With its relatively short length, it’s a nice diversion for readers more interested in word choice and description over a beginning, middle, and end. Click on the link to read my complete review.

Hard to read but beautifully written. The author paints an extraordinary picture.

Recognizing the need for change takes courage. Change takes courage. Writing that story down and sharing it with the world takes courage. That courage is what Andrea Jarrell's memoir I'm the One Who Got Away is all about. What stands out about this book is that the story and hence the author is relatable. The book feels like a quiet conversation with a friend. What stands out the most is the character of Ms. Jarrell's mother. Her perspective is a story I want to know more about.

Read my complete review at http://www.memoriesfrombooks.com/2017/12/im-one-who-got-away-memoir.html

Reviewed for NetGalley

My thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the opportunity to read this book.

I'm the One Who Got Away is a collection of short, sharp essays, each one packing an emotional punch. Jarrell writes with a memoirist's unflinching eye and a poet's sense of language. Highly recommended.

I sat down to read this in bed the other night - and played the game that I’m sure many of you have also played while reading a book: “just 30 more minutes.” I did that until I discovered that I had finished reading the whole book in just one sitting. This is not a frequent occurrence for me because my mind tends to wander a bit and I normally read so many books at one time that I can switch to a different book when that happens. This time I felt no need to wander or switch books as I wanted to keep learning more about Andrea’s life in this beautiful memoir.
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Another thing about me? I don’t normally like reading memoirs - or nonfiction at all. I think that I will need to reassess my thoughts on this between Love Warrior and this book since I have found myself hooked. I’m The One Who Got Away resonated with me a lot since I also had an abusive father growing up, but unlike Andrea, we were never on the run. I loved how the telling of her story (and thus also parts of her mom’s story) led her to see her mom as more of a person and not just as “her mom.” I think that transition is very hard for us to make as we grow up and I felt like the journey was beautiful. Since this is a story about a person’s life there was no huge event or climax, more of a trip to walk in her shoes for a bit. I enjoyed it quite a bit and I think most readers would.

Very well written and the author had such skill in expressing the different emotions and feelings of what the characters experienced that it was like I was there. Couldn't put the book down till the very end!

I’m sitting down with a new friend, and she starts the conversation with this line (which happens to be the first sentence of this memoir):

“Susannah was murdered just before Christmas but I didn’t find out until after New Year’s.”

My attention is officially grabbed. What? Tell me more!! How well did you know her? Were you best buds? Did you argue, share a boyfriend, have regular dates to go bowling or bungee jumping? Was she nice or was she a bitch? Did she tell you secrets, but maybe not the important ones? Did they solve the murder? Did you have critical information for the police? I’m all ears, expecting something juicy.

So the new friend talks about Susannah, oh, for say, 10 minutes. Says that Susannah’s boyfriend killed her.

Suddenly, I’m hearing my new friend’s whole friggin’ life story. Vanilla, no cinnamon. Nothing special about her life. I hear about her growing up, settling down. Whoop-de-doo.

I’m very sorry, but Susannah’s story is the interesting one. I don’t appreciate that my friend was just using it as a launching pad so she could take off on the story of her own boring life. I’m trapped! Help! I am the victim of a bait and switch!

What that tease of a first line really means to me is that the author’s writing professors—or maybe it was her editors—advised that she hook the reader with a tantalizing opener. That’s Writing 101. Well, yeah, she did that—she hooked me. But it’s not okay to make me think I’m getting something that I’m not.

The author tried to make a transition, explaining in a few sentences how this acquaintance of hers, Susannah, reminded her of her relationship with her mother. But it didn’t work for me. The connection seemed forced.

Even the book title is misleading. The title, combined with that great opening sentence, made me think I was going to hear about how maybe the author was the intended victim of the murderer, how maybe she was the “one who got away.” Now THAT would have been a good story . . .

This life story of a regular person wasn’t exceptional. She loved her adventurous mom, yes. Her father was a mean drunk and a minor movie star. She had a boyfriend who was a jerk. She married a nice guy.

