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Richard McCann

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Mother of Sorrows Hardcover – April 26, 2005

by Richard McCann (Author)

4.5 51 ratings

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With the breadth and cumulative force of a novel, Mother of Sorrows presents ten interwoven stories of an American family starting out in the post—World War II suburbs of Washington, D.C., a world of identical brick houses and sunstruck, treeless lawns, a world of initial hopefulness from which shame and loss have seemingly been banished. This is the story of two adolescent brothers whose father has suddenly died, and of their beautiful and complicated mother, a mother whom the younger son worshipfully imagines as “Our Mother of the Sighs and Heartaches . . . Our Mother of the Gorgeous Gypsy Earrings . . . Our Mother of the Late Movies and the Cigarettes . . . Our Mother of Sudden Attentiveness . . . Our Mother of Sudden Anger.” This is the brother who narrates these tales as he looks back thirty years later, the only remaining survivor of a world he seeks both to leave behind and to preserve in words forever, a world of sorrow that has held him spellbound even as he has attempted to create a life of his own.

Suffused with the beauty of Richard McCann’s extraordinary language, Mother of Sorrows introduces us to a voice that is urgent, contemplative, elegant, angry, revelatory, and like no other in contemporary fiction.

Print length

208 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Pantheon
Publication date

April 26, 2005
Dimensions

5.4 x 1 x 7.9 inches
ISBN-10

0679411763
ISBN-13

978-0679411765
See all details

Fae Myenne Ng
151
Paperback
86 offers from $1.23

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Though it is a work of fiction, this slim volume of interconnected stories—a collection 18 years in the making by the codirector of the graduate program in creative writing at American University—reads like a memoir; an unnamed first-person narrator leads the reader through meticulously constructed scenes from his past, musing on self, sexual identity and family dynamics. The earliest chapters are set in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in the 1950s. The narrator is a child, growing up gay in classic fashion, obsessed with his glamorous mother and chastised by his father for things like "cutting out Winnie Winkle fashion dolls from the Sunday funnies or designing elaborate ball gowns for my favorite movie stars." When he dresses in his mother's clothes with another boy, he is caught; a fishing expedition with his father is a failure. The narrator's transition into adulthood is hardly any easier: his father dies young; his brother, Davis, also gay, is arrested several times and eventually dies of a drug overdose. And in the final section, the narrator is revealed to have AIDS, a disease that has claimed the lives of many friends. McCann's calm, elegiac prose is lovely in descriptive passages, but turns stiff and self-conscious in the frequent explanations the narrator offers for his behavior and that of others. Still, McCann's graceful writing carries these bittersweet snapshots of a life plagued by self-doubt and yearning. Agent, Gail Hochman. (Apr. 26)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

In prose as silky smooth as the clothes from his mother's closetthat the protagonist covertly dons, McCann relates an Eisenhower-era coming-of-agein a D.C. suburb of trimmed lawns and station wagons. Civil defense leaflets picture moms in backyard bomb shelters, leafing through magazines stacked on Danish modern coffee tables. In the midst of the cold war, shootouts on Gunsmoke provide drama in the living room. Already more than a little fixated on Our Mother of the Late Movies and Cigarettes, McCann's narrator, when 11, becomes yet more so when his father, an officer assigned to the Pentagon, suddenly falls ill and dies. Overlapping flash-forwards and --backs show older brother Davis OD'ing at 35 and then as a laughing 6-year-old; the glamorous mother dressing for an evening out, then an old woman needing to check her blood sugar. Throughout, McCann captures the nuances of bonding, down to the elaborate "twin speak" the brothers, differing only 15 months in age, devise and ultimately provides insight into a gay man's development at a bygone midcentury. Whitney Scott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

“Richard McCann’s Mother of Sorrows is almost unbearably beautiful. It is, purely and simply, the real thing–a book so intricately felt, so magnificently written, that it can stand unembarrassed beside the mystery of life itself. It has immediately joined the small body of books I keep close by, for the times I need reminding of the heights we can attain using only ink and paper.” –Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours

“These stories are written in a precise, spare, and tender poetry. They are full of haunted and love-filled moments of American memory.” –Colm Tóibín, author of The Master

“These stories are heartbreaking, and yet they are written with so much tenderness I came away from them filled with their beauty rather than their sadness. Richard McCann writes like a dream.” –Ann Patchett, author of Bel Canto

