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Dreaming: Hard Luck And Good Times In America
In this bittersweet and beautifully written memoir, Carolyn See embarks on nothing less than a reevaluation of the American Dream. Although it features a clan in which dysfunction was something of a family tradition, Dreaming is no victim's story. With a wry humor and not a trace of self-pity, See writes of fights and breakups and hard times, but also of celebration and optimism in the face of adversity. The story of See's family speaks for the countless people who reached for the shining American vision, found it eluded their grasp, and then tried to make what they had glitter as best they could.
372 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1995
21 people are currently reading
308 people want to read
About the author
Carolyn See
37 books76 followersCarolyn See was the author of ten books, including the memoir, Dreaming: Hard Luck and Good Times in America, an advice book on writing, Making a Literary Life, and the novels There Will Never Be Another You and The Handyman.
She was the Friday-morning reviewer for The Washington Post, and she has been on the boards of the National Book Critics Circle and PENWest International. She won both the Guggenheim Fellowship and the Getty Center fellowship. She lived in Pacific Palisades, California.
See also wrote books under the pen name Monica Highland, a name she shared with two others, her daughter Lisa See and her longtime companion, John Espey, who died in 2000.
See was known for writing novels set in Los Angeles and co-edited books that revolve around the city, including a book of short stories, LA Shorts, and the pictorial books Santa Monica Bay: Paradise by the Sea: A Pictorial History of Santa Monica, Venice, Marina Del Rey, Ocean Park, Pacific Palisades, Topanga & Malibu, and The California Pop-Up Book, which celebrates the city's unique architecture.
She was the Friday-morning reviewer for The Washington Post, and she has been on the boards of the National Book Critics Circle and PENWest International. She won both the Guggenheim Fellowship and the Getty Center fellowship. She lived in Pacific Palisades, California.
See also wrote books under the pen name Monica Highland, a name she shared with two others, her daughter Lisa See and her longtime companion, John Espey, who died in 2000.
See was known for writing novels set in Los Angeles and co-edited books that revolve around the city, including a book of short stories, LA Shorts, and the pictorial books Santa Monica Bay: Paradise by the Sea: A Pictorial History of Santa Monica, Venice, Marina Del Rey, Ocean Park, Pacific Palisades, Topanga & Malibu, and The California Pop-Up Book, which celebrates the city's unique architecture.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 34 reviews
September 18, 2016
This was a very tender book for me. Carolyn See was one of the important Los Angeles writers standing like beacons when I was learning to write, and her mother-daughter novel "Rhine Maidens" was an exemplar for me. AS a person, she was such a generous figure on the literary scene, encouraging new writers, especially women, at a time when successful women were traditionally seen as territorial and adversarial to one another==not so very long ago.
I am the daughter of a woman who'd lived a hardscrabble young life in Los Angeles, and Carolyn, being exactly half-way between my own mother and me in age, illuminated the life and times of Los Angeles in a way which has unleashed a terrible flood of nostalgia, both for times i recognized and eras before. Not necessarily a life I would have liked to live--hard drinking marked her childhood, and you can take out the K and put in an extra R in its place, and her adulthood as well. But Carolyn's never the victim in her story, she's could dish it out and she could take it, even as a child.
I also feel for her children, growing up in a very difficult, roller-coaster, yet extremely romantic household in Topanga Canyon when that really meant something--the glory of hippie days, the full- on ecstatic highs as well as the craziness and the careening downs. The novelist Lisa See was her older daughter, and it was a little like reading Gerald Durrell's family memoir in which he talks about his older brother "Larry"--the novelist Lawrence Durrell. The prismatic effect of seeing familiar figures in a new light.
See died this year, and there's a hole in Los Angeles literature where she had been. I hadn't realized she'd written a memoir, and for anyone who is interested in the making of writers, and the difficulties of such lives, this is an instructive book--in some ways it reminded me of the film about the life of Alice Neel the painter, who also struggled her way on her own to make a sometimes excruciating life for herself, her art and her children. While at times the book meanders, and at times presents characters I would have loved to see whole novels about, like Carolyn's unfortunate sister Rose, who was left behind when Carolyn flew the coop, to get away from probably the craziest mom since Mommy Dearest.
But See pulls it all together and it's a beautiful, heartbreaking trip. now I want to go down to Tijuana with a carload of my crazy friends in 1963 and buy tequila and go to the bullfights and smuggle it back in under the carseats. Some worlds are closed to us forever, but they're still there, beckoning.
