The Afterlife: A Memoir 
Product Description: A New York Times Book Review Editors Choice In the winter of 2000, shortly after his mother s death, Donald Antrim began writing about his family. In pieces that appeared in The New Yorker and were anthologized in Best American Essays, Antrim explored his intense and complicated relationships with his mother, Louanne, an artist, teacher, and ferociously destabilizing alcoholic, his gentle grandfather, who lived in the mountains of North Carolina and who always hoped to save his daughter from herself, and his father, who married his mother twice.
The Afterlife is an elliptical, sometimes tender, sometimes blackly hilarious portrait of a family--faulty, cracked, enraging--and of a man struggling to learn the nature of his origins.
Customer Ratings: - Filled with raw emotion. I thought, at first, that The Afterlife would be one of those memoirs of a dysfunctional childhood that, while dark and deeply disturbing, also provided humorous moments...ala Running With Scissors. (I think, for some reason, that this impression came from the cover photo of the author s mother...smiling and looking down at the title of the book. But wait, isn t there some adage about a book and its cover...?)
The Afterlife dances right up to the humor line but never crosses. This section about his quest for a bed comes the closest:
I saw the crated bed by the door. I saw the sunlight coming through the windows. I saw myself standing there seeing these things. I was a man whose need for love and sympathy had led him to telephone a Swedish executive in the middle of the morning. Perhaps, at some point, the story of my mother and the bed becomes the story of my mother and father, the story that remains to be told, the story, you could say, of the queen versus the king.
The bed went away. I let it go. R was right. I could get another bed later. I stood in my empty room. In place of the bed was - shame? In place of the bed was a question - a question that is at once too simple and too complicated to answer.
But in every memory, there is too much genuine pain, confusion and love behind the author s words to find these stories funny. The raw emotion, the way Antrim is still questioning every emotion or thought he has/had about his mother, comes through every line, almost every word. His life is still tied up in hers, and in the end of her life. He is still unable to clearly define their relationship. Were they mother and son, or was theirs a more Oedipal relationship, or were they similar artistic souls...or? He is very critical of her at times, being too embarrassed of her to go out in public together, and then will flip to the fiercest kind of protective love.
And when in the deep of the night my mother came into my room swaying, half conscious and with grey smoke from her cigarette wreathing her face, shattered by bourbon and white wine, and when she raised her hand to strike, and I easily batted her arm back, then stepped forward and quickly steadied her before she tipped...
and also, You may learn, too, as a defense against the absurd disappointments caused by fragile and unhappy parents, the crude art of sarcasm.
and later, I found myself repeatedly subjecting K. to antagonistic appraisals of my mother s cultivation of fantasy. When K. went along with my negative assessments, I turned the tables on her and rushed to my mother s defense.
One of my favorite aspects of the book was Antrim s acknowledgement of the vagaries of time and memory. So many things from our past seem so clear and indisputable...and yet when described to other people, those certainties start to break apart like a fragile web. He is constantly starting into a description of an event...and then second guessing himself...which for me, makes the memory all the more real. The past, tempered by time and by who we are in the present.
I liked, or certainly appreciated this book, but felt at times that it was too raw, too personal for me to be reading. Antrim s thoughts seem so real, so genuine...that I almost felt like I was trespassing in his mind. Any memory involving his mother invoked my pity, and empathy.
The book does, though, give glimpses of other relationships, ones that are easier to read, ones that have the gentle patina of time...not colored by pain.
Nonetheless I was attracted by my grandfather s patience, by the care he took with this broken house. It wasn t that I suddenly understood the value in a job well done. Far from it. It was that for a moment - a romantic moment destined to resonate and grow in magnitude over the years - I hoped (and this may have been a fantasy that I wanted to have about the man) that my grandfather had something to pass on to me, to teach me.
At the end of the book, it is even clearer than at the beginning, that the author has not resolved his feeling towards his mother in the writing of this book. Far from it - the wellspring of emotion seems even stronger. I hope, for his sake, that further reflection or writing, helps.
