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Cargando... The Removers: A Memoir (edición 2014)por Andrew Meredith
Información de la obraThe Removers: A Memoir por Andrew Meredith
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Inscríbete en LibraryThing para averiguar si este libro te gustará. Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro. Loved knowing all the places he talked about. Really added to the book that I'd seen all the streets and neighborhoods and could really picture in my mind when he talked about it. ( ) Many years ago, my husband had a part-time job as a Remover. He had lots of interesting stories to tell so I was hoping for 'The Removers' to carry on where my husband left off. It didn't. There were some references to the author's jobs as a remover and in the cremation business which he worked off and on for about 20 years. But this is a dark (at times) memoir about his dysfunctional family living in Philadelphia and what happened when the author was age 14 to cause the family problems. Mr. Meredith had great difficulty in most aspects of his life: his relationship with his parents and women, his difficulties in college (failing and quitting), and in holding a job. This is a debut book for this author. I couldn't help but feel sorry for him and his family's situation and was glad there was some happiness for most of them at the end. I've criticized a lot of memoirs for not transforming angst into art. These memoirs turn out to be whiny and narcissistic, making me want to say, meanly, "Sucks to be you." Meredith lived with parents who didn't speak to each other for years because of a mysterious transgression by the father (which, thank god, we finally discover what it was at the end of the book). As a result he had some bad years, and ended up removing dead bodies with his father of all apt professions. But by the end he's transformed the pain, with beautiful writing that characterizes most of the book: "The thing I discovered in my late approach to growing up is the peace in realizing there is nothing special in the traumas that form us. . . . We cherish the particulars of our past, these events that cause our pain, but the liberation comes when we start to see how every living person has gone through something that has changed him or her . . ." This is the transformation I've been struggling to define. sin reseñas | añadir una reseña
"A dark, poignant, and emotionally brave coming-of-age memoir: the story of a young man who, by handling the dead, makes peace with the living. For almost twenty years I mistook my father's downfall as my own. But it wasn't. It was not my sister's either, nor my mother's. A literature professor at La Salle University, Andrew Meredith's father was fired after unspecified allegations of sexual misconduct. It's a transgression Andrew cannot forgive, for it brought about long-lasting familial despair. In the wake of the scandal, Andrew's parents limp along, trapped in an unhappy marriage. Meanwhile, Andrew treads water, stuck in a kind of suspended adolescence--falling in and out of school, moving blindly from one half-hearted relationship to the next, slowly killing the nights drinking beer and listening to music with his childhood friends. Broke, Andrew moves back home to his childhood neighborhood in northeast Philadelphia and takes a job alongside his father as a 'remover,' the name for those unseen, unsung workers who take away the bodies of those who die at home. He describes, as only a professional can do, the intimate, horrific, poignant, and occasionally morbidly comedic aspects of handling the dead. Just how do you carry a 500-pound corpse down winding stairs? What actually happens to pacemakers, tooth fillings, surgical screws, artificial hips, and anything else that the deceased has within his or her body? Andrew begins to see his father not through the lens of a wronged and resentful child, but as a sympathetic, imperfect man who loves his family despite his flaws. Eventually the chip on his shoulder starts to lose its weight. Poetic without being florid, and with the literary ability to transform the naturally grotesque into the exquisite, The Removers is a searing story of a young man who finds in death a redemptive path toward the forgiveness of the living, including himself"-- No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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