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Now Beacon, Now Sea: A Son's Memoir
A wrenching debut memoir of familial grief by a National Book Award finalist--and a defining account of what it means to love and lose a difficult parent.
When Christopher Sorrentino's mother died in 2017, it marked the end of a journey that had begun eighty years earlier in the South Bronx. Victoria's life took her to the heart of New York's vibrant mid-century downtown artistic scene, to the sedate campus of Stanford, and finally back to Brooklyn--a journey witnessed by a son who watched, helpless, as she grew more and more isolated, distancing herself from everyone and everything she'd ever loved.
In examining the mystery of his mother's life, from her dysfunctional marriage to his heedless father, the writer Gilbert Sorrentino, to her ultimate withdrawal from the world, Christopher excavates his own memories and family folklore in an effort to discover her dreams, understand her disappointments, and peel back the ways in which she seemed forever trapped between two identities: the Puerto Rican girl identified on her birth certificate as Black, and the white woman she had seemingly decided to become. Meanwhile Christopher experiences his own transformation, emerging from under his father's shadow and his mother's thumb to establish his identity as a writer and individual--one who would soon make his own missteps and mistakes.
Unfolding against the captivating backdrop of a vanished New York, a city of cheap bohemian enclaves and a thriving avant-garde--a dangerous, decaying, but liberated and potentially liberating place--Now Beacon, Now Sea is a matchless portrait of the beautiful, painful messiness of life, and the transformative power of even conflicted grief.
When Christopher Sorrentino's mother died in 2017, it marked the end of a journey that had begun eighty years earlier in the South Bronx. Victoria's life took her to the heart of New York's vibrant mid-century downtown artistic scene, to the sedate campus of Stanford, and finally back to Brooklyn--a journey witnessed by a son who watched, helpless, as she grew more and more isolated, distancing herself from everyone and everything she'd ever loved.
In examining the mystery of his mother's life, from her dysfunctional marriage to his heedless father, the writer Gilbert Sorrentino, to her ultimate withdrawal from the world, Christopher excavates his own memories and family folklore in an effort to discover her dreams, understand her disappointments, and peel back the ways in which she seemed forever trapped between two identities: the Puerto Rican girl identified on her birth certificate as Black, and the white woman she had seemingly decided to become. Meanwhile Christopher experiences his own transformation, emerging from under his father's shadow and his mother's thumb to establish his identity as a writer and individual--one who would soon make his own missteps and mistakes.
Unfolding against the captivating backdrop of a vanished New York, a city of cheap bohemian enclaves and a thriving avant-garde--a dangerous, decaying, but liberated and potentially liberating place--Now Beacon, Now Sea is a matchless portrait of the beautiful, painful messiness of life, and the transformative power of even conflicted grief.
304 pages, Hardcover
First published September 7, 2021
52 people are currently reading
2280 people want to read
About the author
Christopher Sorrentino
16 books43 followersChristopher Sorrentino (born May 20, 1963) is an American novelist and short story writer of Puerto Rican descent. He is the son of novelist Gilbert Sorrentino and Victoria Ortiz. His first published novel, Sound on Sound (1995), draws upon innovations pioneered in the work of his father, but also contains echoes of many other modernist and postmodernist writers. The book is structured according to the format of a multitrack recording session, with corresponding section titles ("Secondary Percussion", "Vocals", "Playback", and so forth).
His second novel, Trance (2005), an epic fictional treatment of the Patty Hearst saga, used many of the same experimental techniques as Sound on Sound, but, according to Sorrentino, incorporated them more carefully and subtly into the text. The book was widely praised for its lush descriptions, riveting characterizations and dialogue, imaginative departures, and attention to period detail. Trance ended up on several reviewers' "best" lists, was named a finalist for the 2005 National Book Award for Fiction, and was longlisted for the 2007 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. In 2009, Trance was named one of the "61 Essential Postmodern Reads" by the Los Angeles Times.
His second novel, Trance (2005), an epic fictional treatment of the Patty Hearst saga, used many of the same experimental techniques as Sound on Sound, but, according to Sorrentino, incorporated them more carefully and subtly into the text. The book was widely praised for its lush descriptions, riveting characterizations and dialogue, imaginative departures, and attention to period detail. Trance ended up on several reviewers' "best" lists, was named a finalist for the 2005 National Book Award for Fiction, and was longlisted for the 2007 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. In 2009, Trance was named one of the "61 Essential Postmodern Reads" by the Los Angeles Times.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 49 reviews
September 2, 2022
This is a memoir, elliptical in many ways, frank in others, about Christopher Sorrentino's relationship (or lack thereof, at times for years at a stretch) with his parents, Gilbert and Vivian. Vivian was puerto rican, hostile, commanding, and, to my mind, a psychological and physical abuser.* Gilbert wrote and wrote, monologued, and occasionally behaved like a father, but rarely went anywhere (on his own or with his family), cut people from his life like his wife did, showed cruelty to his son, and required a strict routine. The two parents didn't get along from the start and they freely took their feelings out on each other and on their only child whose refrain in this book, about his mother, is "'Why can't she be normal?'" But neither parent seems normal.
The memoir genre need not always resemble a Revenge play. As a whole this one doesn't, but there are occasions when C. Sorrentino recalls conversations that are brutal to read (and reminiscent of some of his father's depictions of married people), if great fun to read aloud, and reveal a lot about his mother and father. He doesn't live a spot-free life; indeed, ending his marriage by having an affair and then maintaining that new relationship says something about his own ability to remove people from his life (readers can decide what they think of his character for themselves). He isn't shy about self-criticism. A mother who denied her own heritage and aimed to pass for white is diagnosed at some point with lupus and has a husband unsuitable to her (as she may have been for him); a father so narrow in his 'pleasures' (the occasional friend, but eventually they disappear) that only writing may be what he truly liked; the family home as a constant battleground. If this was not written well and self-lacerating it might be dull. As it is, it stops short of harrowing (that's a word that ought to be used infrequently), but it does make me reappraise my family and the families of people I know.