Near her life s close, I lost the fortitude, the ability, the heart to be with my mother. For a time, I referred to her, in thought and in conversation with others, not as my mother but as Louanne....In thinking of her as Louanne, I pretended to an objectivity of perspective that I did not, nor will ever, possess, and, in doing so, I pretended to myself that the coming loss of her would not hurt, and in the absence of suffering I would go forward, a free man.
Going back to old adages...one can only hope that the one about Time and old wounds proves true.
- (3.5) At last I m free of that woman..
In this troubled rendering of a tragic past, Antrim struggles to find peace with a life defined by the chaos of alcoholism. His early memories tainted with the unspoken, the author gradually reveals the true nature of his early family life, an alcoholic mother, a father diminished by his spouse s excesses, finally driven to divorce. In true dysfunctional fashion, the divorce is temporary, unable to resist the siren call of their unhealthy relationship, the parents remarry, only to separate again when their untended troubles resurface. For a time, the father visit his family on weekends, but even those deteriorate with Louanne s advancing disease. Antrim s role is family scapegoat, his younger sister the rescuer. Painfully recounting the brief alliances with family members over the ensuing years, at heart Don remains the object of his mother s affection and disdain, pulled into the role of man of the house, but derided for his failures in her drunken rages.
As an artist and writer, the creative Mrs. Antrim exists in a world of her own making, her children dragged through years of false hubris, delusions and paranoia, her health gradually declining. A sickly child, son bonds to mother in mutual illness, boundaries ignored in an advancing codependency that virtually cripples a young man searching for identity. This book is a valiant effort to make peace with the disease that tore apart the Antrim family and poisoned any chances at meaningful relationships. All the hallmarks of the disease are present in the author s recollections, the drunken rants, family fights, ritualized holidays designed to obscure the true extent of family disharmony. Perceptive and intuitive, the hyper-responsible son attempts to care for his failing mother, even after her sobriety and gradual decline after the onset of cancer.
No matter her son s thoughtful recollections, it is impossible to apply logic and empathy to this disease, Louanne Antrim remains a monster, unable, even in sobriety, to heal the breech between herself and her children or to make amends for the past without a willingness to admit the truth. To the end, she remains a grasping child and no amount of rationalization can alter that stark reality. It is only in the final pages that the author lays bare the continued chaos, the family fights, the violence, the constant moving from place to place, the desire to please a parent, to glue back together the fragile pieces of a broken life. In a painful revelation, Antrim admits, My mother lived her life inviting death. Finally freed from the greedy tentacles of his mother s fatal disease, Antrim attempts peace with a harrowing past, exploring the damage of a wasted life. Fortunately, in the telling begins recovery. Luan Gaines/2007.
- self absorbed and over-rated. Honestly, I should have been able to identify with this author. Both parents from Appalachia, with alcholism on both sides of my extended family. I spent some time in Miami as a youngster. And I grew up to be a professor! I thought that I should be able to identify with this character! But alas, that was not the case! Donald Antrim has got the be the most self absorbed person on the face of this earth. This story was painful to get through, not because of the depressing subject matter, but because of the monotony of the pathetic way in which he continued to NOT deal with it. Honestly, we all have our lot in life to deal with. He has obviously decided to continue to follow in the footsteps of those who raised him and NOT face up to the possibilities that life might hold for him. It is a shame. I find his writing mediocre at best. That he has been endowed with numerous awards for writing is beyond me. If this is representative of his best, it just leaves me thinking that surely there are more deserving writers out there.
- Very Good, when he stayed on the subject.. Albeit a sad story of a young man dealing with his alcoholic mother, the book is both interesting and well written . . . when Antrim sticks to the subject. Maybe I missed something, but who cares about his obsessive/compulsive bed buying disorder? I read it over a two day break at the beach.
- Poweful. I bought this book, never having read anything by Antrim before, in an effort to understand my son s perspective on our relationship. I found it searing and exceptionally well written. The first few chapters seem so odd and quirky to me but even when it gets into more conventional memoir stuff it is completely without self pity or rancour.
As a recovering alcoholic, his description of his mother s descent into the pit of the disease was better than a meeting.
Very intelligent.
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The Afterlife: A Memoir (ID: 0312426356)
