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![I Know This Much Is True: A Novel (P.S.) by [Wally Lamb]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51+6d9TjPKL._SY346_.jpg)
I Know This Much Is True: A Novel (P.S.) Kindle Edition
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#1 New York Times Bestseller and Oprah Book Club selection
"Thoughtful . . . heart-wrenching . . . . An exercise in soul-baring storytelling—with the soul belonging to 20th-century America itself. It's hard to read and to stop reading, and impossible to forget." — USA Today
Dominick Birdsey, a forty-year-old housepainter living in Three Rivers, Connecticut, finds his subdued life greatly disturbed when his identical twin brother Thomas, a paranoid schizophrenic, commits a shocking act of self-mutilation. Dominick is forced to care for his brother as well as confront dark secrets and pain he has buried deep within himself—a journey of the soul that takes him beyond his blue-collar New England town to Sicily’s Mount Etna, the birthplace of his grandfather and namesake. Coming to terms with his life and lineage, Dominick struggles to find forgiveness and finally rebuild himself beyond the haunted shadow of his troubled twin.
I Know This Much Is True is a masterfully told story of alienation and connection, power and abuse, devastation and renewal—an unforgettable masterpiece.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHarperCollins e-books
- Publication dateMarch 17, 2009
- File size4498 KB
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A stretch, both literally and figuratively from his Oprah-christened bestseller, She's Come Undone, Lamb's book ventures outside the confines of the tightly bound beach read and marathons through a detailed, neatly cataloged account of every familial travesty and personal failure one can endure. At its heart lies Freud's "return of the repressed": the more we try to deny who we are, the more we become what we fear. Lamb takes Freud's psychological abstraction to the realm of everyday living, packing his novel with tender, believable dialogue and thoughtful observation. --Rebekah Warren
--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
"She won't tell," I said. "She never tells."
It was true. However angry we could make our mother, she would never have fed us to the five-foot-six-inch sleeping giant who snoozed upstairs weekdays in the spare room, rose to his alarm clock at three-thirty each afternoon, and built submarines at night. Electric Boat, third shift. At our house, you tiptoed and whispered during the day and became free each evening at nine-thirty when Eddie Banas, Ray's fellow third-shifter, pulled into the driveway and honked. I would wait for the sound of that horn. Hunger for it. With it came a loosening of limbs, a relaxation in the chest and hands, the ability to breathe deeply again. Some nights, my brother and I celebrated the slamming of Eddie's truck door by jumping in the dark on our mattresses. Freedom from Ray turned our beds into trampolines.
"Hey, look," Thomas said, staring with puzzlement at the television.
"What?"
Then I saw it, too: a thin curl of smoke rising from the back of the set. The Howdy Doody Show was on, I remember. Clarabel the Clown was chasing someone with his seltzer bottle. The picture and sound went dead. Flames whooshed up the parlor wall. I thought the Russians had done it--that Khrushchev had dropped the bomb at last. If the unthinkable ever happened, Ray had lectured us at the dinner table, the submarine base and Electric Boat were guaranteed targets. We'd feel the jolt nine miles up the road in Three Rivers. Fires would ignite everywhere. Then the worst of it: the meltdown. People's hands and legs and faces would melt like cheese.
"Duck and cover!" I yelled to my brother.
Thomas and I fell to the floor in the protective position the civil defense lady had made us practice at school. There was an explosion over by the television, a confusion of thick black smoke. The room rained glass. The noise and smoke brought Ma, screaming, inside. Her shoes crunched glass as she ran toward us. She picked up Thomas in her arms and told me to climb onto her back.
"We can't go outside!" I shouted. "Fallout!"
"It's not the bomb!" she shouted back. "It's the TV!"
Outside, Ma ordered Thomas and me to run across the street and tell the Anthonys to call the fire department. While Mr. Anthony made the call, Mrs. Anthony brushed glass bits off the tops of our crewcuts with her whisk broom. We spat soot-flecked phlegm. By the time we returned to the front sidewalk, Ma was missing. "Where's your mother?" Mr. Anthony shouted. "She didn't go back in there, did she? Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!" Thomas began to cry. Then Mrs. Anthony and I were crying, too. "Hurry up!" my brother shrieked to the distant sound of the fire siren. Through the parlor windows, I could see the flames shrivel our lace curtains. A minute or so later, Ma emerged from the burning house, sobbing, clutching something against her chest. One of her pockets was ablaze from the paper towels; her coat was smoking. Mr. Anthony yanked off Ma's coat and stomped on it. Fire trucks rounded the corner, sirens blaring. Neighbors hurried out of their houses to cluster and stare. Ma stank. The fire had sizzled her eyebrows and given her a sooty face. When she reached out to pull Thomas and me to her body, several loose photographs spilled to the ground. That's when I realized why she'd gone back into the house: to rescue her photo album from its keeping place in the bottom drawer of the china closet.