I've not read any fiction by C. Sorrentino, but certainly his work looks like something to check out (though he only seems proud of Trance). As for Now Beacon, Now Sea, it's recommended if you want to watch a family behaving terribly. "She had resigned herself to living unhappily, and my father had resigned himself to being unhappy about her unhappiness. This was life, according to them." So, you know what you're in for.
* C.S. writes: "I don't think of myself as a victim, or of my mother as an abuser." Readers may arrive at different conclusions.
The memoir genre need not always resemble a Revenge play. As a whole this one doesn't, but there are occasions when C. Sorrentino recalls conversations that are brutal to read (and reminiscent of some of his father's depictions of married people), if great fun to read aloud, and reveal a lot about his mother and father. He doesn't live a spot-free life; indeed, ending his marriage by having an affair and then maintaining that new relationship says something about his own ability to remove people from his life (readers can decide what they think of his character for themselves). He isn't shy about self-criticism. A mother who denied her own heritage and aimed to pass for white is diagnosed at some point with lupus and has a husband unsuitable to her (as she may have been for him); a father so narrow in his 'pleasures' (the occasional friend, but eventually they disappear) that only writing may be what he truly liked; the family home as a constant battleground. If this was not written well and self-lacerating it might be dull. As it is, it stops short of harrowing (that's a word that ought to be used infrequently), but it does make me reappraise my family and the families of people I know.
I've not read any fiction by C. Sorrentino, but certainly his work looks like something to check out (though he only seems proud of Trance). As for Now Beacon, Now Sea, it's recommended if you want to watch a family behaving terribly. "She had resigned herself to living unhappily, and my father had resigned himself to being unhappy about her unhappiness. This was life, according to them." So, you know what you're in for.
* C.S. writes: "I don't think of myself as a victim, or of my mother as an abuser." Readers may arrive at different conclusions.
October 21, 2021
The memoir opens with biographical detail, which I prefer to have tucked into the interstices of tale, but as the story unfolded, and as Sorrentino’s mother increasingly shook hands with mine, I was hooked.
I’ve experienced many of the machinations pressed into service in Sorrentino’s family. “Like most enforcers,” he says about his mother, “she misused her authority.” All doctrines had to be accepted without question, or there would be “withdrawal of affection until I repented.”
He asks, “What difference would it make for me to assert who I really was?”
My counter question: what difference did it make to try and understand who she really was? We each have worked so hard at fathoming our mothers’ inner clockwork, yet what did it change? Perhaps if I figure that out for myself, I’ll get closer to comprehending him.
My early thought? That we sought understanding of their motivations not to promote their acceptance of us, but to save ourselves. To shrug off their labels and claim our authentic identities. As “only” children, disliked by our mothers and wired for guilt, we did it to evade regret and remorse.
Sorrentino’s mother dies leaving nothing of herself behind: “no aura, no essence.” When I read that, I had to briefly set the book aside. I needed to listen, rake through the stillness. My mother died in 2019. I realized she had left behind no comforting aura, no essence.
This was something new to consider. I still don’t know what it means. But I didn’t feel bereft, because how can you miss what has always eluded you?
I finished the book feeling as most writers would hope for their readers: not alone. I wish I could thank him. If you’re reading this, Christopher Sorrentino, thank you.
I’ve experienced many of the machinations pressed into service in Sorrentino’s family. “Like most enforcers,” he says about his mother, “she misused her authority.” All doctrines had to be accepted without question, or there would be “withdrawal of affection until I repented.”
He asks, “What difference would it make for me to assert who I really was?”
My counter question: what difference did it make to try and understand who she really was? We each have worked so hard at fathoming our mothers’ inner clockwork, yet what did it change? Perhaps if I figure that out for myself, I’ll get closer to comprehending him.
My early thought? That we sought understanding of their motivations not to promote their acceptance of us, but to save ourselves. To shrug off their labels and claim our authentic identities. As “only” children, disliked by our mothers and wired for guilt, we did it to evade regret and remorse.
Sorrentino’s mother dies leaving nothing of herself behind: “no aura, no essence.” When I read that, I had to briefly set the book aside. I needed to listen, rake through the stillness. My mother died in 2019. I realized she had left behind no comforting aura, no essence.
This was something new to consider. I still don’t know what it means. But I didn’t feel bereft, because how can you miss what has always eluded you?
I finished the book feeling as most writers would hope for their readers: not alone. I wish I could thank him. If you’re reading this, Christopher Sorrentino, thank you.
November 10, 2021
Sorrentino is clearly a talented writer; however, this memoir reads flat to me. The author ruminates on his mother's bitterness and mental health struggles throughout the book and it becomes repetitive--almost circular. Although the author was closer to his father, readers aren't given a well developed portrait of him. I'm almost curious why the writer didn't focus the memoir on his father. This was a most dissatisfying read without a narrative arch or empathetic narrator.
August 7, 2021
amazing
September 25, 2021
There were many parts of this book that I could relate to - I also have a mother whose life revolves around illness, both real and imagined. She also uses her illness to get out of that which she doesn't want to do, but is fine for those things she really wants to do, causing hurt feelings when you realize you weren't a priority.