I am the daughter of a woman who'd lived a hardscrabble young life in Los Angeles, and Carolyn, being exactly half-way between my own mother and me in age, illuminated the life and times of Los Angeles in a way which has unleashed a terrible flood of nostalgia, both for times i recognized and eras before. Not necessarily a life I would have liked to live--hard drinking marked her childhood, and you can take out the K and put in an extra R in its place, and her adulthood as well. But Carolyn's never the victim in her story, she's could dish it out and she could take it, even as a child.
I also feel for her children, growing up in a very difficult, roller-coaster, yet extremely romantic household in Topanga Canyon when that really meant something--the glory of hippie days, the full- on ecstatic highs as well as the craziness and the careening downs. The novelist Lisa See was her older daughter, and it was a little like reading Gerald Durrell's family memoir in which he talks about his older brother "Larry"--the novelist Lawrence Durrell. The prismatic effect of seeing familiar figures in a new light.
See died this year, and there's a hole in Los Angeles literature where she had been. I hadn't realized she'd written a memoir, and for anyone who is interested in the making of writers, and the difficulties of such lives, this is an instructive book--in some ways it reminded me of the film about the life of Alice Neel the painter, who also struggled her way on her own to make a sometimes excruciating life for herself, her art and her children. While at times the book meanders, and at times presents characters I would have loved to see whole novels about, like Carolyn's unfortunate sister Rose, who was left behind when Carolyn flew the coop, to get away from probably the craziest mom since Mommy Dearest.
But See pulls it all together and it's a beautiful, heartbreaking trip. now I want to go down to Tijuana with a carload of my crazy friends in 1963 and buy tequila and go to the bullfights and smuggle it back in under the carseats. Some worlds are closed to us forever, but they're still there, beckoning.
January 25, 2020
This is a strange, haunting memoir by Carolyn See. The thread of alcoholism and drug abuse absolutely ravaged her family, with every generation succumbing to addiction to varying degrees. See writes of her fraught relationship with her mother, a woman who was, by all accounts, a horrible, emotionally abusive, unavailable person. The memoir is honest about the author’s drinking problem and her shortcomings as a mother and wife, but her honesty also recognizes the ways that her children reclaimed life for themselves.
Side note: I have said, to anyone who will listen, that Carolyn See is one of the most under appreciated authors of the past 50 years. Her writing, particularly Golden Days and There Will Never Be Another You, is on par with another amazing California writer, Joan Didion. When Carolyn passed away a few years ago, the lack of media notice was criminal. I hope that some time in the future she receives the notoriety she is due.
Side note: I have said, to anyone who will listen, that Carolyn See is one of the most under appreciated authors of the past 50 years. Her writing, particularly Golden Days and There Will Never Be Another You, is on par with another amazing California writer, Joan Didion. When Carolyn passed away a few years ago, the lack of media notice was criminal. I hope that some time in the future she receives the notoriety she is due.
February 6, 2015
I'm on a Carolyn See bender - rereading all my faves of hers. I read Dreaming when it came out (20 years ago - ack!), and a few times later, but this time I read it as research for a new novel I'm working on, and this reading made it all the richer. See is brave and honest and funny and heartbreaking and best of all, she is tender and realistic as she writes about her alcoholic family --- about a family coming of age in L.A. at the same time that L.A. came of age in America. Her mother was brutal in obvious ways. Her father's brutality mingled with his kindness, though it's his kindness that shines through. That See can be grateful, despite her childhood, is worthy of the highest respect. I like See because she writes in context. There is perspective in her recollections, and also, it's interesting to see how much in her novels is autobiographical - quite a bit! I was aware this time, more than ever before, that her daughter is Lisa See. When I first read this book Lisa was not famous; now she is, and I admit, it's a little unnerving to read about her, even though her mother's descriptions only depict her as lovely and strong. See understands the times in which she lived; she understands how time and place shape families and individuals. She is one of the finest writers of our times.
July 18, 2021
Carolyn See’s memoir, “Dreaming: Hard Luck and Good Times in America” packed a punch for me. I spent my adolescence in Southern California, in a family of alcoholics, and while See was older by 18 years than I, many of the landscapes and experiences she described are familiar to me.