“Mother of Sorrows is written in language so precise and vibrant, reading it brings to mind the elegiac stories of John Cheever and Richard Yates. McCann’s compassionate, refractive method, however, is all his own.” –Bernard Cooper, author of Maps to Anywhere

“There is sorrow, of course, in Mother of Sorrows. Richard McCann delivers sorrow, of the most knowing, serious kind–and joy, lust, awareness unfolding, the lyric and the ugly–all held in the loving embrace of exceptionally strong and tender language. McCann delivers.”
–Amy Bloom, author of Come to Me

“James Baldwin once described successful artists as those who had reconciled themselves to the task of a ‘delicate, arduous, disciplined
self-exposure.’ In Mother of Sorrows, Richard McCann has subjected himself to this process with brave honesty, and the result is a portrait of a family as tender as it is harrowing.” –Adam Haslett, author of You Are Not a Stranger Here

About the Author

Richard McCann’s work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, Tin House, and Ploughshares, and in many anthologies, including Best American Essays 2000. He is the author of Ghost Letters, a book of poems. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and from the Fulbright and Rockefeller Foundations. He lives in Washington, D.C., where he co-directs the graduate program in creative writing at American University.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Crêpe de Chine

Each night, after dinner, my father went downstairs to his workbench to build birdhouses, which he fashioned from scraps of wood left over from pine-paneling our basement. He was a connoisseur of birdhouses, my mother said. His favorite was a miniature replica of our ranch house, with a tiny Plexiglas picture window, a red Dutch door, and a shingled roof. It was a labor of love, he said the night he completed it.

My brother, Davis, went to his room, where he listened to Radio Moscow on his shortwave. As for me: I cleared the table.

“Sit with me, son,” my mother said. “Let’s pretend we’re sitting this dance out.”

She told me I was her best friend. She said I had the heart to understand her. She was forty-six. I was nine.

She sat at the table as if she were waiting to be photographed, holding her cigarette aloft. “Have I told you the story of my teapot?” she asked, lifting a Limoges pot from the table. She had been given the teapot by her mother, whom we called Dear—Dear One, Dear Me, Dearest of Us All. Dear had just recently entered a sanatorium for depression, after having given away some of her most cherished possessions. When she died at home a few months later—she’d returned to her deteriorated Brooklyn brownstone, where she slept on a roll-away bed in the basement—my mother found she’d left an unwitnessed will written entirely in rhymed couplets: “I spent as I went / Seeking love and content,” it began.

“No,” I told my mother as I examined the teapot’s gold-rimmed lid, “you haven’t told me about it.”

In fact, by then my mother had already told me about almost everything. But I wanted to hear everything again. What else in Carroll Knolls—our sunstruck subdivision of identical brick houses—could possibly have competed with the stories my mother would summon from her china or her incomplete sterling tea service or the violet Louis Sherry candy box where she kept her dried corsages? I wanted to live within the lull of her voice, soft and regretful, as she resuscitated the long-ago nights of her girlhood, those nights she waited for her parents to come home in taxicabs from parties, those nights they still lived in the largest house on Carroll Street, those nights before her parents’ divorce, before her father started his drinking.

She whispered magic word: crêpe de chine, Sherry Netherlands, Havilland, Stork Club, argent repousée . . .

Night after night she told me her stories.

Night after night I watched her smoke her endless Parliaments, stubbing out the lipstick-stained butts in a crystal ashtray. We sat at the half-cleared table like two deposed aristocrats for whom any word might serve as the switch of a minuterie that briefly lights a long corridor of memory—so long, in fact, the switch must be pressed repeatedly before they arrive at the door to their room.

She said her mother had once danced with the Prince of Wales.

She said her father had shaken hands with FDR and Al Capone.

She said she herself had once looked exactly like Merle Oberon.

To prove it, she showed me photos of herself taken during her first marriage, when she was barely twenty. From every photo she’d torn her ex-husband’s image, so that in most of them she was standing next to a jagged edge, and in some of them a part of her body—where he’d had his hand on her arm, perhaps—was torn away also.

She said life was fifty-fifty with happiness and heartache.

She said that when she was a girl she’d kept a diary in which she’d recorded the plots of her favorite movies.

She said that if I was lucky I too would inherit the gift of gab.

When I was little, she read me Goodnight, Moon. Goodnight, nobody. Goodnight, mush. And goodnight to the old lady whispering “hush.”

But otherwise, she read me no bedtime books. She told me no fairy tales.