Perhaps that is why I had a hard time really liking the book. I also found the book to be filled with lots of big words that added nothing to the writing other than to make it harder to read. I'll never understand why some authors choose to use the biggest, most obscure word they can when a more common one would do just as well and not alienate the less vocab-savvy reader.
Perhaps that is why I had a hard time really liking the book. I also found the book to be filled with lots of big words that added nothing to the writing other than to make it harder to read. I'll never understand why some authors choose to use the biggest, most obscure word they can when a more common one would do just as well and not alienate the less vocab-savvy reader.
January 9, 2022
decided to stop reading halfway through
dreary, repetitive, somewhat uninteresting
dreary, repetitive, somewhat uninteresting
January 10, 2022
This book was strange and sad in a cringey type of way. It's a memoir of a man who grew up with parents who were constantly fighting but never got divorced. I read a review about it in the New York Times and decided to read it because I can really relate to that. But overall, it left me with a feeling of hopeless depression. It took me nearly a month to get through because of its dark and heavy subject matter as well as the fact that at times it was just plain boring. (Also, I think the title is odd so I guess that should have been my first clue.)
The author is depressed but it's in large part because he was never able to stand up to his emotionally abusive mother (something he himself admits several times in the book). So it's kind of like having to watch a train keep crashing when the driver knows how to veer off course but refuses to. The reader is treated to example after example of times when he should have stopped letting his mom treat him so badly but instead he didn't, and you want to think he'll learn his lesson and so something to get off this nightmare roller coaster ride, but, no, it just keeps going.
It seems like the author's mother loved to be miserable and wanted him to be stuck in her misery with him. Just like his father was (the parent he says he was much closer to but didn't write nearly as much about). So, as a young adult and then especially after his father dies, he follows in his father's footsteps and enables his mother's mental illness, allowing her to hurt others he claims to love, just as his beloved father allowed his mother to hurt him as a child.
I felt so bad for his wife because his mother refused to meet her or have anything to do with her and he didn't stand up for her or choose her over his awful mother. It was hard to root for him when he was such a coward and went along with his mother in treating his own wife so badly.
The weird thing is that the author has a high level of self-awareness. He would say that he knew he should grow up and stop being such a man-child (basically... his writing style is very old and stuffy and he uses lots of big self-important-sounding words) but then he wouldn't.
But I also found it hard to be mad at him when I felt so sad and bad for him. His mother routinely ignored him and cut contact with him and he would just keep trying to contact her, waiting like her obedient dog until she decided to call him back because she needed something, and then he would always be waiting to fulfill her every need, and he still felt guilty about it, as if he wasn't doing enough and couldn't make her happy, when clearly it was because she LIKED being miserable.
I really wish this was a different kind of book, in which the author learned to live himself and love himself instead of chasing after whatever little crumbs of fake love his mother threw at him so that she could continue to abuse him when it was convenient for her. I wish he could have broken free from her toxicity and dysfunction and protected himself, his poor wife and their poor kids from her abuse.
There was gross favoritism, too, as she would want to see the older two daughters he had with his first wife she liked, and he would let them be used as toys to pacify her moods, but she wanted nothing at all to do with his step son because she hated his second wife, or even the third daughter he had with that wife. It was like his first two children were given special status and his second two were relegated to having no status at all on his side of the family and instead of preventing something that will surely cause them harm from happening to them, he actively participated in it!
Therefore he is passing his own trauma down onto the next generation instead of breaking the cycle; he is allowing his own children to feel the same feelings of rejection, abandonment and sadness that he himself suffered at the hands of his mother, and for that I felt angry at him. In my opinion this treatment bordered on child abuse because it's giving those two children a complex from an early age that they have no power to understand or protect themselves from and it will likely negatively affect their self-esteem and social interactions for their entire lives unless they can find truly loving supporting people and/or a very good therapist. (The author mentions having a therapist himself several times and I couldn't help but think that he was robbed blind because that therapist sounds pretty useless. Oh, and he also appears to have a problem with alcohol that he's aware of but continues anyway. Maybe a SMART Recovery support group would help him more than that therapist seems to have.)
I know the author would be much less depressed if he could realize his own value independently of his mother and realize how she actively worked to keep him sad, small and depressed instead of able to achieve his full potential and find happiness. It's not too late for him to do this even though she has passed away; it comes from within and is a very powerful and helpful thing to realize and work towards. So I'm kind of hoping there's a sequel that is more focused on him and his own journey, and his wife and kids, instead of wasting any more words on his mother.
I did enjoy the literary travel through New York City as his mother was raised there in a Puerto Rican immigrant family and the author is half Puerto Rican. I liked the peek into the 60's during the hippie era (although his parents did not like hippies) and the mentions of areas in Greenwich Village and other parts of Manhattan as well as the Bronx and Brooklyn. It made me nostalgic for when I went to college in that area and made me want to visit New York again.
Many parts of the book were overly detailed and very repetitive so that it became like groundhog day. And some other areas needed expansion or explanation. I didn't understand why he kept saying that taking a job as a professor killed his father when it was a tumor; or why it was so awful. Both he and his father are writers (although I hadn't heard of either of them before I read this book) so it was an interesting glimpse into the life of a writer and all the ways in which they can be so emotionally tortured.
The book doesn't really focus on his parents' marriage as much as it does his mother alone. But it seemed like something she liked to miserable about and try to make his father miserable about just live everything else in her life, and his father put up with it and was pretty miserable himself (leading me to believe his own parents were similar, hence the unbroken cycle) and it was like they were two (well, three, actually- counting their son/the author) miserable peas in a pod.