Besides the bait and switch, there’s another item for the Complaint Board: Quotes. In the first half of the book, the author quotes conversations she had when she was very young. Wait just a minute. There is no way she could have remembered exactly what she said when she was little. No way. It’s even worse when she talks about events in her parents’ life. For example, she describes one long scene that happened when her dad was 22. Lots of minute detail—she even mentioned what her dad was wearing! But worse, there is a lot of dialogue between her dad, mom, and another man at a hotel shindig. Are you serious? How could she describe a scene that happened before she was born?! I’m assuming her mom told the stories to her, but there could not have been so much detail. Most of the time I forgot it was someone’s real-life story. It felt like fiction.

On the plus side—and this is a gigantic plus—I will say that the author is a very good writer. I couldn’t stop reading, even though nothing special happened. I liked the way the author told her story and I wanted to listen. She made mundane things seem sort of fascinating, and for that she gets big points.

I’m getting pickier and pickier about memoirs. I tend to like memoirs by famous people, but they must be well-written. If it’s by an unknown person, it must be well-written, of course, but it also has to be about some life-changing event or be super funny.

This is neither. It’s just a meh. Very readable, but ultimately forgettable.

Thanks to NetGalley for the advance copy.

I loved this book. I related to it in a lot of ways. While my father wasn't an abusive man, he was an addict who wasn't around during my childhood and still not a lot even now though I'm in my 30's and have learned to just accept who he is. The abuse came from a later marriage. Unlike Andrea's mother who kept her personal life away from her daughter by never openly dating (unless she was back on again with Andrea's father), my mom wanted to find a father figure for myself and two brothers. The fact that Andrea's mother kept returning to Nick (the abusive, alcoholic father) didn't really surprise me. My own mom stayed in the abusive marriage with that husband for over 13 years only finally breaking free a few years ago. But like Andrea's mother, she still responds to him when he gets in contact...not really willing to accept that she can finally be whatever she wants to be without him.

As far as Andrea's relationship with Nick...well...there wasn't one when she was a child. He didn't come back into her life until her teenage years. Where he was charming but bordering on inappropriate. Never seeming to want to let go of his glory days when he was almost a celebrity. My father never really grew up either. He still acts like a teenager and is more "pal" to my brothers and I than "dad".

I wonder if things would have been different for her if she wasn't an only child. I had my older and younger brother looking out for me my whole life. They may both have their own issues and we may still fight from time to time, but when it comes to the three of us, nothing could ever come between us. But perhaps because it was just the two of them, that's why they always had a pretty good relationship. "Just us two" her mother always said to her. My relationship with my mom was always strained. I'm 34 now with a daughter of my own who has just turned 15. I think about how lucky my husband and I are that she is so well behaved and smart and funny and just awesome. But sometimes the teenager in her comes out and I remember how much my mom and I used to butt heads. But over time, old wounds and hurts have faded and we are slowly building our relationship back up.

I also found her marriage to Brad relatable. They went through a lot and came through stronger. Their love and desire growing instead of fading as the years then decades went by. My husband and I will be celebrating our 15 year wedding anniversary in May and our marriage has definitely been tested. But we continue to make it through stronger and more united.

Something I couldn't relate to though was the constant traveling. Oh how I wish that could have been us, but we were more the typical divorced family of 4 with only one parent to support us the best she could. Of course, it was the 80's and 90's for us. 60's and 70's for Andrea and her mother. And I imagine there is a HUGE price difference in raising one child alone instead of three.

I would definitely recommend this to someone.

“The first time I saw him on television, I was seven. My mother and I were living in a little apartment near UCLA. During a commercial on Marcus Welby, M.D., she whispered, “It’s Nick.”