"It's all right now," she kept saying. "It's all right, it's all right." And, for Ma, it was all right. The house her father had built would be saved. Her twins were within arm's reach. Her picture album had been rescued. Just last week, I dreamt my mother--dead from breast cancer since 1987--was standing at the picture window at Joy's and my condominium, looking in at me and mouthing that long-ago promise. "It's all right, it's all right, it's all right."
Sometime during Ma's endless opening and closing of that overstuffed photo album she loved so much, the two brass pins that attached the front and back covers first bent, then broke, causing most of the book's black construction paper pages to loosen and detach. The book had been broken for years when, in October of 1986, Ma herself was opened and closed on a surgical table at Yale-New Haven Hospital. After several months' worth of feeling tired and run down and contending with a cold that never quite went away, she had fingered a lump in her left breast. "No bigger than a pencil eraser," she told me over the phone. "But Lena Anthony thinks I should go to the doctor, so I'm going." My mother's breast was removed. A week later, she was told that the cancer had metastasized--spread to her bone and lymph nodes. With luck and aggressive treatment, the oncologist told her, she could probably live another six to nine months.
--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.About the Author
Wally Lambis the author of five New York Times bestselling novels: She’s Come Undone, I Know This Much Is True, The Hour I First Believed, Wishin’ and Hopin’, and We Are Water. His first two works of fiction, She’s Come Undone and I Know This Much Is True, were both #1 New York Times bestsellers and selections of Oprah’s Book Club. Lamb edited Couldn’t Keep It to Myself, I’ll Fly Away, and You Don’t Know Me, three volumes of essays from students in his writing workshop at York Correctional Institution, a women’s prison in Connecticut, where he has been a volunteer facilitator for two decades. He lives in Connecticut and New York.
--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.From the Author
From the Back Cover
With his stunning debut novel, She's Come Undone, Wally Lamb won the adulation of critics and readers with his mesmerizing tale of one woman's painful yet triumphant journey of self-discovery. Now, this brilliantly talented writer returns with I Know This Much Is True, a heartbreaking and poignant multigenerational saga of the reproductive bonds of destruction and the powerful force of forgiveness. A masterpiece that breathtakingly tells a story of alienation and connection, power and abuse, devastation and renewal--this novel is a contemporary retelling of an ancient Hindu myth. A proud king must confront his demons to achieve salvation. Change yourself, the myth instructs, and you will inhabit a renovated world.
When you're the same brother of a schizophrenic identical twin, the tricky thing about saving yourself is the blood it leaves on your bands--the little inconvenience of the look-alike corpse at your feet. And if you're into both survival of the fittest and being your brother's keeper--if you've promised your dying mother--then say so long to sleep and hello to the middle of the night. Grab a book or a beer. Get used to Letterman's gap-toothed smile of the absurd, or the view of the bedroom ceiling, or the influence of random selection. Take it from a godless insomniac. Take it from the uncrazy twin--the guy who beat the biochemical rap.
Dominick Birdsey's entire life has been compromised and constricted by anger and fear, by the paranoid schizophrenic twin brother he both deeply loves and resents, and by the past they shared with their adoptive father, Ray, a spit-and-polish ex-Navy man (the five-foot-six-inch sleeping giant who snoozed upstairs weekdays in the spare room and built submarines at night), and their long-suffering mother, Concettina, a timid woman with a harelip that made her shy and self-conscious: She holds a loose fist to her face to cover her defective mouth--her perpetual apology to the world for a birth defect over which she'd had no control.
Born in the waning moments of 1949 and the opening minutes of 1950, the twins are physical mirror images who grow into separate yet connected entities: the seemingly strong and protective yet fearful Dominick, his mother's watchful "monkey"; and the seemingly weak and sweet yet noble Thomas, his mother's gentle "bunny." From childhood, Dominick fights for both separation and wholeness--and ultimately self-protection--in a house of fear dominated by Ray, a bully who abuses his power over these stepsons whose biological father is a mystery. I was still afraid of his anger but saw how he punished weakness--pounced on it. Out of self-preservation I hid my fear, Dominick confesses. As for Thomas, he just never knew how to play defense. He just didn't get it.
