May 2, 2016
Leve, a journalist, author, and daughter of a poet whom she leaves unnamed, suffered an abusive mother-daughter relationship that reached well into adulthood. In this searing portrait, Leve vividly renders the trauma she endured and her struggle to free herself from her mother. To her friends, who included Andy Warhol and Saul Bellow, Leve’s mother is vivacious and alluring, regularly throwing dinner parties at her Manhattan penthouse. But as a single mother (Leve’s father left the family and moved to Bali), when she commands her child’s time and attention, her demands are absolute, her needs bottomless, and her rages unpredictable and seismic. “Throughout my childhood I was threatened with her lava consuming me,” Leve writes. When her mother is busy writing, she wants Leve silent (disruptive kid games aren’t allowed), and hands her off to a nanny, family friends, or near-strangers. Leve never directly addresses what’s behind her mother’s behavior beyond mentioning medication. Her mother is, Leve notes, the person who supported her talents and helped shape her into a writer. It’s not until Leve, after much therapy, decides in her 40s to move to Bali and limits her mother to contact over email that she experiences a release. Aided by a new relationship, she learns to trust. Leve’s powerful story of surviving her brutal childhood demonstrates that contentment can be found. Agent: Rob Weisbach, Rob Weisbach Creative.
April 15, 2016
A daughter's raw memoir exposes her "spiteful, vindictive, uncontrollable mother."Journalist Leve (It Could Be Worse, You Could Be Me, 2010, etc.), a former columnist for the London Sunday Times Magazine and contributor to other journals, grew up in a Manhattan penthouse with her mother, a poet whose narcissism, unpredictable mood swings, and physical abuse the author recounts in repetitive detail. At times "slapped, punched, kicked, pinched, and attacked," subjected to hysterical tirades alternating with suffocating demonstrations of love, Leve felt abandoned, betrayed, and continually threatened, as if she were stranded "in the pit of a crevasse, with a rope to safety just inches away and out of reach." Some measure of safety came during visits to her adored father, who lived in Thailand and whom Leve portrays as flawless; from her father's former girlfriend, whose nurturing attention brought a bit of stability to Leve's life in New York; and from a succession of caretakers, many of whom fled from her mother's employ. One woman quit or was fired multiple times over the course of 12 years. By her mid-40s, Leve still felt indelibly wounded and oppressed by the past. "You understand these things and you're in control of your life," her father remarks. "Why can't you beat those demons and destroy them?" Overcoming the demons, however, proved complicated: Leve learned that childhood stress and abuse caused "pathological changes to brain chemistry," making her "hypervigilant" and "highly reactive to perceived threats." Desperate for help, she decided to undergo eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy, designed to treat PTSD. Two years later, she was living with her Italian lover and his daughters in Bali, finally feeling central to a family. Though still beset by memories, she was also buoyed by "endorphins of hope" that she finally would be able to "outrace the past." A candid rendering of pain and survival.
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June 1, 2016
Journalist Leve (It Could Be Worse, You Could Be Me, 2010 ) leaps into the bad mother genre with a vengeance, chronicling her materially privileged yet miserably abusive 1970s childhood in a forensically crafted mosaic of jagged shards. Her beautiful if wildly unkempt writer and feminist-activist mother was so irresponsible and narcissistic, Leve's father fled halfway around the world, dividing young Leve's life between brief, bright summers in Bangkok, and dark and grueling seasons in New York City, where she was desperately dependent on nannies for care and domestic coherence, while her mother filled their penthouse with celebrities and indulged in appallingly inappropriate behavior. Leve alternates her furious recollections of her mother's pathological hunger for attention and epic parental negligence with carefully researched facts about the neurological damage traumas like hers can cause and descriptions of the serenity and love she finally found on Bali. Ironically, thanks to Leve's acid and incisive eloquence, it is her rampaging mother (whose identity she conceals, but which determined readers can figure out) who generates this candidly intimate, hopefully cathartic expose's magnetizing power.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)