A woman is murdered, someone on the periphery of Andrea Jarrell’s life, a woman she kept at a distance because maybe she reminded her too much of her own upbringing with a single mother. A woman ‘other than‘ the mothers she prefers to surround herself with, the ones who know the right way to raise children, who have marriages intact and a natural ease in their mothering. The safe, stable, good solid families not those who are unkempt or harried. With this tragedy and the shocking reality of the abuses she must have suffered, Jarrell’s mind returns to her childhood, raised by a single mother with a dangerously abusive father always lurking in the background of her memory.

Andrea was too young to know how her mother escaped her cruel abusive father, left to rely solely on her mother’s stories from that time. Certainly he is a beautiful man, an actor of some success, friends to celebrities like Frank Sinatra. Her mother couldn’t raise her daughter in a home where the father saw threats to his masculinity, accusing her mother of desiring other men. Abusive, controlling and yet drowning with a seductive magnetism her mother, and most everyone in his path, find irresistible. The years collect, and it’s just the two of them. There are rough times, yet good ones too as Andrea’s mother always planned trips to distant places, like Europe. Each are growing experiences, with men somehow always a threatening presence that no one senses more than women on their own.

Her mother dates, but never seems to keep a long term relationship nor allow her dating to get in the way as sometimes happens with single parents. Andrea’s mother was a hard working woman that wasn’t going to fall apart, nor wait for a man to save them. Just as Andrea is coming into her teen years her father finds his way back to them, luring Andrea into a relationship. She struggles with the confusion of longing for his affection and resenting him. Against her better judgement, knowing he truly doesn’t deserve to be the proud father, she tries to form a bond. Her memories are both her own and versions of her mothers, there are things she begins to love about her father and others she cannot stomach. Falling for her dad is much like a new ‘romance’, the highs and lows, hungry for the fatherly affection she was long denied.

Perplexed by the sudden appearance of her father, and the freedom her mother allows her in finally letting the ‘big bad man’ back into their lives, after doing everything in her power to flee him, it isn’t long before she realizes her mother has an ulterior motive, they both do. Just how much will the story have to change to allow Nick, her father, back into their lives? Can her mother really erase the past, could her father have changed?

While a murder sets off memories of her childhood and the tempest that is her mother and father’s love story, it really isn’t center stage to this memoir. This is a story about a girl who spent the formative years with a single mother, free of the abuses of a controlling husband/father only to have him upend their lives once again. It’s the confusion of how it bled into every decision she made in life, of why she kept certain people at a distance and as an adult does her best to blend in with the ‘normal’ families. It’s returning to the beast you know, against your better judgement, it’s resenting the decisions your parents make, and dreading making the same mistakes as your mother.

There is confusion in how someone who ran so far can just seem to give up and change the past to accommodate returning to your first mistake. I just keep thinking ‘better the devil you know’ maybe that should be the name of a condition. Andrea will finally come to know the real abuser her mother fled, and question whether father truly does know best!

Available today September 5, 2017

She Writes Press

Very interesting memoir. The author's childhood and life is very interesting I really enjoyed how she wrote it. It was one of those memoir's that once you pick it up you can't put it down. I highly recommend it.

"I'm The One Who Got Away" is a deeply meaningful memoir by journalist and columnist Andrea Jerrell, who recalled her coming-of-age story: raised by a dedicated adventurous single mother, that treated her to vacations in Europe after a brief marriage to her abusive alcoholic father. Jarrell explored her parents marriage and how it influenced her life choices, and the relief she felt as she matured and was able to distance herself from abusive relationships, and maintain a stable loving marriage and family life.

While returning home with her husband/children from a Christmas break, Jerrell received a shocking call related to the murder of her neighbor, Susannah. Susannah was murdered as she was attempting to leave an abusive relationship. Jerrell doesn't detail a grizzly account of the murder. Instead, she examined her own troubling family history, and her instinctive reaction as to why she kept Susannah at a superficial distance. Susannah had once attended her son's birthday party, their sons were in the same class at school.
In addition, Jerrell recalled her extraordinary relationship with her mother, mindful of her self-sacrifice in raising her, and indirectly provides a thought provoking alternative to raising children safely in the age of divorce and family breakdown. While this is not a self-help book, there is a suggested reading list provided.
Jerrell completed her MFA in creative writing at Bennington College, her writing has been featured in several notable publications including the NYT, and The Washington Post, she lives in Washington D.C.
*Special thanks and appreciation to She Writes Press via NetGalley for the direct e-copy for the purpose of review.

