Irma
The Education of a Mother's Son
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
A son’s lessons from his single mother—a twenty five year old widow who took control of her life, defied expectations and raised him into a manhood of his own—from the author of the acclaimed The Accidental Life.
As a child, Terry McDonell imagined epic stories about his father, a fighter pilot who died in World War II. But, as he discovers in this dazzling memoir, the real hero in his life was his mother, Irma, who moved with him to California hoping for a new life and raised him through difficult times.
Like most headstrong boys growing up in mid-century America, McDonell took his mother for granted, never giving her life much thought. He was bright, cocky, and determined to make his own way, separate from her and from his complicated roots. But as he matured, built a career, married, divorced, remarried, and raised his own sons, McDonell came to see that Irma had lived her life in a way that allowed him to discover what he wanted his own life to be. The person he was would be forever tied to Irma’s courage and wisdom and love. From his recollections—a series of colorful, deeply personal, sometimes funny, stunningly composed vignettes—an intriguing and poignant portrait emerges.
Irma is the story of a formidable woman who built the life she wanted as she raised her son to be the kind of man and father he had longed for but never knew.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Novelist and former Sports Illustrated editor McDonell (The Accidental Life) delivers an unfocused memoir of growing up in postwar California with his mother, Irma, and stepfather Norm. Norm was a chauvinist who beat Irma and salved his failures with racist, sexist bluster, on one occasion "rolling a toothpick in his mouth and winking to that a girl in his seventh-grade class was stacked." After Irma divorced Norm, she built an independent life as a teacher and conveyed to her son simple lessons—"it's better not to be like everyone else"; be "kind and fair and up for people"—that questioned patriarchal attitudes. The author moves on to his own romantic entanglements and relationships with his sons, crediting Irma with nurturing his love of liberated women and teaching him how to let his own children be themselves. McDonell's male feminism can be overwrought, as when he castigates himself just for looking at women, or registers "disgust" with Ernest Hemingway's literary machismo. His writing is itself often Hemingwayesque in its spare, blunt prose, but it also tends to get bogged down in hazy, directionless ruminations. The resulting meditation on what it means to be a decent man isn't wrong, but it lacks the profundity it's straining for.
