Sherman Alexie is a master at craft. His memoir is an impressive work of writing and definitely deserves a space on every library's shelf across the US (and internationally).

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Highly recommended read! Thanks for providing through Net Galley. Five Stars *****

This is a tough one for me. I absolutely love Sherman Alexie. I admire him and his works. I was desperate to read this book because I wanted to know more about him. For me, this book was more about him than it was about his mother. I felt he spent more time writing about non-mother things. I would have liked to know more about her and their relationship. This could have been two separate books. An autobiography and a memoir would have worked better.. On the other hand, I love Sherman Alexie. This book is raw and I found myself both laughing and sobbing during the book. As all his works are, this one is beautifully written and I loved learning more about him and his past.

Sherman Alexie, author of popular books The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven wrote You Don't Have to Say You Love Me as a way to process the death of his mother, Lillian, at age 78. His relationship with his mother is complicated. Lillian wasn't the most likable person... But Alexie so beautifully reveals who his mother was---the good and the bad---that by the end of the book I felt like I knew her, understood her, and could even easily empathize with her.

The book is half poetry, half prose, and 450 pages of straight grief. It's one of the most beautiful books I've ever read, and I pretty much cried the whole way through. Alexie is honest and insightful---sometimes biting, but then also so full of grace and acceptance it's heartbreaking. There is so much feeling in here. Just page after page of raw sadness and vulnerability. Alexie is able to cut the heaviness somewhat with humor, but this book is still a giant heap of SORROW.

In my opinion, You Don't Have to Say You Love Me is the best book Alexie has ever written. It's a roller coaster of emotion to be sure, but it's definitely worth reading.

You Don't Have to Love Me was a masterful blend of prose and verse as Alexie confronts legacy of rape and disenfranchisement as a Native American and focuses on his own mother.

Cried on the couch when he wrote about absorbing the finality of his friend's death. He's such a fantastic author and I'm so thrilled I was able to read this.

Update and actual review:
I received an advance copy from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Sherman Alexie has long been one of my favorite authors for so skillfully blending humor and tragedy in his prose and poetry. But in You Don't Have To Say You Love Me, he lets the tragedy take the lead, as you'd have to if you write a memoir about your mother and her death. His mother, Lillian, spent her life on the reservation, and her life was touched in all ways by this, from health care to the trauma that people inflict on each other when they've had trauma inflicted on them. When she died at 78, he began writing, poetry and prose, trying to explore her life, her influence on his, and the ways one person can appear to many people. His pain is obvious in the words, because even if she wasn't the perfect mother, she was his mother.

I have a hard time writing an even-handed review of this book. I started it on June 5, it was released June 13, and on June 14, I learned that one of my oldest friends had committed suicide. I put the book down and walked away from it until I thought I could finish it with a modicum of dignity. I could not, but instead dug in over a few days, buried in my grief as well as Alexie's grief. I will recommend it to anyone, but I honestly don't know if I can read it again.

There is only one word that can be used to describe this book: raw. Alexie opens up his heart and gives us a collection of essays and poems in a way that makes this memoir stand out from others in the genre and that will linger in the reader's mind and heart.

Loved this book. Soaring writing, funny, heartbreaking. What a gift from Sherman Alexie to readers.

<i>”There is no preparation for the loneliness of a world from which the two people who put you in it have gone. The death of parents removes the last cushion against contemplating your own mortality. The cycle of life and death becomes internal, bone-deep knowledge, a source now of despair, now of inspiration. The earth acquires a new quality of silence.”</i> Roger Cohen in <i>The New York Times</i>



As I was completing Sherman Alexie’s memoir which loosely focuses on his troubled relationship with his Spokane First-Nation mother, Lillian, I learned that he had just cancelled most of the book tour dedicated to promoting it. He was haunted by his mother’s ghost and found himself sobbing several times a day while he travelled. His grief over the loss of his fierce mother, he wrote in a letter posted on Facebook, was “complicated” (an actual term used by psychotherapists who work with the bereaved). He needed to mourn in private. Having been diagnosed as bipolar in 2010, he was now in the throes of a significant depressive episode.

