Welcome to the book show A Celebration of Reading and Writers.
I'm Joe Dono.
Richard Russo's memoir, Elsewhere, primarily concerns his mother.
There is another main character in the book, and that is the town of Gov.
New York.
It is a community that has appeared and reappeared under different names, Mohawk, Empire Falls,
in various Russo novels, the prototype of his decayed towns in upstate New York or Maine.
After eight works of fiction, including Empire Falls, Bridge of Size, and Nobody's Fool,
the Pulitzer Prize winner now turns to Memoir in a very funny, moving, and surprising
account of his life, his parents, and the upstate New York town they all struggled
variously to escape.
It's a great pleasure to welcome an old friend, Richard Russo back to the book show.
Thank you very much for being with us.
It's always a great pleasure.
Great to be with you again, Joe.
You know, one of the things I found fascinating about this book is it answered a lot of
questions for me because the two of us, you and I have done a few events together, and
at various times during the Q&A portions, people will ask about Gloversville, usually people
from Gloversville.
Yeah.
And you seem hesitant.
And I always wondered about that hesitancy, and this book answers a lot of those questions.
Yeah, it does, doesn't it?
And I've been very aware of the hesitancy.
I think I may have told you at some other time that I was at the New York State Riders Institute.
Oh gosh, almost a decade ago now.
And Don Faulkner, the writer who runs that institute with William Kennedy, asked me one day,
a very straightforward question at the end of an interview.
He said, just, why don't you live in upstate New York?
I mean, it's just such an obvious place for me to live, given all those upstate New York
towns that I write about.
Just, you know, what the hell are you doing living in Maine?
You know?
And it really brought me up short.
And I felt that same even then hesitancy to go into what seemed to answer the question
would seem, you know, to take a book.
And you know what?
It did.
It seems, and this comes toward the end of elsewhere, where you start to describe your
interest once again in this place, which ultimately ends up being another book that kind of brings
you down this path.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And this was a book that I warmed to in a way after I started writing it.
I actually interrupted the writing of a sequel to Nobody's Fool to write this book.
I didn't want to write it.
I got kind of, I not exactly talked into it, but the editor of Granta one day was driving
along the through way and saw the exit for Glover'sville and said, you know, Richard Russo
used to live there.
And he was planning this magazine special issue of Granta magazine about going home.
And so he contacted me and said, you want to write about Glover'sville and really call
it Glover'sville.
And I said, well, if I don't have to go there, if I can just stay home.
And so I started writing about it mostly because my mom had recently died.
She'd been much on my mind.
And I thought, God, this is going to be just so, so painful to do.
And at times it was, but at other times, once I started to warm to the task, I really felt,
I don't know.
I just felt a sense of almost euphoria of being able to finally talk about some things
that I had been as you said, very, very reticent about for a very long time and for probably
insufficient reason.
When you decided to look at the place, then it seems that you realize the connection
between, as you say, the connection between the place and your mother and quite frankly
her hatred for the place.
Yeah, which was, as I say in the book, it's perhaps the earliest opinion that I'm aware of
as a child was my mother's loathing of the place where we lived.
Her sense that in order for me to have a chance in life, I had to get out of there.
And for her to have the kind of life that she wanted, she envisioned getting out of Glover'sville
as a quest for freedom.
And she wanted out desperately.
She loved her parents, my grandparents.
She loved them more than she could express, but she was living in the same house with them.
And at times she felt like in order to be her own free woman, she had to get out of there.
She had to get out of her marriage to my father.
And for her, the town itself, Glover'sville seemed to her to represent in some way that
she could never quite articulate everything that was holding her back in life.
If she could somehow escape this town, then then and only then could she be happy.
And it was that opinion, this first opinion of my young life, you know, that I was so
well aware of almost pre-language, but certainly by the time I went off to kindergarten, by
the time I was five, I was I was very aware of her desperate longing to be elsewhere,
anywhere else.
So your mother divorces your father.
You move into a flat that is that is owned by her parents.