I am not sure why anyone would want to stay this miserable and depressed and do nothing to change it but there you have it- the author's sad life story. I think the worst part were letters he included that he had written to his mother while she wasn't talking to him and later found in her apartment after she had to go to the hospital. He was begging for her love and sounded like a six year old; it was really off-putting and pathetic.
I can't really recommend this book unless you want to depress yourself by reading about depressive people or if you really like historical memoirs set in New York City or as a "life of the writer" type of thing. Or if you just like to read about dysfunctional marriages and families. But I'd recommend more positive ones that show how the cycle can be broken, such as Unorthodox or Hollywood Park or even The Glass Castle. I do wish the author well and hope he can find happiness after a lifetime of emotional abuse, now that his perpetrator and enabler have passed away.
The author is depressed but it's in large part because he was never able to stand up to his emotionally abusive mother (something he himself admits several times in the book). So it's kind of like having to watch a train keep crashing when the driver knows how to veer off course but refuses to. The reader is treated to example after example of times when he should have stopped letting his mom treat him so badly but instead he didn't, and you want to think he'll learn his lesson and so something to get off this nightmare roller coaster ride, but, no, it just keeps going.
It seems like the author's mother loved to be miserable and wanted him to be stuck in her misery with him. Just like his father was (the parent he says he was much closer to but didn't write nearly as much about). So, as a young adult and then especially after his father dies, he follows in his father's footsteps and enables his mother's mental illness, allowing her to hurt others he claims to love, just as his beloved father allowed his mother to hurt him as a child.
I felt so bad for his wife because his mother refused to meet her or have anything to do with her and he didn't stand up for her or choose her over his awful mother. It was hard to root for him when he was such a coward and went along with his mother in treating his own wife so badly.
The weird thing is that the author has a high level of self-awareness. He would say that he knew he should grow up and stop being such a man-child (basically... his writing style is very old and stuffy and he uses lots of big self-important-sounding words) but then he wouldn't.
But I also found it hard to be mad at him when I felt so sad and bad for him. His mother routinely ignored him and cut contact with him and he would just keep trying to contact her, waiting like her obedient dog until she decided to call him back because she needed something, and then he would always be waiting to fulfill her every need, and he still felt guilty about it, as if he wasn't doing enough and couldn't make her happy, when clearly it was because she LIKED being miserable.
I really wish this was a different kind of book, in which the author learned to live himself and love himself instead of chasing after whatever little crumbs of fake love his mother threw at him so that she could continue to abuse him when it was convenient for her. I wish he could have broken free from her toxicity and dysfunction and protected himself, his poor wife and their poor kids from her abuse.
There was gross favoritism, too, as she would want to see the older two daughters he had with his first wife she liked, and he would let them be used as toys to pacify her moods, but she wanted nothing at all to do with his step son because she hated his second wife, or even the third daughter he had with that wife. It was like his first two children were given special status and his second two were relegated to having no status at all on his side of the family and instead of preventing something that will surely cause them harm from happening to them, he actively participated in it!
Therefore he is passing his own trauma down onto the next generation instead of breaking the cycle; he is allowing his own children to feel the same feelings of rejection, abandonment and sadness that he himself suffered at the hands of his mother, and for that I felt angry at him. In my opinion this treatment bordered on child abuse because it's giving those two children a complex from an early age that they have no power to understand or protect themselves from and it will likely negatively affect their self-esteem and social interactions for their entire lives unless they can find truly loving supporting people and/or a very good therapist. (The author mentions having a therapist himself several times and I couldn't help but think that he was robbed blind because that therapist sounds pretty useless. Oh, and he also appears to have a problem with alcohol that he's aware of but continues anyway. Maybe a SMART Recovery support group would help him more than that therapist seems to have.)
I know the author would be much less depressed if he could realize his own value independently of his mother and realize how she actively worked to keep him sad, small and depressed instead of able to achieve his full potential and find happiness. It's not too late for him to do this even though she has passed away; it comes from within and is a very powerful and helpful thing to realize and work towards. So I'm kind of hoping there's a sequel that is more focused on him and his own journey, and his wife and kids, instead of wasting any more words on his mother.
I did enjoy the literary travel through New York City as his mother was raised there in a Puerto Rican immigrant family and the author is half Puerto Rican. I liked the peek into the 60's during the hippie era (although his parents did not like hippies) and the mentions of areas in Greenwich Village and other parts of Manhattan as well as the Bronx and Brooklyn. It made me nostalgic for when I went to college in that area and made me want to visit New York again.
Many parts of the book were overly detailed and very repetitive so that it became like groundhog day. And some other areas needed expansion or explanation. I didn't understand why he kept saying that taking a job as a professor killed his father when it was a tumor; or why it was so awful. Both he and his father are writers (although I hadn't heard of either of them before I read this book) so it was an interesting glimpse into the life of a writer and all the ways in which they can be so emotionally tortured.
The book doesn't really focus on his parents' marriage as much as it does his mother alone. But it seemed like something she liked to miserable about and try to make his father miserable about just live everything else in her life, and his father put up with it and was pretty miserable himself (leading me to believe his own parents were similar, hence the unbroken cycle) and it was like they were two (well, three, actually- counting their son/the author) miserable peas in a pod.
I am not sure why anyone would want to stay this miserable and depressed and do nothing to change it but there you have it- the author's sad life story. I think the worst part were letters he included that he had written to his mother while she wasn't talking to him and later found in her apartment after she had to go to the hospital. He was begging for her love and sounded like a six year old; it was really off-putting and pathetic.
