloved father, the family anchor dies...but it is the living along the way that Montgomery celebrates.

Thank you, Ms. Montgomery, foe allowing me -- a typical guy who keeps his emotions on the surface -- to explore a greater depth that has actually improved and help me cherish my relationship with those dear to me...while I can.

-Clay
Keene, New Hampshire

I stumbled upon this book in our local library..and I'm glad I picked it up. Three days later it is done...and I can feel aspects of my own life are getting clearer now. The author was born in the 1950s and comes to terms with her beloved dad's death in the 1990s. No one is ever ready to loose a parent but your heart will break and you'll laugh out loud during the most special passages in this memoir. I don't hesitate to recommend this bittersweet testament to love in an era when dysfunctional was common and alcoholism was a secret of so many people.

I really couldn't put the book down. I love Ms. Montgomery's writing style and sense of humor. Ok, I am a transplanted New Englander and we have a dry humor so it makes sense I laughed throughout a book with a sad plot. I laughed because that's what you do to deal with saddness. It's our form of therapy.- I lost my brother and like another reviewer already said, I felt myself rush back into the last year of his life and the delicate, complicated, and very confusing moments you have with siblings and parents when you face the death of someone you love. Yes, there were times we even laughed. I also nodded my head many times to the descriptions of life on the farm and the struggles of being a teen during those years. The book reignited all those emotions and more. Ms. Montgomery should keep on writing.

Dysfunction. That word that few my age ever heard growing up but know so well now is the key element of Lee Montgomery's wonderful memoir about her parents. It is also a testimonial to strength in coming together with her siblings as she did when their father was dying. Survival for the author was paramount as she had to make dozens of balancing decisions not only about her father's care but also her mother's alcoholism.

There isn't much humor in "The Things Between Us" and one needs to approach this book with a sense of this, but along the way there is much color...the New England sky, for instance, stands out as one example. The seriousness with which she confronts her own growing up (now at age fifty or thereabouts) is inspirational for those of us, age-related, who know about dysfunction and dying parents.

"The Things Between Us" is highly recommended for anyone who has been through or is going through the parental care process. When one becomes a parent to one's own parents, perspective of life changes dramatically. I applaud Lee Montgomery for giving us her story.

Having been raised in New England it was a treat to read this memoir set there about a dysfunctional family and coming home as an adult. Very well written, and touching as her father grapples with his own mortality. I highly recommend this book.

As a rule, I don't like memoirs. At least, the modern memoir. It is often little more than a flimsy frame on which to hang some lukewarm narrative on the dysfunction of the month, splaying open a life for the sheer spectacle of it. But this book has changed my mind about the entire genre. It is an honest examination of a family holding itself together the only way it can and showing in the process how deeply love can bind. Montgomery handles deftly the fraying bonds between her alcoholic mother, her dying father, her siblings, and herself, and writes about them with grace, humor, frankness, the more than occasional obscenity, and a love so bright and raw that it almost hurts to read at times. It is a wonderful reminder of how moving and instructive a memoir can be.