Her father is a glove maker in Glover'sville.
So it's sort of going against, she's fighting all of these things, but these are all the
forces in your life and her life.
Yes.
And because her feelings about this town, despite the fact that they were a wildly contradictory,
whenever she left Glover'sville, she tried so desperately to get out, but whenever she
left Glover'sville, she immediately saw it as home and as her safety net.
But that paradox, the central paradox of her life, I believe, her need to flee and also
to return endlessly on this loop, manifested itself for me in a very different way, because
I knew that in order to love my mother, I had to hate Glover'sville.
The problem was I didn't.
I couldn't hate it.
It was that would have been like hating my grandparents.
That would have been like hating my friends and my relatives who lived around the corner,
my cousin Greg, to whom this book is dedicated.
Growing up there, I just loved the town.
I loved our neighborhood.
I loved our lives.
I loved everything about our lives there.
And yet that was something I had to always conceal.
Because it was tantamount to some terrible disloyalty that as a 10-year-old I certainly
never could have articulated, but which I felt nonetheless.
During the time, and you write in the book, there is a point of your memory of thinking
of Glover'sville not as a depressed place, but as a place that was thriving.
You remember that point.
I sure do.
And remember it vividly.
Remember those walks that I used to take, what seemed like such an astonishingly long distance,
was probably about 400 yards from our home on Hellwick Street.
I remember walking on weekdays sometimes or weekends with my grandfather down to the
local dairy where we would pick up a quart of milk and some of those red-skinned peanuts
that he used to call peatles.
And then later in the week, my mother worked so hard, she worked Monday through Friday,
her eight or nine-hour shift and connected it at General Electric.
But then of course, she had the hour commute on each end, and by the time she got home,
there were still things for her to do.
But on weekends, we would head down to Down Main Street.
And I can remember just being lost in a sea of people and trusting my mother to get
us in this sea of people where we needed to go.
Crossing Main Street was clogged with cars.
And the next time I felt anything even akin to that would have been years later when I went
to New York City with my father coming out of Grand Central Station, being in a sea
of people and not knowing where you were going.
That sense of being at risk just because there were so many people there.
It's strange for me now, but that's kind of what Gloversville, you know, with its population
at the time, probably 22,000 people, Gloversville felt to me like a child, as a child, felt
to me like New York City, felt like being in the middle of Manhattan, unable to move
because there were just so many people there.
Richard Russo is our guest on the book show.
The name of the book is elsewhere, a memoir it is published by Kanoff.
So a real turning point in the story comes when you're ready to go to college.
You are admitted to the University of Arizona.
You buy a Ford Galaxy.
You get ready to make the trip.
And in what is a very funny section of the book is mom comes with you.
Yeah.
That doesn't happen to every kid who's going off to college does it.
No.
And you have to hook up the U-Haul with her stuff in it and head south.
At what point did you know she was going along for the ride?
Well, she kept the secret as long as she could.
Ultimately, she had to tell me.
You know.
But she kept the secret from me for just as long as she possibly could.
And part because she didn't want to tell her parents, I think, that she was flying the
coop.
They would have objected for all kinds of reasons.
They were not convinced that she was healthy enough to make the trip.
She suffered from what was pretty clear to them some sort of nervous syndrome.
They thought they would have argued strenuously against her making this trip.
And she told them what I thought was the truth at the time, which was that she had a job
waiting for her when we got to Arizona.
But of course, she didn't.
She was basing that little fib, white lie.
I think she would have called it.
And the fact that she had once had a kind of casual conversation with someone from the
Phoenix branch of General Electric that gosh, you know, if she was ever out that way,
she should drop by.
And so she decided that she would be out that way.
And she would drop by, which she did.
But no, she, as a matter of fact, in the writing of this book, that was one of the things
that was so interesting about it was when I started writing the book and telling the
story of that journey.
I began to realize that not only was her going kind of a surprise and a secret, so was
my going there.
I didn't, I didn't realize as a kid that the reason, you know, the reason that she was
leaving all those Arizona highways magazines around the room.