I can't really recommend this book unless you want to depress yourself by reading about depressive people or if you really like historical memoirs set in New York City or as a "life of the writer" type of thing. Or if you just like to read about dysfunctional marriages and families. But I'd recommend more positive ones that show how the cycle can be broken, such as Unorthodox or Hollywood Park or even The Glass Castle. I do wish the author well and hope he can find happiness after a lifetime of emotional abuse, now that his perpetrator and enabler have passed away.
February 3, 2022
"My unhappiness had satisfied her. It had proven certain things to her about the fundamentally unhappy nature of life."
This literary memoir was a challenging and moving read. I related to a lot of the author's experiences. I highlighted so many passages - the writing is truly beautiful. I wouldn't say this is for everyone, but for those of us readers who may not have had an ideal family life growing up and/or have lost a difficult parent, this will resonate and put words to difficult feelings.
"Later it occurred to me that death could begin an unraveling; that people themselves, their presence, held things together in ways that the memory of them never could."
This literary memoir was a challenging and moving read. I related to a lot of the author's experiences. I highlighted so many passages - the writing is truly beautiful. I wouldn't say this is for everyone, but for those of us readers who may not have had an ideal family life growing up and/or have lost a difficult parent, this will resonate and put words to difficult feelings.
"Later it occurred to me that death could begin an unraveling; that people themselves, their presence, held things together in ways that the memory of them never could."
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October 2, 2021Review up on my reading vlog: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3dWRk-0...
March 12, 2023
I am interested in work that deals with making meaning in grief. Here, Sorrentino sets out to understand and honor his mother, who was often overshadowed by her husband, son, and white supremacy. I found I wanted more of Sorrentino's mother, but that is the nature of the work--she is rigid, has hard boundaries, and vague about her background. This book felt incredibly honest, a very heart broken search for meaning and grief. Is it good, I'm not sure. But it is an honest piece of art.
December 27, 2021
I found this memoir terribly boring. His mother is exactly like mine. I grew up not far from him, born the same week he was, thinking this non-maternal behavior was normal. Maybe I’m less shocked than some of the reviewers because this was my life. His book was flat and uninteresting but for me it was cathartic.
January 21, 2022
I adored this book and could not put it down. Sorrentino examines his parent's marriage from the vantage point of adulthood and in doing so, reveals so much about the 70s, artistic ambition, romantic love, women's limited roles in the earlier part of the 20th century, California vs. NY, the difficulty of caring for aging parents, and so much more. But what really got me was the author's intimacy and honesty. His deceptively straightforward narration reveals complicated and multilayered emotions.
February 5, 2022
This was a difficult book to read, so I’m not even sure I’d recommend it. It begins and ends with the lurid details of the deterioration of Sorrentino’s mother’s body after her death, alone and unfound for at least 12 days. In between, Sorrentino examines her life and his life and the difficult relationship they had - him wanting approval and connection and her not caring. I imagine, and truly hope, it was cathartic to write.
December 17, 2021
Who doesn't love a good death/dysfunctional family memoir?
December 29, 2021
My therapist said that 80% of people have dysfunctional families and this is a dark and thoughtful account from that 80%!
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November 6, 2021Sorrentino’s memoir details in excruciating detail the balancing act that was his relationship with his late mother. Most moving and surreal is the sense that, despite his meticulous note-taking and careful narration, this book is all that remains of a complicated woman. After almost 300 pages I was amazed to realize I knew practically nothing about this woman; her hopes, her dreams, the parts of her life that remained unrevealed to her son at the time of her death.
At times, the venom in his account feels too strong, too fresh. Sorrentino is excising as much as he is describing. But it is also real and cathartic and not gratuitous.
Notes
And during those silences, while I lived my life as a father, husband and ex-husband, a friend, a teacher, a writer, and my mother filled her days in complete solitude, I did not think about what made her happy or unhappy; I felt only that my own unhappiness with the situation was the price for having a skate from confinement within the narrowest definition of what it was to be myself, the definition of me made by someone else, even if it applied only during the time it took me to phone, or during the isolated afternoons I traveled alone to her apartment to see her. Even that was too much. With my mother and I eventually found a way to remain on speaking terms… I allowed her the pyrrhic victory of becoming her boy again, agreeing with her, listening to her uncritically, allowing her to raise and drop the subjects… what difference would it make for me to assert who I really was? From my earliest attempts it had rarely worked out happily… But for the most part, I was willing, finally, to avoid imposing reality upon my mother. This came at some expense, but with the recompense of feeling, for the last four years she was alive, that I had a mother who loved me, or an idea of me. (PG. 36-38)
I wasn't particularly happy either — new school, etc. —but happiness in childhood as a matter of sheer luck, and probably temperament. The unhappy child can always say, “One day, I'm going to get out of here." The unhappy adult says only, “How did I end up here?" This had to have been a question for my mother. (PG. 59)
A discussion of my father’s peculiar and fixed habits, the rigid self-annihilating discipline he exercised throughout the period of his life when I knew him, is for another day. The point is that those habits, that discipline, required the people in his orbit not only to behave equally predictably, but to submit to his compulsive sense of control as well. (PG. 61-62)
Living in a marriage, you realize how much it is spend testing the bond, sometimes gingerly, sometimes forcefully, proving to yourself again and again that two individuals remain individual. The holy myth of the soul mate is easily dispelled buy the most jejune discovery: “What do you mean you don't like Dylan?” “What do you mean you hate the Red Sox?” One can only adapt to marriage, successfully or unsuccessfully. Adults are usually lousy at it, which is why my mother’s signature refrain, when remonstrating against my father, comically updated itself to mark the passage of time: “Ten years I've been telling you not to…” “Fifteen years I've asked you to…” “Twenty years I've been saying…” “Twenty-five years and you've never once…” Neither of them adapted. 30 years, 40, 45. And then the tolling stopped. (PG. 75-76)