See herself was alcoholic (she died in 2016); her examination of this disease in her family looks in part at how the “American Dream” eludes so many people, and how “drinking, drugs and divorce” can destroy us, but also make disappointments tolerable that result from the gap between the lives we wanted and the lives we actually have.
See’s account of becoming a writer (she wrote novels, her memoir, other nonfiction, and reviewed books for the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, as well as achieving a professorship at UCLA) is fascinating. She writes also of her disastrous marriages and happier long-term relationships later in her life, of raising her two daughters amid all the chaos, of her horrible mother and heroin-addicted sister. She reflects at the end of her memoir, as she sits looking out the window of her home in Topanga Canyon, of how lucky she is. She says, “Most of us have found the way to get out of the abyss and onto the calm and placid golf course. But there’s something to be said for free fall, the wild life. It’s ruined us, but it’s helped to save us too. It’s given us our stories; and made us who we are. It has to do with dreaming, inventing, imagining, yearning, and there’s more of it—like blue smoke—in the American Dream than we’re ever, ever, going to be able to acknowledge or admit”(See, “Dreaming,” p. 343).
In short, I loved Carolyn See’s “Dreaming.”
See herself was alcoholic (she died in 2016); her examination of this disease in her family looks in part at how the “American Dream” eludes so many people, and how “drinking, drugs and divorce” can destroy us, but also make disappointments tolerable that result from the gap between the lives we wanted and the lives we actually have.
See’s account of becoming a writer (she wrote novels, her memoir, other nonfiction, and reviewed books for the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, as well as achieving a professorship at UCLA) is fascinating. She writes also of her disastrous marriages and happier long-term relationships later in her life, of raising her two daughters amid all the chaos, of her horrible mother and heroin-addicted sister. She reflects at the end of her memoir, as she sits looking out the window of her home in Topanga Canyon, of how lucky she is. She says, “Most of us have found the way to get out of the abyss and onto the calm and placid golf course. But there’s something to be said for free fall, the wild life. It’s ruined us, but it’s helped to save us too. It’s given us our stories; and made us who we are. It has to do with dreaming, inventing, imagining, yearning, and there’s more of it—like blue smoke—in the American Dream than we’re ever, ever, going to be able to acknowledge or admit”(See, “Dreaming,” p. 343).
In short, I loved Carolyn See’s “Dreaming.”
March 4, 2023
I have a love/hate relation with this book. It is brilliantly written, eloquent, descriptive. Almost clinical in its review of memories.
I am typing from my Book Club journal – so a bit rough.
Carolyn See gives great insight into a world I so gratefully did NOT endure. I see the opportunity for strength and resilience with such neglect and abuse to overcome. How is it that NONE of these children suffer fetal alcohol syndrome?
Carolyn/Penny was born of alcoholic parents, into a world of alcoholism. A father who takes his underage daughter drinking in bars. A drunk bitter, abusive mother.
With little to steer Carolyn/Penny, other than a desire for something better through education and the exquisite desire to write, she does find success teaching and as an author.
She, and her younger sister even MORE, endured neglect and abuse from alcoholic parents, aunts and uncles. Drinking and driving, it was a different time. Carolyn/Penny did try to save her sister, but as a child herself, it was an impossible task. Her sister fell unto drug addiction, as Carolyn/Penny became an alcoholic.
The book paints her family’s and her reality and their dreams of what success in America and California was. It shows how many lived and continue live.
My Book Club members like it more than I did, and had some interesting points, but I think I also made them reevaluate the nature and lack of insight the characters had.
Carolyn See is a brilliant writer. But this book =p
I am typing from my Book Club journal – so a bit rough.
Carolyn See gives great insight into a world I so gratefully did NOT endure. I see the opportunity for strength and resilience with such neglect and abuse to overcome. How is it that NONE of these children suffer fetal alcohol syndrome?
Carolyn/Penny was born of alcoholic parents, into a world of alcoholism. A father who takes his underage daughter drinking in bars. A drunk bitter, abusive mother.
With little to steer Carolyn/Penny, other than a desire for something better through education and the exquisite desire to write, she does find success teaching and as an author.
She, and her younger sister even MORE, endured neglect and abuse from alcoholic parents, aunts and uncles. Drinking and driving, it was a different time. Carolyn/Penny did try to save her sister, but as a child herself, it was an impossible task. Her sister fell unto drug addiction, as Carolyn/Penny became an alcoholic.
