Who Could Ever Love You
A Family Memoir
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4.3 • 58 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Instant New York Times and USA Today nonfiction bestseller!
A New York Times Nonfiction Book to Read this Fall
A People Magazine Best Book of September
The Week Five Riveting Books to Take You Through September
Mary Trump grew up in a family divided by its patriarch’s relentless drive for money and power. The daughter of Freddy Trump, the highly accomplished, dashing eldest son of wealthy real estate developer Fred Trump, and Linda Clapp, a flight attendant from a working-class family, Mary lived in the shadow of Freddy’s humiliation at the hands of his father.
Fred Trump embodied the ethos of the zero-sum game and among his five children, there could only be one winner. That was supposed to be Freddy, his namesake, but Fred found him wanting—too sensitive, too kind, too interested in pursuits beyond the realm of the real estate empire he was meant to inherit. In Donald, Fred found a kindred spirit, a “killer,” who would stop at nothing to get his own way.
Even after Freddy’s short-lived career as a professional pilot for TWA came to an end, he never stopped trying to gain his father’s approval. Finally, at the age of forty-two, he succumbed to Fred’s lethal contempt and died alone in an emergency room, with no family by his side.
In WHO COULD EVER LOVE YOU, Mary Trump brings us inside the twisted family whose patriarch ignored, froze out, and eventually destroyed his own. Freddy Trump’s decline into alcoholism and illness, along with Linda’s suffering after their divorce, left Mary dangerously vulnerable as a very young girl.
Inadequately and only conditionally loved, there were no adults in her life except for the father she loved, but lost before she could know him; and a mother abandoned by her ex-husband’s rich and powerful family who demanded her loyalty but left her with nothing.
With searching insight, poignant detail, and unsparing prose, Mary Trump reveals the cold, selfish cruelty that has come to define the Trump family thanks in large part to her uncle, whose malignant ambition has riven our nation and threatens the world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The unraveling of a family prefigures the unraveling of a nation in this wounding account from clinical psychologist Trump. One year after publishing 2020's Too Much and Never Enough, an exposé of her uncle, Donald Trump, the author checked into treatment for "dissociation... and increasing social isolation." Sensing her condition was linked to childhood trauma, she revisited her early years, which were dominated by her grandfather, real estate developer Fred Trump. Much of the memoir outlines her self-interrogation: her parents, Freddy and Linda, spent "glittering evenings at Manhattan clubs," yet Freddy, who left the family business to become a pilot, encountered "stifling control and blanket disapproval" from his father, who called him "a goddamned chauffeur in the sky." After Freddy descended into alcoholism, he and Linda divorced, leaving a five-year-old Trump and her older brother, Frederick, with an angry and inattentive mother. Trump endured sexual abuse from a teenage neighbor, life-threatening asthma that Linda ignored, and her father's early death, only to have Donald and his siblings steal Freddy's portion of the inheritance from her grandfather. The material can be astonishingly bleak, but Trump's clear and concise prose shines, and she has a well-trained eye for the melancholy that runs through her family. It's an astute and occasionally explosive plunge into an American dynasty's heart of darkness.
Customer Reviews
Not impressed
I'm surprised NYT recommended this book as a September read. I found the writing to be almost juvenile and dripping with bathos. It needs some serious editing. Sometimes she adds trivial points to add “stuffing” and in other situations she makes a suggestion and never follows through on it, as when she suggested she was either transgender or lesbian and drops it. The author certainly had a dysfunctional family and I feel sympathy for her. But don’t we all know by now the sins of the fathers go on and on and on . . . . I don’t like the Don and fear his becoming president again—for some reason I thought this would be more about him.