Other people did things wrong: this lesson was inflicted early. It is still my reflexive sense of others, fought against constantly. The problems with such an attitude should be obvious. For one thing, it is the most primitive of social inaccuracies. It's knows no bounds, for another. If you become obnoxiously self righteous about the way you wash a dish or the ingredients that belong in a salad, then other people soon become nothing more than the agglomeration of their various failings. Habits, decor, conversation, diet, spiritual beliefs, tastes, politics, dress, speech, cleanliness, child-rearing practices —each becomes an equal basis for forming a titanically dismissive judgment. My mother never shrink from such judgment; she lived within them as she might have within a fortress… The woman who at thirty-five perceived in inhuman mechanism operating beneath the surface appearance of our neighbors had, by middle-age, pretty much determined never to catch such a glimpse again. (PG. 96-97)
If I seem unfairly to be taking my father’s side here, it's not quite the case. It's more accurate to say that I recognize in my mother the signs of an unwillingness, within a relationship, to insist upon one's own fulfillment… Within such a structure, my parents were destined to wither, their emotional fate determined by the passive-aggression of one in the paralysis of the other (PG. 107)
I worry about inheriting her eerie fatalism, well concealed behind an appearance of hard edged and concern; I worry about the need to blame. My mother let things happen to her, drifted into situation she hated and became stuck until some force dislodged her and sent her on her way again. She would endure in silence but finally she would lay blame. Laying blame for the things she endured was always the delayed reward for having endured it. (PG. 121)
But Baldwin caution against the incompleteness of the assimilated life; grasps that, in conforming to another's model, someone like my mother allows others to define her just as surely as they would have in applying the stereotypes she has mostly escaped. (PG. 178)
I'm reminded of the so-called Flitcraft parable… on the afternoon when he disappeared he had been walking down the street we have been falling from a building under construction struck the sidewalk right beside him. "He felt like somebody had taken the lid off life and let him look at the works,” Spade says. He immediately deserted his life… After several years of wondering he returned to the region, married a woman very similar to his abandoned wife and started a new family… Spade concludes: “ But that's the part of it I always liked. He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling."
I don't know if for me it's beams not falling as much as it's a desire to put the lid back on life and it's works. Everything about my upbringing urged that —even suggested that a lid be manufactured and installed if circumstances hadn't provided one. What else was it all about, the endless organization and regimentation of things and actions that made no difference? (PG. 210)
The forgotten woman was the young one, buried in the bureau drawers. Here, in these old possessions, as much as in the photographs and the old letters, was the almost-obliterated record of connection. That hat, that's scarf, that watch — in them, in my memory of their useful life as everyday articles, frugally saved for, discriminatingly chosen, meticulously cared for, I could recall my mother as a force in the world, a woman for whom life hadn't yet become a broken clock, a desultory list of small events scattered across the pages of a giveaway diary. (PG. 286)
At times, the venom in his account feels too strong, too fresh. Sorrentino is excising as much as he is describing. But it is also real and cathartic and not gratuitous.
Notes
And during those silences, while I lived my life as a father, husband and ex-husband, a friend, a teacher, a writer, and my mother filled her days in complete solitude, I did not think about what made her happy or unhappy; I felt only that my own unhappiness with the situation was the price for having a skate from confinement within the narrowest definition of what it was to be myself, the definition of me made by someone else, even if it applied only during the time it took me to phone, or during the isolated afternoons I traveled alone to her apartment to see her. Even that was too much. With my mother and I eventually found a way to remain on speaking terms… I allowed her the pyrrhic victory of becoming her boy again, agreeing with her, listening to her uncritically, allowing her to raise and drop the subjects… what difference would it make for me to assert who I really was? From my earliest attempts it had rarely worked out happily… But for the most part, I was willing, finally, to avoid imposing reality upon my mother. This came at some expense, but with the recompense of feeling, for the last four years she was alive, that I had a mother who loved me, or an idea of me. (PG. 36-38)
I wasn't particularly happy either — new school, etc. —but happiness in childhood as a matter of sheer luck, and probably temperament. The unhappy child can always say, “One day, I'm going to get out of here." The unhappy adult says only, “How did I end up here?" This had to have been a question for my mother. (PG. 59)
A discussion of my father’s peculiar and fixed habits, the rigid self-annihilating discipline he exercised throughout the period of his life when I knew him, is for another day. The point is that those habits, that discipline, required the people in his orbit not only to behave equally predictably, but to submit to his compulsive sense of control as well. (PG. 61-62)
Living in a marriage, you realize how much it is spend testing the bond, sometimes gingerly, sometimes forcefully, proving to yourself again and again that two individuals remain individual. The holy myth of the soul mate is easily dispelled buy the most jejune discovery: “What do you mean you don't like Dylan?” “What do you mean you hate the Red Sox?” One can only adapt to marriage, successfully or unsuccessfully. Adults are usually lousy at it, which is why my mother’s signature refrain, when remonstrating against my father, comically updated itself to mark the passage of time: “Ten years I've been telling you not to…” “Fifteen years I've asked you to…” “Twenty years I've been saying…” “Twenty-five years and you've never once…” Neither of them adapted. 30 years, 40, 45. And then the tolling stopped. (PG. 75-76)