The book paints her family’s and her reality and their dreams of what success in America and California was. It shows how many lived and continue live.
My Book Club members like it more than I did, and had some interesting points, but I think I also made them reevaluate the nature and lack of insight the characters had.
Carolyn See is a brilliant writer. But this book =p
October 8, 2019
2.5 stars. This is more autobiography than memoir, which seems common from these types of books from the 90s. Today memoir refers to a theme or a short time in someone's life, whereas See starts at the beginning of her life (or even before). It's a family history but I'm not sure what the point is? Is it about alcoholism? Divorce? Basic family dysfunction? Because a lot of families suffer under these; it's not that interesting.
I skipped over large chunks when she turned the story over to her sister or to her mother. I prefer memoirs keep the focus on the author. Interesting that AA was a running theme because this book read like what that program calls a drunkalogue - a recitation of appalling events without any sense of redemption or lessons learned. Unsatisfying read for me. In addition the author had that hideous ruse of acting as though she were surrounded by crazies and she alone were sane.
I skipped over large chunks when she turned the story over to her sister or to her mother. I prefer memoirs keep the focus on the author. Interesting that AA was a running theme because this book read like what that program calls a drunkalogue - a recitation of appalling events without any sense of redemption or lessons learned. Unsatisfying read for me. In addition the author had that hideous ruse of acting as though she were surrounded by crazies and she alone were sane.
December 2, 2017
This is a memoir by (the now late) Carolyn See, author, Washington Post book critic and mother of Lisa See (one of my favorite authors). I had absolutely loved Lisa See’s nonfiction work On Gold Mountain about her family, so when I came across this memoir of Carolyn See’s on Amazon I was intrigued.
Carolyn See certainly had an interesting life. This memoir was moving and funny, though it did feel disorganized. She included a lot of background information on her relatives, and reflected on how their lives fit into the American Dream. Her family was “unconventional” for the time in which she grew up (1950s), but I feel like this book serves as a reminder that there has never been an “ideal” family. Above all, I appreciated this memoir’s honesty.
Carolyn See certainly had an interesting life. This memoir was moving and funny, though it did feel disorganized. She included a lot of background information on her relatives, and reflected on how their lives fit into the American Dream. Her family was “unconventional” for the time in which she grew up (1950s), but I feel like this book serves as a reminder that there has never been an “ideal” family. Above all, I appreciated this memoir’s honesty.
February 10, 2019
The first part of the book covers the auth0r's early years as a child of alcoholics (one functioning, one not), and her abuse at the hands of her drunk, troubled mother. It should have been depressing, but her straightforward narrative and her often acidic humor keep it from being so. Then she moves into adulthood, and it becomes depressing. She addresses her overuse of alcohol at some points, but addresses her later drug use as self-explorations, rather than selfishness that contributes to the neglect of her children. She later expresses regret for her actions that forced her older daughter to assume the role of mother to her younger sister, but I can't quite buy it.
August 7, 2020
You wanna talk about a dysfunctional family?
Yikes...
At times, the book is a little boring in the relentless chaos of this extended family.
At other times, it's wildly entertaining.
One feels for young Clara, not much more than a toddler, when her life comes apart at the seams when they are living, drugging, screwing, partying, dancing in a shack at the top of Topanga Canyon.
This book is a memoir...I'm just very glad I didn't have to try to grow up as a member of this family.
Caroline See is relentlessly honest, and for this I give her credit.
Yikes...
At times, the book is a little boring in the relentless chaos of this extended family.
At other times, it's wildly entertaining.
One feels for young Clara, not much more than a toddler, when her life comes apart at the seams when they are living, drugging, screwing, partying, dancing in a shack at the top of Topanga Canyon.
This book is a memoir...I'm just very glad I didn't have to try to grow up as a member of this family.
Caroline See is relentlessly honest, and for this I give her credit.
November 30, 2018
Evocative of the 60's in mostly southern CA, anyone who wasn't there and wants to experience that time and place should read this. But also it's nostalgic, confirming, and captures the complexities of familial relationships, good and bad, beautifully and without pretension. My favorite kind of writing. I wish she was still with us, writing, and teaching.
June 12, 2023
What a treasure!
