lindawisniewski

So here's a memoir focused on a man's relationship with his mentally ill mother. You'd think it would be sad, depressing, frustrating. Not so. It's all about survival and resilience. True, some things don't get better: the author's hometown of Gloversville, NY, went downhill after the glove factories closed, much like my neighboring hometown of Amsterdam, NY, when the carpet mills moved out. Russo writes about the pollution and the disregard for workers' health, and the common identity and pride of place, lost when manufacturing left so many American towns in the mid-twentieth century. In that context, he gives us the story of his mother, Jean Russo, trying over and over again to reinvent her life. After her husband left, she was unable to break free of her parents and "live independently." It was a life's dream she was unable to realize without the constant help of the author.

When I wrote Off Kilter, my own memoir about growing up in Amsterdam with an unhappy mother, I tried to show her tenacity and resilience, too, and can only hope I did it half as well as Russo.

"What nourishes us in this life might be the very thing that steals that life away from us," he writes near the end, noting that his "paralyzing anxiety at the thought of returning home" is his mother's legacy. Gloversville is described so well in this memoir(and in his novels, by other names) it's hard to believe he wasn't there just the other day, and maybe that's because the place where we grew up remains a part of us always.

Written with a novelist's sensitivity to the story hidden in every life, "Elsewhere" is a beautiful testament to love, survival and putting one foot in front of the other, just to see what happens next. Russo's message: even if we can't, in his mother's words, make "it all work out," we keep trying. That's what it all comes down to, for all of us.