Other people did things wrong: this lesson was inflicted early. It is still my reflexive sense of others, fought against constantly. The problems with such an attitude should be obvious. For one thing, it is the most primitive of social inaccuracies. It's knows no bounds, for another. If you become obnoxiously self righteous about the way you wash a dish or the ingredients that belong in a salad, then other people soon become nothing more than the agglomeration of their various failings. Habits, decor, conversation, diet, spiritual beliefs, tastes, politics, dress, speech, cleanliness, child-rearing practices —each becomes an equal basis for forming a titanically dismissive judgment. My mother never shrink from such judgment; she lived within them as she might have within a fortress… The woman who at thirty-five perceived in inhuman mechanism operating beneath the surface appearance of our neighbors had, by middle-age, pretty much determined never to catch such a glimpse again. (PG. 96-97)
If I seem unfairly to be taking my father’s side here, it's not quite the case. It's more accurate to say that I recognize in my mother the signs of an unwillingness, within a relationship, to insist upon one's own fulfillment… Within such a structure, my parents were destined to wither, their emotional fate determined by the passive-aggression of one in the paralysis of the other (PG. 107)
I worry about inheriting her eerie fatalism, well concealed behind an appearance of hard edged and concern; I worry about the need to blame. My mother let things happen to her, drifted into situation she hated and became stuck until some force dislodged her and sent her on her way again. She would endure in silence but finally she would lay blame. Laying blame for the things she endured was always the delayed reward for having endured it. (PG. 121)
But Baldwin caution against the incompleteness of the assimilated life; grasps that, in conforming to another's model, someone like my mother allows others to define her just as surely as they would have in applying the stereotypes she has mostly escaped. (PG. 178)
I'm reminded of the so-called Flitcraft parable… on the afternoon when he disappeared he had been walking down the street we have been falling from a building under construction struck the sidewalk right beside him. "He felt like somebody had taken the lid off life and let him look at the works,” Spade says. He immediately deserted his life… After several years of wondering he returned to the region, married a woman very similar to his abandoned wife and started a new family… Spade concludes: “ But that's the part of it I always liked. He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling."
I don't know if for me it's beams not falling as much as it's a desire to put the lid back on life and it's works. Everything about my upbringing urged that —even suggested that a lid be manufactured and installed if circumstances hadn't provided one. What else was it all about, the endless organization and regimentation of things and actions that made no difference? (PG. 210)
The forgotten woman was the young one, buried in the bureau drawers. Here, in these old possessions, as much as in the photographs and the old letters, was the almost-obliterated record of connection. That hat, that's scarf, that watch — in them, in my memory of their useful life as everyday articles, frugally saved for, discriminatingly chosen, meticulously cared for, I could recall my mother as a force in the world, a woman for whom life hadn't yet become a broken clock, a desultory list of small events scattered across the pages of a giveaway diary. (PG. 286)
December 15, 2021
I am a sucker for family drama and lissome sentences, and this book delivered them combined. Win! But I can't say it was easy going. Neither the author or his parents were particularly likable, so the hours spent in their company could drag.
January 3, 2022
Unspeakably good and very hard to set down, upsetting as it is. Sorrentino is a fine and brave writer but not necessarily someone I'd want to get stuck in an elevator with.
October 10, 2021
Whew. Hard to read, because of the subject and the vitriol and bile and other bitter liquids with which he writes about his mother. Not because mothers should be revered, but because I, too had a difficult mother. In the beginning I felt he was being unfair to her, whiny, complaining (and he was no gem as a son either, when young)—then I realized I was reacting to the things I don’t like about myself that I saw reflected in him. And, felt very sorry for her, because she obviously wasn’t a happy person—at least as seen from her perspective. I may have to read it again soon.
November 13, 2022
“Happiness,” around the Sorrentino family, “was something the smart money wasted no time pursuing.” Certainly, the clan was smart; both father & son, Gilbert & Christopher, carved out distinguished literary careers. Yet the mother held her own around the household. Born Vivian Dora Ortiz, her 1937 birth certificate listed her as Puerto Rican & “BLACK,” but in time she pulled off a wily escape from the traps of race & ethnicity. It's she who her son makes the focus of his memoir. Yet while NOW BEACON, NOW SEA acknowledges that the woman’s trajectory could seem a triumph, it offers no happy ending. Uplift, that’s a game for suckers. The very qualities that made Gilbert S. a fine & fascinating writer, his rigor & focus, left his wife isolated, falling prey to her depressive tendencies, & the son suffered too-- not abuse, no, but a benign neglect. He compares their homelife, rigid in its schedules, duties, & boundaries, to “astronauts aboard a space station.” Such psychological probing drives this text, both rendering long-ago experience vivid & appreciating them maturely, informed by the revelations of later life. The balance is tricky, one foot in the past & the other in the present, but Sorrentino pulls it off so well you would think he was one of the Flying Wallendas. Were I to criticize, I'd say he overemphasizes psychology & sociology (there's great stuff about NYC in the '70s, for instance), depriving us of the physical; we could use a more tangible sense of the parents & their world. Still, though this may be a memoir out of the Book of Job-- I alone am escaped to tell thee!-- I found the wailing unforgettable, even beautiful, & I came away with new clues to that never-ending mystery, the lives of the artists. (*This review adapted from an essay in LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS).
February 17, 2024
Book
This book is about family dysfunction and nothing else. Sorrentino recites bad conversation after bad conversation between he and his parents His mother’s constant verbal attacks on him are disturbing. Even as an adult, he endured her crazy verbal assaults and just kept coming back. The author recites everything quite matter of factly and with no introspection or indicia that he ever became self aware or preceptive of why his parents acted the way they did even though Sorrentino went through therapy and invariably dealt with some of these issues. His comment to his mother “well here I am 40 years later still trying to get you to like me,” was heartbreaking and disgusting at the same time, as he still kept going back for more. It was particularly difficult to read because Sorrrentino doesn’t describe any gestures or signs of love he ever receives from her. And while Sorrentino says time and again that he was close to his father, he gives us no reason for this. He never shows us how or why he was close to his father, he just tells us. I did not enjoy this book.