I’ve been reading Lisa See’s books and enjoying them so I thought I’d read this one. It is a beautiful, complex story of family life, finding the pearl in the oyster, and how “better living through chemistry” has both ups and downs. I loved her authentic voice. Made me wish such a story existed for my own family.
I’ve been reading Lisa See’s books and enjoying them so I thought I’d read this one. It is a beautiful, complex story of family life, finding the pearl in the oyster, and how “better living through chemistry” has both ups and downs. I loved her authentic voice. Made me wish such a story existed for my own family.
May 24, 2024
Such a sad depressing life. Yes everything we do gets us to where we are so be thankful for that. But she is one strong woman to have gotten where she is. So much alcohol drugs marriages too much maybe. And such mean relatives. Her mom needed more than therapy and maybe so did rose So well written I had to continue despite the tragic events.
December 5, 2025
What a wonderful memoir. Engaging characters, unbelievable personal and family history wound around addiction, poor choices, unearned love, and ultimately hope. She brings her characters to life in technicolor. Carolyn See’s story makes my life seem utterly tame by comparison, and leaves one wondering what stories might lie behind the faces of anyone we meet.
January 24, 2018
I loved it because she was honest about her family background and her lifestyle in California!
July 17, 2013
For years, I assumed the revered Carolyn See was a fine Southern California author, with lovely prose and a point of view that perfectly summed up living in this Left Coast metropolis. But after finally reading one of her books, I can't believe how little thought she put into it. This book reads like a first draft, with no thought put into correcting even the minor mistakes, inconsistencies, and awkwardnesses that riddle the book.
There are parts involving alcohol that were insightful. I was reading the book in part to do research for my novel, "What Happens to Us" (Aha! Press, July 4, 2013), which is available as an ebook. http://www.amazon.com/What-Happens-to... My book is a spiritual journey under the guise of a thriller, following a young woman who's a recovering alcoholic as her life is threatened by a man she seems to have met during a blackout and doesn't remember. As she runs from him, people around her start dying. She finally goes off the grid with a man she meets and ducks for cover. She realizes, though, that in order to get her life back, she's going to figure out who he is and what he wants. To do that, she's going to have to get drunk again, because whenever she does, all her blackout memories come flooding back to her. And once she takes the leap into the void again, all hell breaks loose.
And this book has lots of alcohol in it, but See doesn't seem to accept the whole 12-step dogma. There's been lots of alcohol abuse in her life, for example, but she never stopped drinking, even now. Perhaps this is because she was there at the beginning of AA and she knows a woman who had an affair with the famed Bill W. If you know God, you will surely see him warts and all. The whole quit-alcohol-forever thing seems to her like just a wild guess and a general guideline.
Regarding her prose, I know that See knows how to write better than this! Any working writer does! Why did she leave the manuscript like this? Throughout, several reasons occurred to me. 1) Perhaps it was too painful for her to read through a second time and polish. 2) Perhaps she was just hopping on the alcohol memoir bandwagon started by Mary Karr around the same publication year, and couldn't be bothered because she already had loyal fans. 3) Perhaps she's an alkie who lives the high life and can't sit herself down long enough to polish before her head falls onto the keyboard. 4) Perhaps she's just a bad writer.
I hesitate to write this because the writing world is small. This woman is powerful, having been on the board of PEN Center USA/West, the National Book Critics Circle, a book reviewer for the Washington Post, a Guggenheim fellow, and a Getty fellow. Perhaps the rest of her work sings. But now this one.
This is See's life story, from birth and upbringing in a hateful home (well drawn, I must admit, but sloppily written) through all the major events in her life to the final chapter, which reads like a paean to relatives who are still alive and about whom you cannot say anything critical. But if she had chosen one through line--her drugged-out sister, for example--this would have been more focused and readable.
But oh, then there's the prose, which sounds in many ways like the unreconstructed prose of a junior-college dunce. Below the prose, you know she knows how to write better, but she never seems to even try. Themes aren't crystallized, storylines are left in that should be deleted, and it reads more like real life than the book that sums everything up and makes us realize how sweet and fragile life is.
True, this isn't as bad as some books. The prose is better than Stieg Larsson's, for sure, and she sometimes hits on memorable anecdotes, like when, in her childhood, her mother declares that she wants nothing so much in her life as to drink and play cards, although the story is told better than this brief synopsis of it. Still, all in all, this is a terribly disappointing book. There. Somebody had to say it.
