Uphill Walkers: A Memoir of a Family [Hardcover]

Madeleine Blais (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 10, 2001

In 1952, Madeleine Blais's father died suddenly, leaving his pregnant wife and their five young children to face their future alone in a newly purchased house in rural Massachusetts. Uphill Walkers is the story of how the Blais family pulled together to survive and ultimately thrive in an era when a single-parent family was almost unheard of. As they came of age in an Irish-American household that often struggled to make ends meet, the Blais children would rise again and again above all obstacles -- from the complex vicissitudes of Catholic doctrinal education to the inevitable sibling rivalries. At every step of the way they were inspired by a mother who expected much but gave even more, as she saved and sacrificed to provide her children with the same education they would have received had their father lived. Then, when they had grown to adulthood and begun to lead separate lives, the Blais children had to band together once more to come to the aid of Raymond, their troubled eldest brother, whose mental illness had driven his life to take increasingly darker turns. Beautiful, heartbreaking, and full of wonderful insights about sisterhood, brotherhood, and the ties that bind us together, Uphill Walkers is a moving portrait of the love it takes to succeed against the odds -- and what it means to be a family.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

When Blais's father died unexpectedly in 1952, he left a family of six, and Blais's life changed forever. Blais, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the Miami Herald and author of the best-selling In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle and The Heart Is an Instrument, was the second oldest. She was five at the time, barely able to comprehend the situation. Her mother, widowed and pregnant, had a large family to support with meager resources. Here Blais chronicles her family's struggle to survive, tracing each sibling's growth to adulthood and her strong-willed, Irish American mother's progress toward old age. Especially poignant is the account of her older brother Ray's decline into mental illness and the resulting pain and frustration for the entire family. Although Blais captures both the feeling of growing up in the Fifties and Sixties and the warmth and camaraderie of her large family, her skillful, reportorial prose has a tone of objectivity and distance that is disconcerting in a memoir. Recommended, with some reservations, for public libraries.
- Nancy R. Ives, SUNY at Geneseo
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Blais won a Pulitzer Prize as a Miami Herald reporter and positive reviews (and strong sales) for In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle (1996). Her memoir tells the story of a large, rambunctious Irish family in rural Massachusetts, raised by a widowed single mother at a time when all families were expected to be nuclear. Her book is full of the fascinating trivia of childhood--favorite foods and sibling rivalries and slogans from TV ads and shared poetry and crushes on rock stars--but its unifying arc is the impact on the family of older brother Ray's mental illness. Blais carries the story to the present, with her mother an aging but still dignified matriarch, Raymond deceased at 54, the four sisters nurturing another generation as mothers and aunts, and baby Michael, born after his father's death, a supportive, sometimes impish uncle. Involving and beautifully written. Mary Carroll
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press; 1ST edition (May 10, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0871137925
• ISBN-13: 978-0871137920
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,366,630 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Family Perseveres, May 4, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Uphill Walkers: A Memoir of a Family (Hardcover)

Madeline Blais,who amazed us with "In These Girls, Hope is a Muscle," a book which is on nearly all high school summer reading lists, does it again with "Uphill Walkers." She turns her reporter's eye inward to examine her family and its vicissitudes. The family's uphill struggle following the death of her father is at the core of this book. Blais does not gloss over the rough spots. Her brother's emotional problems, her mother's struggles to keep the family going following the death of her husband, the constraints of growing up in a small, rural 1950's town are all laid bare. But there is a warmth and charm to the telling of the tale. Blais and her three sisters and two brothers move forward propelled by their ability to see the joy in the details of quotidian life and their ability to lean on each other when the going gets tough (as it does when Raymond, the eldest child, falls prey to his inner deamons). This book also captures the spirit of the family matriarch. Proud to the point of denying anything is wrong with Raymond (when Raymond is discharged from the Navy due to aural hallucinations she tells the other children to tell outsiders Ray got a medical discharge because there was something wrong with his hearing!) yet fiesty enough to make do and raise her brood in an era when "single parents" were unheard of, Blais's mother Maureen comes across as the heroine of this work. Blais again demonstates her considerable writing skills. There are some terrific lines in this book, such as her description of her mother's ability to to take a grain of indignity and massage it into a "pearl of pique." Since a family memoir never truly ends, Blais has included a "where are they now" chapter and an epilogue which describes each sibling's take on how the author has told the story -- what she got right, what she is remembering through her personal filter that differs from their own. These chapters are like the "Bonus Tracks" so popular on movie DVDs; a little extra that helps put the whole into perspective. At a time when memoirs, especially Irish-American memoirs, seem to be flooding the market, "Uphill Walkers" is worth your time and money.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Extraordinary, August 2, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Uphill Walkers: A Memoir of a Family (Hardcover)

Not a word is wasted in this quietly powerful memoir. I found myself underlining passages I wanted to save and savor. This is a book about the ties that bind us to family -- a refreshing look at normal small town life in the 60's -- about nuns -- mental illness -- powdered milk -- hope and despair. By the time you finish reading, you know this family and are glad you met them. I chanced upon this book quite by accident -- may other readers be so lucky.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Quirky, delightful, sad but I wanted more, February 15, 2002

By 

Natalie - See all my reviews

This review is from: Uphill Walkers: A Memoir of a Family (Hardcover)

I raced through this book, caught up in the momentum of the evocation of a large 50s family...(I too come from a New England family of 6 children, one prematurely dead after a nervous breakdown), and I am only a couple of years younger than the author.)

The book seems to highlight little "spots of time" beautifully. (I wondered if the author had seen that chillingly scary yet rapturously dazzlingly wonderful episode of "Queen for a Day" when a woman wanted a wooden leg, for example).

Look at all the parentheses in this review! That shows, I believe, how taken in a very personal way I was with this book. I wanted more. More details about how the children REALLY thought about their mother. Are any in therapy? More more more about the two youngest daughters....but is that because I have more difficulties understanding my own two youngest siblings?

I usually read novels and poetry and very little non-fiction, so I am not uncomfortable with things omitted although I so often crave more. Oddly (and it was perhaps my mood) I wanted to hear less about Raymond. Yet had he been a "fictional construct" he would have fascinated me more.

I would recommend this book highly to anyone who is in the process of trying to come to terms with an odd childhood, or to anyone who is curious about all of those huge families who grew up in the 1950s. Young adults of today might learn something about the life of their parents from this book: the enforced sharing, the lack of certain kinds of entitlement that we had growing up in the 1950s when the self-esteem movement had not yet commenced.

Blais has some startlingly original and memorable metaphors and figures of speech which made her book aesthetically pleasurable as well.

I would love to read a sequal in which she fills in more details on what it's like to have four sisters who almost feel like quadruplets. She gives us the "facts" on that, but I would love to hear more about the emotional give and take and take and give.