This book is about family dysfunction and nothing else. Sorrentino recites bad conversation after bad conversation between he and his parents His mother’s constant verbal attacks on him are disturbing. Even as an adult, he endured her crazy verbal assaults and just kept coming back. The author recites everything quite matter of factly and with no introspection or indicia that he ever became self aware or preceptive of why his parents acted the way they did even though Sorrentino went through therapy and invariably dealt with some of these issues. His comment to his mother “well here I am 40 years later still trying to get you to like me,” was heartbreaking and disgusting at the same time, as he still kept going back for more. It was particularly difficult to read because Sorrrentino doesn’t describe any gestures or signs of love he ever receives from her. And while Sorrentino says time and again that he was close to his father, he gives us no reason for this. He never shows us how or why he was close to his father, he just tells us. I did not enjoy this book.
November 21, 2021
There are very few sympathetic characters in this book. Chris' relationship with his mother -- as he remembers it -- is terrible. How he has portrayed her after her recent death is also terrible. If one of my children wrote such a book after my death I'd be rolling in my grave.
In terms of redemptive qualities, the book is beautifully written (if a bit too wordy at times) and it's a powerful reflection on what disaster can befall when you let life carry you instead of taking agency. How constantly putting one's life at the mercy of others -- children, husbands -- can drive a woman borderline insane.
In terms of redemptive qualities, the book is beautifully written (if a bit too wordy at times) and it's a powerful reflection on what disaster can befall when you let life carry you instead of taking agency. How constantly putting one's life at the mercy of others -- children, husbands -- can drive a woman borderline insane.
November 29, 2021
Eek, searing. My mother was a little like this -- just refusing agency, while complaining and blaming. I've always wondered about this -- I think women from that generation and maybe from traditional backgrounds weren't raised to make decisions for themselves but only to implement other people's decisions and to be the supporting partner. This family is a pretty extreme example, but I do think he lets his dad off easy? I think it was the father with the intense need to keep everything the same and to keep people away? Sorrentino writes beautifully and doesn't try to make himself look good. Definitely worth reading if you like dysfunctional family memoir genre!
February 6, 2022
4 STARS
One of the reasons I read memoirs is because I learn so much from them. It is instructive to witness other people wrestling with their own past. I enjoyed Sorrentino’s writing style, and I respect his keen insights into his parent’s behavior, although I think he could show them more empathy. Difficult people are often difficult for good reasons, the heart has its reasons, as the saying goes. I take issue with S’s portrayal of the Bay Ridge neighborhood in Brooklyn, where his parents spent their later years. I lived there in the late 70s and have fond memories of it. For me, it was a good place to live.
One of the reasons I read memoirs is because I learn so much from them. It is instructive to witness other people wrestling with their own past. I enjoyed Sorrentino’s writing style, and I respect his keen insights into his parent’s behavior, although I think he could show them more empathy. Difficult people are often difficult for good reasons, the heart has its reasons, as the saying goes. I take issue with S’s portrayal of the Bay Ridge neighborhood in Brooklyn, where his parents spent their later years. I lived there in the late 70s and have fond memories of it. For me, it was a good place to live.
December 28, 2022
2.5 stars. Guy has mommy issues. I love reading about mommy/daddy issues, but I also did not wind up liking or sympathizing much with this writer. Some of the sentences are nice, others make me feel like I’m reading the product of a shitty west village writing class (to be fair, I produced garbage when I participated in such courses). The book ends abruptly and without a significant or poetic arc, it’s kind of the author vomiting up his life history until he gets to his mom’s death and then things end. Not great. I’ll have to reread Crying in H-Mart (💜) to get reacquainted with the proper execution of this kind of memoir.
February 20, 2022
It feels weird to say that I enjoyed reading this; it’s a darkly funny, at times melodramatic family saga. Because Sorrentino is both honest and unsparing (he, of anyone, comes off as deeply flawed), the strange humaneness of the family always remains. He has a particular skill in describing how we all engage with the complexities of the people we are closest to, knowingly and yet without confidence.
April 3, 2022
Too dark and meaningless. and too slow to finish entirely. All Family dysfunction. The writing was creative and exacting. He admits to having no awareness of his parents lives independent of his....the self centered child that we each are. He show how naturally we repeat our parents lives and mistakes.
Best line: "Rare was the complaint that didn't raise a deeper, older complaint." Page 121.
We all hold the grudges and our version of their occurrence.
Best line: "Rare was the complaint that didn't raise a deeper, older complaint." Page 121.
We all hold the grudges and our version of their occurrence.
October 18, 2021
A stirring memoir
This memoir captures a son's complicated journey toward building a relationship with his complex and demanding mother. The writers' descriptions of New York City during the 1960s are raw and real.
This memoir captures a son's complicated journey toward building a relationship with his complex and demanding mother. The writers' descriptions of New York City during the 1960s are raw and real.
August 29, 2022
It was a really beautiful, haunting description of a challenging mother/son dynamic. I wish the author had been more self-reflective and described both the ways he contributed to the dynamic, and the challenges of moving out of the dynamic.
May 1, 2024
2.5 stars. The writing was good and some bits were great. Overall, though, very tedious for me. Maybe it was just a mismatch on the subject matter but hopefully Sorrentino is able to work some stuff out in therapy. I can see why the NYT liked it… it had some great NYC references.
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