My Amazon and Goodreads review of Never Simple: A Memoir by Liz Scheier (Rating 4) – Ambivalent. Grieving the death of a parent with whom one had fraught relationship is harder than the “clean” mourning that follows the end of a primarily loving one. In Never Simple: A Memoir, Liz Scheier tries to come to terms with a mother who smothered her with love, but was also physically and emotionally abusive, a liar (including about who Liz’s father was), financially dependent, combative, and eventually afflicted with dementia. I read the book with personal interest. My mother, while not physically abusive, was in most other ways a replica of Judith Scheier. I also read it as a writer (see my Amazon author page and Goodreads author page), looking for the narrative’s literary arc. My reaction to the book, like Liz’s feelings toward her mother, was “ambivalent.” On the downside, Scheier presents her own life in repetitive detail, sacrificing the book’s momentum in her attempts to convince readers of her unfair treatment. We get it; no reruns needed. On the upside, in the final chapter, after her mother dies, Scheier empathically recognizes, “She was both dealt a bad hand and played that hand badly.” Of their relationship, she concludes, “You can still love someone who has caused you a lot of harm.” Never Simple is both an accusation and an absolution. When life’s injustice meets mental illness, it is indeed “never simple.”
A fraught mother-daughter relationship
Why writers read: “Reading makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something, learned something, become a better person.” – Nora Ephron
