Misgivings: My Mother, My Father, Myself Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

Misgivings: My Mother, My Father, Myself Book

Meditating on his parents' marriage as well as his own thorny relationship with them, poet C.K. Williams forsakes the conventional memoir format in favor of a succession of lyrical short takes, some hardly more than a page long, that accrue to form an impressionistic portrait of two often unhappy people. Williams's father was a businessman whose work was "the defining essence of his life," a man who was often cruel to his family and made it a policy never to apologize. His mother, self-centered and pleasure-loving, remained haunted by childhood losses (including the sudden deaths of her father and two sisters) and by the poverty she suffered in the early years of her marriage. It's the kind of family in which a wife can say to her husband, "You used to be such a nice man," a father to his son, "You're a bastard, just like your mother." Yet Williams's spare, elegantly written elegy also contains tributes to his father's financial generosity (however controlling) and to his mother's stoicism as she lay dying from lung cancer. In the end, it's less the particulars of their failures that matter than the author's ability to transform painful feelings into transforming ones: "peace for rage, affection for frustration, devotion and compassion for misunderstanding." --Wendy Smith Read More

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  • Product Description

    An Intense, Refractory Memoir By A Major Poet.

    Misgivings is C. K. Williams's searing recollection of his family's extreme dynamics and of his parents' deaths after years of struggle, bitterness, and inner conflict. Like Kafka's self-revealing Letter to His Father, Misgivings is full of doubt, both philosophical and personal, but as a work of art it is sure and true. Williams's father was an "ordinary businessman"--angry, demanding, addicted to the tension he created with the people he loved; a man who could read the Greek myths aloud to his son yet vowed never to apologize to anybody. His mother was a housewife, a woman with a great capacity for pleasure, who was stoical about the family's dire early poverty yet remained affected by it even when they became well-off. Together, these two formed what Williams calls the "conspiracy that made me who I am." His account of their life together and their deaths--his father's with suicidal despair, and his mother's with calm resignation--is a literary form of the reconciliation the family achieved at the end of his parents' lives. And as literary form it is novel, a series of brilliant short takes, a double helix of experience and recollection. Few contemporary writers have understood their origins so acutely, or so eloquently.

  • 0374199841
  • 9780374199845
  • C.K. Williams
  • 30 April 2000
  • Farrar, Straus & Giroux Inc
  • Hardcover (Book)
  • 170
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