I enjoyed this book, because I could really resonate with a lot of her thoughts, since I grew up with a single mother as well. I could really understand some of her experiences and thought processes and felt for her and for me.

I do wish that we would have returned to the shocking murder at the beginning of the book, and I also wish we would have hear more about her life during the past 15 or so years. Those years were barely mentioned at the end and I would have liked a little more detail and a little more resolution at the end, it stopped quite abruptly to me. I also know a lot of the book was first published as short stories in various publications, and some of the transitions felt a bit choppy to me.

I requested this book because it sounded like a magnificent true crime story or at the very least, a book about a woman discovering hidden facets about her mother.

It was neither.

Jarrell starts the book off with the murder of her neighbor, a woman Jarrell admits to actively shunning because she was young, pretty, and a single mother. The woman is killed by another neighbor after a domestic dispute and besides Jarrell talking about how she cried about it, we never hear about the woman or her murder again.

She then launches into her own story. I was expecting something… more. The summary reads as if her life was extraordinary but, honestly, this book could be about anyone who grew up in a single parent household. Jarrell’s mother leaves her father, who is a charming, alarmingly possessive and abusive alcoholic actor. Besides a few attempts to sweet talk her mom back, he disappears from their lives for 16 years. In that time, Jarrell’s mother goes to school, becomes a paralegal, and the two go on vacations across Europe several times. When she’s older, Jarrell’s father comes back in the picture and her mother and father reunite for a brief period of time before it ends once again.

Jarrell tells about a few shitty boyfriends and then about getting married and having children.

The only thing that makes this story “extraordinary” is how full of herself Jarrell is. Everything seems to revolve around her. When her husband admits that he has black outs when he gets drunk, she acts as if his drinking was some huge secret that he kept to himself but later admits that she knew he was drinking a lot. When he goes to AA, she acts like his sobriety should revolve around her and often refers to it as “our transformation”.

I was not impressed with this book. I usually enjoy memoirs but this one read like the diary of the middle aged white lady who lives across the street and thinks your lawn ornaments are offensive. Save yourself some time and skip this one.

When I saw the summary of this book I assumed that this book would focus solely on the author's mother. Almost everyone has heard of "the battered wife syndrome," and I think in a way both the author and her mother have the same issues with the father.
I loved how raw and real the author was. She examined both herself and her mother, in regards to their faults and strengths, and especially with the father., "Nick." No matter what he does or how he fails them, both Andrea and her mother keep letting him back in. In a way he contributes to all the bad qualities they have; for example, Andrea's constant insecurities.
I thought this book flowed very well, and I enjoyed Andrea's honesty and her acceptance of both her and her mother's stories. I think without this she would have never been able to move on in her life. Thankfully she now has a full life and so does her mother; which they both deserve.
I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to read a great memoir about the true bonds of family; especially a mother and daughter.

Andrea Jarrell's memoir is thoughtful, entertaining, and an enjoyable afternoon's reading. Her insight and keen observations are a fascinating window into her life. A lot of her story is relatable, and I found myself nodding along in several places. I am glad I got to read I'm the One Who Got Away.

This was an excellent book. I read it rapidly. The author has such a familiar, comfortable narrative, I couldn't put it down. She never reveals her parents' true names, but they are unnecessary because Jarrell paints their characters where monikers aren't needed, It's a great story about living life with the trials and tribulations and figuring things out as you go, sometimes the realizations don't happen until decades later.

This book was hard to put down. As much as I wanted to turn away from some of the topics, Andrea Jarrell discussed them in a way that made me knew that she would get through it in the end. At times harrowing and at times joyful, this book is what a memoir should be: a celebration of a life well lived.