But Dominick's talent for survival comes at an enormous cost, including the breakup of his marriage to the warm, beautiful Dessa, whom he still loves. And it will be put to the ultimate test when Thomas, a Bible-spouting zealot, commits an unthinkable act that threatens the tenuous balance of both his and Dominick's lives.
To save himself, Dominick must confront not only the pain of his past but the dark secrets he has locked deep within himself, and the sins of his ancestors--a quest that will lead him beyond the confines of his blue-collar New England town to the volcanic foothills of Sicily 's Mount Etna, where his ambitious and vengefully proud grandfather and a namesake Domenico Tempesta, the sostegno del famiglia, was born. Each of the stories Ma told us about Papa reinforced the message that he was the boss, that he ruled the roost, that what he said went. Searching for answers, Dominick turns to the whispers of the dead, to the pages of his grandfather's handwritten memoir, The History of Domenico Onofrio Tempesta, a Great Man from Humble Beginnings.
Rendered with touches of magic realism, Domenico's fablelike tale--in which monkeys enchant and religious statues weep--becomes the old man's confession--an unwitting legacy of contrition that reveals the truth's of Domenico's life, Dominick learns that power, wrongly used, defeats the oppressor as well as the oppressed, and now, picking through the humble shards of his deconstructed life, he will search for the courage and love to forgive, to expiate his and his ancestors' transgressions, and finally to rebuild himself beyond the haunted shadow of his twin.
Set against the vivid panoply of twentieth-century America and filled with richly drawn, memorable characters, this deeply moving and thoroughly satisfying novel brings to light humanity's deepest needs and fears, our aloneness, our desire for love and acceptance, our struggle to survive at all costs. Joyous, mystical, and exquisitely written, I Know This Much Is True is an extraordinary reading experience that will leave no reader untouched.
--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.Review
“A gratifying saga of loss and redemption.” -- People
"[A] tour de force that sweeps the reader along in its swift emotional current....A work of astonishing craftsmanship, structural symmetry, and literary self-awareness...Read it and weep." -- St. Louis Post-Dispatch
"Dominick Birdsey is an epic hero and his story an inspiring, darkly comic tale of redemption--a late twentieth-century Les Miserables." -- Glamour
"Never grapples with anything less than life’s biggest questions. . . . Lamb clearly aims to be a modern-day Dostoevsky with a pop sensibility." -- New York Times Book Review
“A fully developed and triumphantly resolved exploration of one man’s suffering and redemption.” -- Publishers Weekly, starred review
"Every now and then a book comes along that sets new standards for writers and readers alike. Wally Lamb's latest novel is stunning--and even that might be an understatement...this is a masterpiece." -- Lisa Ko, author of The Leavers
"The saga of the century. Best, most wonderful, most dramatic, most powerful. There are no superlatives impressive enough to describe this, another Lamb masterpiece." -- Oakland Press
"You couldn’t ask for a more beguiling summer read." -- Entertainment Weekly --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
From Kirkus Reviews
From Booklist
From Library Journal
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
From Publishers Weekly
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
Product details
- ASIN : B000FC128M
- Publisher : HarperCollins e-books; 1st edition (March 17, 2009)
- Publication date : March 17, 2009
- Language : English
- File size : 4498 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 912 pages
- Page numbers source ISBN : 0060987561
- Best Sellers Rank: #61,360 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #104 in Contemporary American Fiction
- #424 in Contemporary Literary Fiction
- #576 in Contemporary Literature & Fiction
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Wally Lamb's first two novels, She's Come Undone (Simon & Schuster/Pocket, 1992) and I Know This Much Is True (HarperCollins/ReganBooks, 1998), were # 1 New York Times bestsellers, New York Times Notable Books of the Year, and featured titles of Oprah's Book Club. I Know This Much Is True was a Book of the Month Club main selection and the June 1999 featured selection of the Bertelsman Book Club, the national book club of Germany. Between them, She's Come Undone and I Know This Much Is True have been translated into eighteen languages. Lamb is also the editor of the nonfiction anthologies Couldn't Keep It to Myself: Testimonies from Our Imprisoned Sisters (HarperCollins/ReganBooks, 2003) and I'll Fly Away (HarperCollins, 2007), collections of autobiographical essays which evolved from a writing workshop Lamb facilitates at Connecticut's York Correctional Institute, a maximum-security prison for women. He has served as a Connecticut Department of Corrections volunteer from 1999 to the present. Wally Lamb is a