It did not surprise me that such afflictive emotions would arise with the completion of <i>You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me</i>. Remembering, writing about, and then publicly discussing intensely painful details of your past forces you, on some level, to relive them. A kind of re-traumatization can quite understandably occur. Alexie has said in interviews that he does not find writing therapeutic, though he acknowledges his work may be therapeutic for his audience, as the reading of the literature of others has been for him. For Alexie, writing appears to be a kind of compulsion. His work, which is strongly autobiographical, occasionally irks family members. They have expressed anxiety or irritation about how events or they, themselves, are represented in his books.

<i>You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me</i> is ostensibly an exploration of Alexie’s relationship with his mother, but I think it is actually something other than that: a collection of short personal pieces on the genocide, literal and cultural, of Indian peoples. Alexie puzzles over the fact that a Holocaust museum (rightly, he says) exists in Washington, DC, but that there is no equivalent memorial to the mass crimes against the humanity of American Indian nations. He describes the substandard living and environmental conditions on his home reservation in Washington State. Two uranium mines were situated near his reserve, and when these mines closed years ago, only one was adequately cleaned up, leaving the indigenous people who live in the area at high risk for cancer. Rains have long run off the toxic mine tailings into rivers and creeks on the reserve. Families swam and fished in those rivers and poured the water from them over the hot stones in sweat lodges constructed from young trees that grew near the waterways.

If mining wasn’t enough of an assault on a people’s land and way of life, the Grand Coulee Dam, constructed in the state of Washington between 1933 and 1942, certainly was. Traditional Spokane culture centred around salmon, but salmon fishing was entirely curtailed with the building of the dam. Colville and Spokane Indian tribes were forced off their lands to make way for it.

Violence, sexual assault, and substance abuse were rampant on Alexie’s reserve as he grew up. (His book provides no indication that things are much different today.) He writes that he himself was sexually abused as a child, but gives no details about this. In an interview with James Yeh of the New York Times (June 12, 2017), Alexie remarks that he is always “going to tell the better version” about what happened. It’s hard to find “the better version” in <i>You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me</i> which seems to be an example of pretty brutal truth telling, but Alexie insists in <i>The Times</i> article that there are secrets—things he will not write about. His sexual abuse may be one of them.

Alexie’s father, a kind and gentle depressive, was almost perpetually on a bender, rarely employed, and largely absent from his children’s lives. He died at 64 of kidney failure, the result of diabetes and a lifelong relationship with the bottle. Lillian, too, had problems with alcohol. She gave it up when Sherman was seven—an act, he says, which saved his life. A powerful and creative woman, a skilled quilter and one of the last fluent speakers of Salish, Lillian was also a fury who frightened people outside the family as much as the ones within it. She was dry drunk, full of rage and pain, long after she’d renounced alcohol. Alexie believes that she, like him, was manic-depressive. Though her words and stories could seldom be trusted, he accepts her accounts of herself as both a product and victim of rape.

<i>You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me</i> is not a perfect work. Parts of it are repetitive, and its organization feels slightly careless and random. It consists of poems and short prose pieces that appear to have been written at various times and then loosely stitched together. Some of the poems are more effective than others. A few were inaccessible to me: even after several readings, their metaphorical import was elusive. Occasionally, there is “too much information”, as they say, (i.e., information that most of us wouldn’t share in “polite” society), and the profanity is sometimes more gratuitous than effective. The truth of any matter can be as slippery in Alexie’s hands as it was in his notoriously fabulistic mother’s. His siblings remark that he lies as much as Lillian, that he massages facts to suit his own ends. Alexie can also come across as self-absorbed and self-admiring. He frequently mentions his popularity and intellectual abilities as a student at an all-white high school and more than once describes himself as a gifted writer. Most of us know it’s just not “good manners” to sing one’s own praises, yet I found myself quite willing to let these statements go. After all, there was really nothing to suggest the contrary, and good reason to sing.

The subject matter of Alexie’s memoir is grim, and his mother, who is supposedly its main subject never emerges as more than a shadowy figure. However, the darkness of the content is regularly pierced with bright flashes of wit, hilarity, and irreverence. Alexie’s voice is utterly unique: confessional, intense, dramatic--variously vulnerable, ashamed, angry, and ironic. I really can't think of another voice quite like it. You can hear Alexie when you read his words. You can sometimes believe that you are there with him.

Kafka said we should read books that wound us: “We need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.” <i>You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me</i> was exactly that kind of book for me: wrenching and intensely, utterly human.

