The Nearly Departed: Or, My Family & Other Foreigners

by Brenda Cullerton

The journalist and fashion writer offers a memoir of her very eccentric family, from her mother who wore three pairs of glasses, one on top of the other, and gardened in black underwear to her brother who lived in a tar-paper shack on the front lawn.

Genres: Nonfiction, Biography Memoir

240 pages, Hardcover

First published May 2, 2003

Reviews

[Judy · Rating 2 out of 5]

I thought this was another memoir of a dysfunctional family with a bit of maudlin coming to terms with it story, but it was more than that. It was also less than that. I couldn't decide if I liked or disliked this story. In the end I decided that it is what it is, whatever that is.

[bookyeti · Rating 3 out of 5]

An intriguing and touching collection of family memories

“As mother taught me, life was a stage - a real stage, with no metaphor intended - and everyone on it but us was an extra.”

Far from prosaic and most definitely diverting, Brenda Cullerton’s unabashedly candid memoir “The Nearly Departed: Or, My Family & Other Foreigners” is a refreshing departure from the autobiographical norm. Dancing between dark humour, stinging wit and poignant life realities, the author’s recollections of her wildly outlandish family are often more bitter than sweet. To be sure, the collective confessions from the ‘Cullerton Family Crypt’ will have you sobbing, guffawing, sighing, and feeling strangely schizophrenic – all in one chapter.

The truth is, Brenda Cullerton’s family would raise anyone’s eyebrow. At the forefront of these eccentric anecdotes are her parents – a social misfit mother who gardened in baggy black undies, lavish jewelry coupled with pop-it beads, and her hair bedecked in curlers; and an alcoholic father who was usually found anywhere but home, and amassed a hidden fortune as traveling businessman in the shoe trade (only to later hide his cash in their dilapidated barn, stuffed in the toes of moldy footwear).

Now in their winter years, Brenda Cullerton’s parents - suffering from ill health - evoke her return to this alien landscape called “home”. As the author painstakingly sifts through piles of family memories encountered along the way, not only does she learn more about these virtual “foreigners” who are family, but ultimately discovers herself and the all reasons for her insatiable desire to escape the past.

Artfully and intelligently captured on paper, it is Cullerton’s ingenuous journey through introspection which makes “The Nearly Departed” quite nearly flawless.

-reviewed for Time Warner books

[Kazzy · Rating 2 out of 5]

I seem to be on a streak of reading books about people taking care of their elderly, and uh, shall we say eccentric parents in their final illnesses. This addition to that group is ok, interesting, but ultimately the family dysfunction leaves me feeling sad.

[Liz · Rating 2 out of 5]

Usually I enjoy memoirs about people's crazy childhoods, but this one was kind of a mess. Probably could have used a more vigorous editor - it was not very cohesive. I wanted to like it, but I didn't much.

[Siobhan Burns · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's astonishing, the childhoods that are survived and then brilliantly "memoirised." Cullerton's Connecticut family is straight out of a southern gothic novel, and she deftly weaves the horrific with the hilarious.

[Priscilla · Rating 3 out of 5]

This could have been my family, which made it easier to laugh at