I didn't realize that when I was talking about going off to college, thinking about maybe
being an archaeologist that she was suggesting not only that archaeology was a wonderful field
for me to go into, but also that all the best places to go were in the Southwest.
And especially the University of Arizona.
So in a way, you know, for at least a couple of years, I had been lapping up these clues.
And certain things weren't making an awful lot of sense.
Like, you know, when I got my license, I only had my license a few months.
Before we embarked to Arizona.
But I hadn't had my license very long.
And when I announced that I wanted to buy a car, you know, for my last few months in
Gloversville so that at last, I'd be able to drive and have some fun with my friends and
all of that, I was stunned when she said, yes, absolutely, you should get a car.
Because of course, we would need one.
How else were we going to get to all the way to Tucson without one?
So it's funny the way I write my novels is to find out how it turns out.
Because there's so much that I don't know when I begin one.
And the writing of this memoir, which I expected would be very different because I was telling
my own story and I was telling my mother's story and all of it was going to be based on
stuff that I knew to be true.
But as I actually started writing the book, I discovered that so much of what I thought
was true the more I thought about it and the more clearly I looked at it turned out
not to be true at all.
And so there was this part of the reason that I enjoyed the writing so much once I got
going was this wonderful sense of discovery.
I was discovering, I was discovering my own story.
I was discovering my mother's story in a way that I hadn't looked at it before.
And also discovering Gloversville again after all of these years, after all of these books
that I had written about it, discovering this place all over again.
It's hold on me.
It's hold on my mother.
You write in the book that she needed me at least emotionally all the time.
You go on to write.
She'd never really considered us two separate people, but rather one entity oddly cleaved
by time and gender like fraternal twins somehow born 25 years apart.
What is that like for a 19 year old kid in college to have that for one of a better
term baggage?
Well, strangely enough, it's not as bad as it sounds when you just described it.
It's not something I would wish on anyone.
On the other hand, it's strange how normal things seem to people who don't know what
normal is.
All those years growing up, the first 18 years of my life lived in Gloversville and what
now seems to me to be a fairly strange set of circumstances given my mother's nervous
condition.
None of that struck me as all that unusual back then, in part because I was an only child.
I didn't have anybody to compare notes with and my grandparents weren't talking.
There would have been a betrayal for them to suggest to me that my mother was anything
other than completely emotionally healthy and so they never did.
And so I mean, really right straight through my 18th birthday and this trip to Arizona,
nothing ever struck me as all that unusual about my life, about my mother's life, about
our lives in Gloversville.
And I took that sense of normality with me to Arizona even when it was becoming increasingly
queer day after day after day on the road, that things weren't normal at all.
But in terms of my psyche, I continued to make them normal.
And whenever that sense of normality got violated too much, I made it, I kind of in my own
mind, made it normal in an odd kind of way, saying to myself, how lucky I was, really,
to have a parent, considering that my father and mother had separated when I was so young
and then divorced when I was in high school.
How lucky I was to have a mother who was so devoted to me, far more devoted to me, probably
than any other mother of my acquaintance, the mothers of any of my friends, who had different
kinds of lives and different kinds of devotions.
They were devoted not just to, you know, to a child, but to all of their children and
to a husband and to probably parents.
Whereas my mother was devoted only to me.
And as unnatural as that sounds for an 18-year-old to think, when I reconstructed, that's
as close as I can come to describing what it felt like.
And so, you know, a couple of years after that when my father seated drunkenly, and he
was no drunker than I was, on a bar stool, when my father said to me in a kind of off the
hand, off the cuff way, you know your mother's.
Nots, right?
I mean, he could have just as easily knocked me off the bar stool with a straight, right
cross.
I mean, nothing like that had ever occurred to me.
That yes, there were times when things seemed kind of out of whack, a little nutty, but
abnormal.
I was 20, 21 years old before that occurred to me.
In other words, I was a slow learner, Joe.
A bond marriage.