BEAUTIFULLY WRITTEN MEMOIR . ALEXIE GIVES A VIVID PORTRAIT OF A COMPLICATED RELATIONSHIP WITH HIS MOTHER THAT HAUNTS HIM AFTER HER DEATH.

In Sherman Alexi’s memoir, You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me, he talks openly about many things: his health – he was born hydrocephalic and suffered a brain tumor in adulthood; his struggles with alcoholism and mental illness – he is bipolar; his life growing up on a Reservation – the poverty, the abuse both sexual and physical, as well as substance abuse, the bullying, and about how so many of his childhood friends and, yes, bullies died young; his decision to attend school off the reserve where he was the only Native kid and how it affected the rest of his life; his father, a binge drinker whom he loved unconditionally; his sisters, his wife, his writing, and his success as a writer.

But most of all, he tries to come to terms with the complicated relationship between him and his mother, Lillian, after her death. Lillian was a very complicated woman. She was, like her son, bipolar and was, in Alexi’s words, ‘salmon-cold and pathologically lied’. But she was also willing to make sacrifices for her children – an alcoholic, she gave up drinking when she saw the effect it was having on them and she supported Sherman’s decision about schooling against his father’s objections. But when he is beaten up by a bigger white boy on the reserve, she refuses to do anything. He describes in a poem how he felt safe with her’ almost half the time’.

<i>Mom protected me from cruelty

Three days a week</i>

She may have been the result of rape as well as the victim of it herself. But, as Alexi points out repeatedly she is a compulsive liar or perhaps, more kindly, like him, she is a storyteller and she has told a different version of her life to her daughters than to Sherman. He does, however, choose to believe the one she told him. But she supported the family for years with her quilting and was also one of the last true native speakers of the Salish language - she chose not to teach it to her kids and he realizes the depth of what is lost after her death.

Alexi’s relationship with his mother often broke down and they frequently stopped talking for long periods of time. He has little good to say about her and yet, despite this or perhaps because of it, his deep and profound grief at her death is present on every page. It is clear that he realizes that they were more alike than different and he misses even all the bad things about her.

Throughout the book, he switches between poetry and prose even occasionally moving from one to the other in the same paragraph. You Don’t Have to Say You Love me is a beautiful, profound, and profoundly moving story about being Native American, about being a writer but most of all about grief and the complicated love/hate relationship between him and his mother.

Thanks to Netgalley and Little, Brown and Company for the opportunity to read this book in exchange for an honest review

Thank you to Netgalley and Little Brown for the advance copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
I love Sherman Alexie and will read anything he writes. He is one of my favorite authors. I have always been drawn to his short stories and understand that he puts a lot of himself and his own experiences into his fiction. You Don't Have to Say You Love Me separates the fact from the fiction and shows how similar they are.
Sherman has never had it easy. Rez life exposed him to poverty, racism, alcoholism, and abuse. While his sisters enjoyed pow-wows and other tribal activities, Sherman was bookish, quiet, and had had 2 brain surgeries by the time he went to school. His father was a drunk, but always lovable. His mother was sober and cruel - especially to him. This book explores his relationship to his mother, her cruelty, her relationships to other people, her relationship to her tribe, and his complicated feelings after her death.
I received an ARC of this book, immediately started reading and realized about 1/4 of the way in that I really needed to hear it in his voice. I bought the audio. It is raw, and vulnerable, and revealing. He bares all and often seems to be crying on the audio narration of the book.
I admire his courage in undertaking (and publishing) a book like this. By revealing long-held family and personal secrets, he has created a book that is simultaneously loving and critical and unlike most memoirs I have ever read.

Powerful, honest and compelling, Sherman Alexie’s memoir of growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Wellpinit, Washington is not a conventional chronological autobiography, but rather goes backwards and forwards in time and includes many of the his own poems. The result is a wonderfully immersive account of an often difficult, often heart-breaking life, one which he conveys brilliantly through his skill with words.

You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me is a wonderful, moving memoir by one of my favorite authors, Sherman Alexie. I first read Alexie’s work in high school, beginning with The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, a short story collection about life on the Spokane Indian Reservation. There are some echoes of that earlier work here, when Alexie reminisces on his childhood growing up on that reservation. This book is mostly a tribute to his late mother though, and Alexie pays homage to her with 160 poems, essays, and reflections throughout the book. Some are no more than a sentence or two. Some span several pages. Each is thoughtful, stirring, and unflinchingly honest.