Connecticut native who holds Bachelors and Masters Degrees in teaching from the University of Connecticut and a Master of Fine Arts in Writing from Vermont College. Lamb was in the ninth year of his twenty-five-year career as a high school English teacher at his alma mater, the Norwich Free Academy, when he began to write fiction in 1981. He has also taught writing at the University of Connecticut, where he directed the English Department's creative writing program. Wally Lamb has said of his fiction, “Although my characters' lives don't much resemble my own, what we share is that we are imperfect people seeking to become better people. I write fiction so that I can move beyond the boundaries and limitations of my own experiences and better understand the lives of others. That's also why I teach. As challenging as it sometimes is to balance the two vocations, writing and teaching are, for me, intertwined.” Honors for Wally Lamb include: the Connecticut Center for the Book's Lifetime Achievement Award, the Connecticut Bar Association's Distinguished Public Service Award, the Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award, the Connecticut Governor's Arts Award, The National Institute of Business/Apple Computers “Thanks to Teachers” Award. Lamb has received Distinguished Alumni awards from Vermont College and the University of Connecticut. He was the 1999 recipient of the New England Book Award for fiction. I Know This Much Is True won the Friends of the Library USA Readers' Choice Award for best novel of 1998, the result of a national poll, and the Kenneth Johnson Memorial Book Award, which honored the novel's contribution to the anti-stigmatization of mental illness. She's Come Undone was a 1992 “Top Ten” Book of the Year selection in People magazine and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Best First Novel of 1992. Wally Lamb's third novel, The Hour I First Believed, explores chaos theory by interfacing several generations of a fictional Connecticut family with such nonfictional American events as the Civil War, the Columbine High School shootings of 1999, the Iraq War, and Hurricane Katrina. The book will be published by HarperCollins in November of 2008.
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The story grabbed me from the very first pages, in which Thomas lops off his right hand while sitting in a public library. In his idealistic delusion, he felt he was making a public statement about America’s “wicked greed” and that his sacrifice would urge us “to follow a more spiritual course if we were to survive”. He believed also that his sacrifice would prevent the U.S. from entering the Gulf War; as soon as the President learned of this selfless act, he’d of course reconsider going to war.
Dominick had sworn to their mother on her deathbed that he’d look after Thomas and keep him safe. The entire theme of the book tells of his struggles to keep that promise, and how he felt he’d failed so many times, in spite of his gargantuan efforts.
How had Thomas gotten so seriously mentally ill? Was it nature or nurture? Was it because he was a gentle, sensitive child who was terrorized by his abusive stepfather? Was it because their mother never revealed who their real father was? Was it because of the secrets held by Domenico, their maternal grandfather who died before they were born? Or was it because Dominick had learned the art of defense and had often bullied Thomas? [“I was always doing that to him when we were kids: letting him know which of us was smarter, stronger, faster on the draw. Maybe that was why he was acting so wacky these days. Maybe I’d finally made him crack.”] And why hadn’t Dominick succumbed to the same fate … or would he? These are all questions that tormented the adult Dominick and forced him to try harder to protect Thomas. His quest overtook his entire life. But the harder he tried, the worse the results seemed to be ... the faster he ran, the behinder he got.
Dominick’s troubles and obsessions eventually lead him to see a psychiatrist, Dr. Patel, who guided him through his past in order to understand his present situation. As a child, Thomas had the lion’s share of their mother’s attention because, as Dr. Patel pointed out. “And was it that aspect of your brother’s nature, that quality perhaps, that made Thomas easier for your mother to love?” Jealousy over his mother’s love for Thomas had consumed Dominick his whole life.
And then there’s the issue of Grandfather Domenico’s memoirs, which their mother had given Dominick just before she died. She had never read it, as it was written in Italian, but it was obvious that she adored her father. When Dominick had it translated and started reading it, he realized his grandfather was an arrogant, egotistical tyrant – a thoroughly unlikeable man. But the memoir is fascinating reading – sort of a novel-within-a-novel.
So many secrets, such surprising revelations, such fascinating intertwined relationships make for a really great book. I promise you, those 900 pages will fly by faster than you ever imagined. I know this much is true.
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