Instead she came to my room at night to tell me stories that began like these: Once upon a time, I had a gold brush and comb set. Once upon a time, my parents looked like F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Once upon a time, I rode a pony in Central Park. Once upon a time, I had a silver fox coat.

Things she told me, sitting on the edge of my bed at night:

“I was born with a caul. That means I have a sixth sense.”

Or, touching her perfumed wrist to my cheek: “This is called ‘Shalimar.’ ”

Or, faintly humming: “Do you know this tune? Do you know ‘When I Grow Too Old to Dream, I’ll Have You to Remember’?”

Or sometimes when she coughed—her “nervous cough,” her “smoker’s cough”—she said, “One day, after I’m gone, you’ll hear a woman cough like this, and you’ll think she is me.”

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Pantheon (April 26, 2005)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 208 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0679411763
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0679411765
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 12 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.4 x 1 x 7.9 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #2,179,221 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #25,235 in Contemporary Literature & Fiction
- #89,518 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- #101,698 in American Literature (Books)

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4.5 51 ratings

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Richard McCann

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Richard McCann is the author of Mother of Sorrows, a work of fiction, and Ghost Letters, a collection of poems (1994 Beatrice Hawley Award, 1933 Capricorn Poetry Award). He is also the editor (with Michael Klein) of Things Shaped in Passing: More 'Poets for Life' Writing from the AIDS Pandemic. His fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in such magazines as The Atlantic, Ms., Esquire, Ploughshares, Tin House, and the Washington Post Magazine, and in numerous anthologies, including The O. Henry Prize Stories 2007 and Best American Essays 2000. He is currently working on a memoir, The Resurrectionist, which explores the experience and meanings of illness and mortality through a narrative exploration of his experience as a liver transplant recipient.

For his work, Richard McCann has received grants and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Christopher Isherwood Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, on whose Board of Trustees he served from 2000-2008. He earned his MA in Creative Writing and Modern Literature from Hollins University and his Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Iowa, where he was a Rockefeller Fellow. He grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland, and he has lived in numerous places, including Sweden, Germany, and Spain. He now lives in Washington, DC, where he teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at American University. He also serves the Board of Directors of the PEN Faulkner Foundation and is a Member of the Corporation of Yaddo.

Customer reviews

4.5 out of 5

51 global ratings

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Customers find the writing style wonderful, with a deep insight into the heart. They also describe the content as sad and funny, told with great heart and humor. Readers also appreciate the gorgeous work of art.

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6 customers mention "Writing style"6 positive0 negative

Customers find the writing style wonderful and lovely.

"...Mr. McCann is is a very fine writer." Read more

"This book is lovely." Read more

"...I find myself re-reading every word because the sentences are so perfectly crafted.Bravo, Richard.And thank you." Read more

"Wonderfully written with a deep insight into the heart and mind that many authors can not put into words." Read more

5 customers mention "Content"5 positive0 negative

Customers find the book wonderful, with deep insight into the heart. They also say the story is sad and funny, told with great heart and humor.

"...The most moving story-- without revealing what happens-- is "My Brother In The Basement."..." Read more

"McCann has written a book of gripping emotion with characters in vivid color...." Read more

"Wonderfully written with a deep insight into the heart and mind that many authors can not put into words." Read more

"I liked the stories in this book they were sad but uplifting at the same time. Takes you back to a time when being different was much harder." Read more

3 customers mention "Visuals"3 positive0 negative

Customers find the visuals in the book gorgeous and powerful. They also appreciate the simple, yet powerful style.

"...i was too overwhelmed with emotion to get a good look at its subtle artistry...." Read more

"Richard McCann has created the most gorgeous work of art with this collection of interconnecting stories...." Read more

"...I enjoyed the simple, but powerful style." Read more

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Foster Corbin

Family of Sorrows

Reviewed in the United States on May 7, 2005

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Richard McCann has written ten fine short stories here, most of which have been published previously. Having read in a gay anthology the last story here, "The Universe, Concealed," is the reason I bought this slim volume of only 191 pages, proving once again that often less is more. While the stories can be read in any order as each of them stands alone, they are all related, a little like one of those David Hockney photographs where the frames are loosely connected to form one picture. There is the narrator, along with his brother Davis, who is 15 months older than he, and their parents. What makes these tender stories so heart-wrenching is that the family dynamics are completely accurate. I saw glimpses of both my parents and my brother in these characters, the competition between children for their parents' love and approval, the difficulties of growing up, the death of a parent or sibling-- and you don't have to be gay to experience that. The narrator is much taken with his mother, dresses in her clothes as a youngster, wants to spend time only with her, and she says things like he is her best friend, probably not the healthiest attitude for a mother to take. He also wants desperately to please his father but not if it means he has to go fishing with him or search for night crawlers. His father is mildly embarrassed with who his son is. "'He makes me nervous,' I heard my father tell my mother one night as I lay in bed. They were speaking about me."

