Post Mortem

by Laurel Saville

PostMortem is as unflinching an act of courage as you're likely to find in everyday life, a journey through soul-rotting self-destruction and its bitter zone of pain toward grace and forgiveness and the ultimate necessity of love...
Laurel Saville is capable of steady lucid prose that continually ascends to eloquence, wisdom, and, at the end of it all, compassion. -Bob Shacochis, National Book Award-winning Author of Easy in the Islands and The Immaculate Invasion Sadly, some lives cannot be understood until after death. So it was with Anne Ford. A charming beauty queen, model, and fashion designer during the 1950s, this glamour girl was poisoned by internal demons and the permissive Southern California culture of the 1960s and 70s. She ended her life as an alcoholic street person, stabbed and strangled in a burned-out building in West Hollywood. Years later, her daughter, the writer Laurel Saville, began the long process of unraveling the twin trajectories of this unusual life. Postmortem takes the reader on an emotionally charged journey that ranges from her eccentric West Hollywood childhood to a top-secret, Depression-era airplane design. Whether describing the artists of the seminal Sunset Strip gallery where Andy Warhol got his start or the hippie parties at Barney's Beanery, Saville's distinctive prose lends insight into events and emotions. This candid exploration of one woman's life and death ends up exposing unexpected and highly-charged truths about both mother and daughter.

Genres: Memoir

ebook

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Laurel Saville is the award-winning author of the novels "Beneath the Trees," "North of Here," and "Henry and Rachel," the memoir "Unraveling Anne" and several other books, as well as numerous articles, essays, and short stories, which have appeared in The Bark, The Bennington Review, Elle.com, House Beautiful, the LA Times Magazine, NYTimes.com, Room and many other publications. Laurel has an MFA from the Writing Seminars at Bennington College.

Reviews

[Tara Chevrestt · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a memoir and an eye opening story of what alcohol abuse can do to a family. The author writes about her mother and spending the first thirteen years of her life watching her mother decline day by day. Her mother was a alcoholic. This story shows how a once beautiful, coddled woman, given every advantage a young lady in the thirties could have, a model, a talented artist, a dress designer ends up being a single mother of three, jobless, with vagrants and drunks coming in and out of her home until finally she ends up dead in her bed with her panties around her ankles and her throat strangled with a one eyed dog barking at the police.

Shocking and disturbing... to read full review, please click the link below.

http://wwwbookbabe.blogspot.com/2010/...

[Wicked Lil Pixie (Natasha) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Postmortem is the story of Anne Ford, the authors mother. A beauty queen, model & fashion designer during the 1950′s, but plagued by inner demons that eventually lead to her becoming a street person & later being stabbed & strangled to death. Years later, Laurel Saville began a journey into understanding the duality of her mother.

Postmortem was a brilliant look from two sides of the coin, Ms. Saville looking at what she knows of her mother & at what she has told her mother was. It’s rather heartbreaking to see how her mother fell from someone so well respected to someone you’d pass by in the streets without a second glance. It shows you what alcohol can do to a family, Ms. Saville having to watch her mother decline to her demons for the first 13 years of her life.

It’s also extremely haunting at how much disregard her mother had for Ms. Saville, there’s a story about a man following them in a car & her mother totally brushing it off. That story was horrifying, thinking about it in a child’s perspective knowing you’ve always been told not to talk to strangers & here is your own mother doing the opposite.

Yet what amazed me most was Ms. Saville’s lack of blame gaming. She doesn’t once blame her mother, but depicts this as her reality & wants to learn more. It totally amazed me that she could become the woman she is with all she dealt with as a child.

Postmortem is an extremly compelling novel & the authors struggle to work through her past & that of her mothers.

[Wendy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book for many reasons. While the story is tragic and heartbreaking on many levels, I loved the author's (Laurel Saville's) writing style. Saville gives voice to some painful memories, yet without resentment, while also painting a vivid picture of her eccentric childhood during the 60s and 70s in West Hollywood, where her charismatic, artistic mother, Anne Ford, was surrounded by the "Ferus group" of artists from the famous gallery where Andy Warhol got his start, as well as by many other colorful characters (hippies, musicians, etc.). In addition to learning about Saville's mother's fascinating and ultimately tragic life (and death), Postmortem is as much a social history as it is a portrait of a family. The fact that Saville is able to look beyond the circumstances of her childhood, and build a loving, successful, and stable life for herself is a gratifying and beautiful tale within itself. Highly recommend!

[Audacia Ray · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really badly wanted to like this book, and for the first 50 pages, I did. Overall, the story of the author's and her mother's lives are fascinating, but I feel like the writer got lazy and didn't go as deep into the stories as she could have. There are a lot of places in the book where she summarizes major events, like a paragraph in which she mentions that when she was about 10 her mother took off to Europe and left her and her brother to fend for themselves. Moving right along!

There were so many places in the book where I thought - wow, I want to hear that story. And then its gone. Overall, it's not a fearless book. I really got the sense that the author was holding back. If you're going to write about darkness and shame around your family of origin (especially when key characters are now deceased), you should really go for it. I don't think the author did.

[Joan Hanna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Saville gives her readers everything in Postmortem. The mother’s story, the daughter’s story and every story in between the cracks in the foundation of this broken family. This is not the voice of someone indulging her present because of her past. She not only survives her childhood, she does so with a grace that is self-taught and self-nurturing. The reader finds a woman that ponders where we come from, how we get where we are and all of the crossroads in between.

[Amy Lou Jenkins · Rating 5 out of 5]

Laurel's account of revealing her mothers life is riveting and honest. No "poor me, my mom was no good." Rather this is a daughter searching for reality and evidence of love amist dirt and decay. Difficult and lovely.

[Karen Glass · Rating 4 out of 5]

compelling memoir of woman working through the lingering effects of her mother's murder. Not unlike Glass Castle.

[Amy Lou Jenkins · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brave, honest autopsy of motherhood, neglect, and illness.

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this so I could help my cousin who is attending a local community college. The book was very good, but sad at times. The author lives in my hometown and speaks at the college.