There are parts involving alcohol that were insightful. I was reading the book in part to do research for my novel, "What Happens to Us" (Aha! Press, July 4, 2013), which is available as an ebook. http://www.amazon.com/What-Happens-to... My book is a spiritual journey under the guise of a thriller, following a young woman who's a recovering alcoholic as her life is threatened by a man she seems to have met during a blackout and doesn't remember. As she runs from him, people around her start dying. She finally goes off the grid with a man she meets and ducks for cover. She realizes, though, that in order to get her life back, she's going to figure out who he is and what he wants. To do that, she's going to have to get drunk again, because whenever she does, all her blackout memories come flooding back to her. And once she takes the leap into the void again, all hell breaks loose.
And this book has lots of alcohol in it, but See doesn't seem to accept the whole 12-step dogma. There's been lots of alcohol abuse in her life, for example, but she never stopped drinking, even now. Perhaps this is because she was there at the beginning of AA and she knows a woman who had an affair with the famed Bill W. If you know God, you will surely see him warts and all. The whole quit-alcohol-forever thing seems to her like just a wild guess and a general guideline.
Regarding her prose, I know that See knows how to write better than this! Any working writer does! Why did she leave the manuscript like this? Throughout, several reasons occurred to me. 1) Perhaps it was too painful for her to read through a second time and polish. 2) Perhaps she was just hopping on the alcohol memoir bandwagon started by Mary Karr around the same publication year, and couldn't be bothered because she already had loyal fans. 3) Perhaps she's an alkie who lives the high life and can't sit herself down long enough to polish before her head falls onto the keyboard. 4) Perhaps she's just a bad writer.
I hesitate to write this because the writing world is small. This woman is powerful, having been on the board of PEN Center USA/West, the National Book Critics Circle, a book reviewer for the Washington Post, a Guggenheim fellow, and a Getty fellow. Perhaps the rest of her work sings. But now this one.
This is See's life story, from birth and upbringing in a hateful home (well drawn, I must admit, but sloppily written) through all the major events in her life to the final chapter, which reads like a paean to relatives who are still alive and about whom you cannot say anything critical. But if she had chosen one through line--her drugged-out sister, for example--this would have been more focused and readable.
But oh, then there's the prose, which sounds in many ways like the unreconstructed prose of a junior-college dunce. Below the prose, you know she knows how to write better, but she never seems to even try. Themes aren't crystallized, storylines are left in that should be deleted, and it reads more like real life than the book that sums everything up and makes us realize how sweet and fragile life is.
True, this isn't as bad as some books. The prose is better than Stieg Larsson's, for sure, and she sometimes hits on memorable anecdotes, like when, in her childhood, her mother declares that she wants nothing so much in her life as to drink and play cards, although the story is told better than this brief synopsis of it. Still, all in all, this is a terribly disappointing book. There. Somebody had to say it.
December 29, 2016
I am partial to memoirs, and this one left me breathless. See's family would be hard to invent; if it had been invented, I would have probably thought the author was laying it on a bit thick. What a story! There is no arguing about the characters since they are real, but I did have a hard time with the fact that Carolyn See didn't just cut out her evil mom from her life, and even admired her (in a very compartmentalized way) til the end and put her in a "category of her own" (while admitting that she - the mom - was full of hatred, consumed by it, poisoning everything and everybody around her). That woman tortured her kids in all sorts of ways! Ruined one completely, and almost the other one. She was the personification of evil! Then again, nothing and nobody is all good or all bad, things are complex, and people are what they are - who knows why we do the things we do? That complexity and lack of simple answers and explanations is why I loved this book.
December 29, 2014
Great memoir by writer Carolyn See. Lots of alcoholism, drug addiction, mental illness, family dysfunction. Great writing. Couldn't put it down. The only reason I didn't give this five stars was because I felt like the level of redemption and transformation was so minimal in so many of these people. It made me sad, and perhaps I am critiquing their lives, rather than the book, but as someone who is all about recovery and transformation, I had to take off a star for that lack.
I have read books by Carolyn See's daughter, Lisa See, but never realized they were related. I have heard about Carolyn See for years, but have never read anything by her.
I now have some of her books on my To Be Read list!
Good stuff!
I have read books by Carolyn See's daughter, Lisa See, but never realized they were related. I have heard about Carolyn See for years, but have never read anything by her.