Other passages-- or stories-- ring true as well. The narrator, like so many of us in the 1980's and 1990's, has attended far too many "gay" funerals. It's almost as each of them must be the most unusual but oh, so relevant: "I know what ritual we'll get when we die, I thought each time I looked around the room at the bunch of us, [the narrator is attending a Positive Immunity workshop] the worried unwell. . . It won't be Kaddish. It won't be a funeral pyre on the Ganges. It'll be a boombox playing 'Je Ne Regrette Rien' in the rear of some Unitarian church hung with rainbow flags, like a gay Knights of Columbus hall." (Surely the funeral director who coined the word "cremains" for ashes will burn in hell for that little monstrosity.) There are literally dozens of paragraphs like these in these stories that go straight to the heart.

The most moving story-- without revealing what happens-- is "My Brother In The Basement." The narrator perceives that his brother Davis is on a collision course but cannot save him. This story, like many of the others, is to be read again and again. I'm reminded of what William Maxwell said about good literature, that we should enjoy it rather than analyze it.

Mr. McCann is is a very fine writer.

10 people found this helpful

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Vickie I. Fang

breathtaking Beauty.

Reviewed in the United States on October 2, 2013

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This is a book i need to read over and over again because on a first read, i was too overwhelmed with emotion to get a good look at its subtle artistry. I feel like someone who has just run through a garden and now wants to go back and spend a long time examining the petals and touching the leaves.

Reviewed in the United States on June 27, 2013

Verified Purchase

McCann has written a book of gripping emotion with characters in vivid color. Readers should know that this is the story of a young boy who does not fit the mold of boyhood, a mother who seems excessively self-conscious, and a brother who provides a counterpoint to the main characters life in many ways. This story is one of a life deconstructing and another life developing along a healthier track. If you have read Andrew Holleran's Grief, you might enjoy this as well.

Reviewed in the United States on February 12, 2021

This book is lovely.

Achingly Perfect Prose

Reviewed in the United States on January 1, 2010

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Richard McCann has created the most gorgeous work of art with this collection of interconnecting stories. Most concern his self-obsessed mother, a magnificent creature only Anne Bancroft in her early years could have played.

I find myself re-reading every word because the sentences are so perfectly crafted.

Bravo, Richard.

And thank you.

One person found this helpful

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S. B. Peck

Beautifully written

Reviewed in the United States on July 31, 2019

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Honest. Full of truth. Eudora Welty would like this.

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Stacie Arpey

Wonderfully written with a deep insight into the heart and ...

Reviewed in the United States on November 19, 2014

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Wonderfully written with a deep insight into the heart and mind that many authors can not put into words.

One person found this helpful

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Rita

Great Characters Make Book Wonderful

Reviewed in the United States on February 17, 2010

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I felt as if I could really imagine the characters. He has the rare ability to write with the frame of reference of the age of the speaker-a la Frank McCort. I enjoyed the simple, but powerful style.

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Liam Ostermann

One of the finest collections of short sstories

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 13, 2023

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erhaps one of the finest collections of short stories written in the late twentieth century, certainly it is a 'classic' (and I almost never used that overworked cliche) the second story in the collection 'My Mother's Clothes: The School of Beauty and Shame' became anthologised in numerous gay and straight collections. That story, all the stories in this collection, should be and could be read by anyone who has lived through or is living through the complexities of growing up in families that you love but are flawed and destroy as much as they create. Their setting is suburban in Maryland in the 1950's and, I must admit to having spent the years to fourth grade there in the mid-1960's, but I think even without that I would find resonance and truth in these stories.

They are inter-linked with subtlety, accumulating detail rather than describing events, creates a momentum that is as evocative of times past while relating, betrayal, loss and love. Achingly beautiful, it is a book I would part from.

penelopegray

One Star

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 7, 2014

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mother of sorrows was a different author an American

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Mother of Sorrows Hardcover – April 26, 2005

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