Customer Reviews

Uphill Walkers: A Memoir of a Family

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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.

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.

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.

A wonderful book- Maddy Blais is a riot. She is a professor at my university, and though I never had the opportunity to take any classes with her, I did get to sit down and talk with her about "Uphill Walkers." She's as funny and insightful in person, and even brought pictures of her family for us to connect faces to the personalities we came to know so well in the book. I grew up in the same little corner of the world, so it's a real treat to read a narrative that incorporates familiar local landmarks. And it's a wonderful, sweet, poignant story about a loving family, with flaws like the rest of us.

I commend Madeleine Blais for her effort to record her childhood experiences. She recalls her reaction to her father's untimely death and draws nicely described vignettes of her five siblings and their not-quite-able-to-cope mother. The scenes are linked with mentions of songs, current events and other minutiae of the 50s. Unfortunately these sound like they were gleaned from an almanac to serve as fillers.

She has some pleasant moments in the book, and I was reading it just for that "growing up in the 50s" ambience.

There's nothing much wrong with the biography, but it just seems lacking somehow. The account lacks the elegance of language of Trevanian's The Crazyladies of Pearl Street while their middle class life lacks the drama quotient of The Glass Castle. Maybe if I hadn't read those first, I'd find Uphill Walkers more compelling.

The final part of the book recounts the adult years of the Blais brothers and sisters and it was interesting to read the sad degeneration of her brother into mental illness and the inadequate treatments. Still the saga of his life and hers seemed distant like the events happened to other people and she was just passing the story along.