Alexie’s stories of being born with an abnormal brain condition, then growing up incredibly poor with his alcoholic father and mentally unstable mother are an interesting glimpse into his early life and formative years. He consistently struggles with his identity and Native American roots, attempting to understand the violence, social injustice, racism, and abuse that he sees around himself. He is bullied attending school on the reservation, and eventually leaves to attend a white high school. He struggles both with being perceived as too Indian and not Indian enough, a theme that continues into his adult life.

Alexie recounts a complicated relationship with his mother, incredibly strained at times. He recognizes her as being the more dependable of his two parents and yet also describes her as hypocritical, inconsistent, cold, unpredictable, and at times, cruel. She was revered and widely respected by her tribe but could deal out a heavy hand of justice if necessary. He makes it clear that she was far from perfect. Still, the love that Alexie has for his mother is great, and all too obvious here. Alexie’s grief at her loss is palpable, his respect for her very evident. He references his mother as a salmon repeatedly, explaining that the salmon is a divine and sacred creature for his tribe, “our primary source of physical and spiritual sustenance for thousands of years.” He comes to terms with his mother as an unassailable part of his identity, and begins to understand and accept her in all of her complexity.

Alexie’s writing is witty, funny, heartbreaking, and unflinchingly candid. You feel each emotion, described in different ways: the rage, the sorrow, the hopelessness, and the reverence. There is a lot of repetition, in themes, words, and even whole conversations, but each repetition is purposeful and meaningful, at times resounding like the beating of a drum. “Great pain is repetitive,” Alexie writes, “Grief is repetitive. And, maybe, this repetition can become a chant inside a healing ceremony.” So, Alexie repeats the words and sentences as a form of grieving, and healing. “…I am always compelled to return, return, return to my place of birth, to my reservation, to my unfinished childhood home, and ultimately to my mother, my ultimate salmon. I return to her, my mother, who, in these pages, dies and dies and dies and is continually reborn.”

Alexie's story is often heartrending, but he never lapses into self-pity or misery. He tempers his grief with lightness instead, often using humor and wit, and he goes on with his life. In one section of his book, he describes discovering that he had a brain tumor in 2007, his eventual surgery to remove it in 2015, and his subsequent recovery. “I was in great pain,” Alexie writes about that recovery time period, “but I took the time to write down these very words. This is who I am. This is who I have always been. I am in pain. I am always in pain. But I always find my way to the story. And I always find my way home.”

I always mean to read more of this author, and I check his work out a few times a year, but then I never actually read it. This is a beautiful, difficult, irreverent read. There are lots of things to think about, which I won't go into, but which make this an appropriate choice for a book group.

You Don't Have to Say You Love Me, by Sherman Alexie

Fans of Sherman Alexie's short stories (The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven) and his novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian will gravitate to his new memoir, You Don't Have to Say You Love Me, an intimate and often painful glimpse at the relationship between the author and his mother when he was a child growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation. Like so much of his work, You Don't Have to Say You Love Me is a hybrid creation, including poetry alongside prose; the humor for which Alexie is known gets to the heart of the pain and grief experienced by the author and those he loves.

This book absolutely blew me away. I'd give it 10 stars if Goodreads would let me! I laughed and I cried and I read this book in a day. Poetry and essays combined into one of the most heartfelt memoirs (and accounts of the travesties committed against American Indian tribes) I have ever read. If you don't know who Sherman Alexie is, you need to know him - look him up and read this book. If you already know his work, this will cement your appreciation for him. His life story is heartbreaking and his grief over the loss of his mother can almost be physically felt through reading. Absolutely, positively required reading for every adult.

School librarian note: If you teach Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and Thunder Boy Jr, you can now reference this memoir for your students and describe how much of the novel/picture book is autobiographical. This memoir is NOT appropriate to use in the classroom, however.

I'm so picky when it comes to memoirs, but this one is truly something special. Sherman Alexie blends poetry and prose with a healthy dose of humor and gut-wrenching honesty. I loved how this book basically took everything great from his other work, put it in a blender, and added a wallop of naked honesty. The result is beautiful, heartbreaking, and breathtaking. (And at times, very, very funny.)

Whether or not you've ever read Sherman Alexie, whether or not you enjoy memoirs, this book is so completely worth reading. It's one of my favorites of the year so far. It's just so, so good.