I now have some of her books on my To Be Read list!
Good stuff!
October 15, 2012
I found my way to this book after reading three of Lisa See's books. I thought that by reading about her mother's life, I would learn a little more about her upbringing and how she came to identify so strongly with her Chinese roots. Didn't turn out that way. It's as if I was reading about a completely different Lisa and that really disappointed me.
Aside from that let down, the book was really interesting and a true page turner. I couldn't believe all the craziness this one family endured! The author writes in a very conversational tone, so you feel as if she's sitting with you and sharing her story. Truly engaging.
Aside from that let down, the book was really interesting and a true page turner. I couldn't believe all the craziness this one family endured! The author writes in a very conversational tone, so you feel as if she's sitting with you and sharing her story. Truly engaging.
July 31, 2016
This book was just ok for me. I think my problem with it is that the author was into excessive drinking and drugs throughout the book and I had trouble relating. The part about her childhood and alcoholic parents was interesting but when it got up to the sixties and seventies with the rampant drug use and alcoholism it was difficult for me to relate because during the same period I had three small children and just wasn't into the drug scene. I kept hoping she would stop drinking, if for no other reason than to not set the example for her children that her parents had set for her but that was not to be.
October 7, 2007
great to hear about what echo park was like in the 50s, what topanga was like in the 60s, what UCLA was like in the 70s. from a literary perspective.
see recounts her sordid and abusive childhood, and her escapist adulthood with a humor that is at times unbelievable, but she's redeems her past through narrative art. i guess the therapy worked. a commonplace story in the best way: easy to identify with, and hope for the rest of us.
see recounts her sordid and abusive childhood, and her escapist adulthood with a humor that is at times unbelievable, but she's redeems her past through narrative art. i guess the therapy worked. a commonplace story in the best way: easy to identify with, and hope for the rest of us.
January 2, 2016
Such a bright and fast-moving voice! This books is incredibly readable, but not without its dark undertow. While I enjoyed Carolyn See's story-telling, I will remember most her subtle "show-don't-tell" way of exposing the depression and desperation she and her family experienced in their pursuit of a possibly deformed American dream. "Is this it?" she imagines us all wondering, and, really, who hasn't?
March 11, 2015
This memoir was hard to put down, because it was like trying to revert your eyes from a train wreck. A compelling read, a little confusing in a few places where the time didn't match something she had said earlier, but overall well written. Her story describes dysfunctional family to the max. In the end, time heals, two generations down the line, but that gives even the most dysfunctional family hope and maybe let's the not so dysfunctional family realize how blessed that just might be.
July 9, 2014
Carolyn See is as true a Californian as she is a writer. She is tough and kind, smart and funny, cool and hot, and definitely a writer to read and, if you're a writer, to emulate. This book is one of the best memoirs I've read, and I always recommend it to people who want to write memoirs.Then again, I also recommend it to people who simply want to read a good book.
August 22, 2016
To the author's credit, she discloses she's not written chronologically and apologizes for it.
I figured she wrote it in a way that was easy to follow, perhaps a new style.
Ugh, no. It wasn't easy to follow and unfortunately became so redundant I had to wonder, once again, if the author had an editor.
I figured she wrote it in a way that was easy to follow, perhaps a new style.
Ugh, no. It wasn't easy to follow and unfortunately became so redundant I had to wonder, once again, if the author had an editor.
February 19, 2009
Carolyn See is a wonderful writer and this book really resonated with me because of my own parent's rather bleak childhoods growing up in Los Angeles during the depression--the more so since my father also had alcoholic parents and also lived in Glassell Park.
August 4, 2016
Fantastic
Funny heartbreaking scary beautiful - a life well lived - a life and lives exposed and torn and stitched back together to make a beautiful tapestry of love and hope and the American Dream
Funny heartbreaking scary beautiful - a life well lived - a life and lives exposed and torn and stitched back together to make a beautiful tapestry of love and hope and the American Dream
October 2, 2007
A fascinating memoir.
November 4, 2014
A tough, no-holds-barred autobiography that shows the many difficult problems Carolyn See (Lisa's mother) had to surmount to become a famous author.
September 2, 2009
I really wanted to like this book. It was written by a UCLA professor and I had attended UCLA. But it just bummed me out. I am sure it was well written but it lacked humor and positivity.
November 10, 2010
I wish there were a 3.5 star rating.
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