Did that offer some checks and balances in the guys of your wife, Barbara, who really,
in this memoir and obviously in your life, put up with an awful lot?
Oh, there's, there's, there's, though I think, try to think of ways every day to repay her,
there is no way to repay what she did.
And as you talk about normality and, and, and the lack thereof, my marriage, our marriage,
my marriage to Barbara, introduced into the mix a whole different set of circumstances.
I now had to be devoted to someone other than my mother.
My mother had to share me with another, with another woman.
This pretty girl, this wonderful girl that I had decided to fall in love with.
But beyond that, there was of course, Barbara's family, who immediately recognized that something
was wrong.
And that my mother's not only devotion to me, but her, her, her need for me to be there,
and to be there for her all the time.
And the threat of her coming unglued if, if any of that changed.
Of course, now the drama had to play out with a whole different audience.
And so yes, yes.
My marriage, my being part of another family, which had its own, you know, my wife's family
was, you know, there are no perfect families.
And, and my wife's family presented its own set of unique challenges.
But it also presented another entire, and entire reality by which to gauge my own relationship
to my mother, my own family.
My own, the first, you know, 18, 19, 20, 21 years of my life.
So when you hear those words from your mother, it's you I need, it's terrible here.
And she wants to be closer to you.
This not only affects you, but it affects your wife and it affects your family.
Yes.
As my mother's, as she grew older and her, and her world as a result of her, her nervous
condition, her anxieties became narrower.
Her need for her need for me to be present and close became magnified as, as you might
expect.
But by that time, of course, we had, it was not only Barbara and me.
It was also our two daughters from whom, with whom we had to, to whom we had to introduce
this whole odd circumstance that they were going to be part of, because of course, they
loved their grandmother, their grandmother loved them.
But they were also quick studies, as their father was not.
They were quick studies.
And so there was the balancing act, trying never to undermine their devotion to their grandmother,
while trying in some ways to explain her and to make sure that they understood that their
grandmother would say things from time to time that might strengthen them as odd.
And that was, that it was fine for them to understand that.
But also fine for them to love someone who was utterly devoted to them as well.
Your mother passed a doctor told you after her death that she suffered from obsessive
compulsive disorder.
Do you think it would have made a difference had you had a label, a diagnosis long before?
It would have made a difference to me.
Because despite that day when my father looked at me and said, you know your mother's nuts,
right?
That was the first time that anybody had ever said anything.
And of course, he wasn't offering a professional diagnosis.
He was just offering a throwaway line.
Had I had a professional diagnosis, it would have been helpful to me to know what I was
dealing with.
And I might have tried some different strategies by not having a diagnosis.
I just kept trying the same strategy over and over again that's, that always worked
in other circumstances, but never worked with my mother.
I don't think, however, that it would have made much difference to her.
One of the terrible things about suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder is that
it's one of, it's one of those mental illnesses, one of the few mental illnesses in which the
sufferer understands perfectly well that something is wrong.
Most, most people who are mentally ill don't have that sense of themselves.
They think there's, that everything is wrong with everybody else and with the world.
You know, people who have the, some of the worst case scenarios of obsessive compulsive
disorder, hoarders, people who really cannot leave the house at all, people who have to
wash their hands 75 times a day.
The thing that all these people have in common is that they know perfectly well that something
is wrong with them.
It's just nothing that they can do about it.
And I think that that was true with my mother too, even if, even if I had told her, you
know, mom, I, I think that, that what you're suffering from here is something that is treatable
through therapy.
All you would have had to do is say the word therapy and that would have been the end of
that discussion.
I think that, that, the walls that she had built at that point against the possibility
of anyone knowing that anything was wrong would have prevented her from, from seeking any
kind of help.
Richard Russo speaking about his new memoir elsewhere published by Kenoff.
We will continue our conversation with Richard Russo about his new memoir on next week's
book show.
We enjoy hearing from our listeners about our shows.
You can email us at book at wamc.org and you can listen again to this or find past book
shows at wamc.org.
Sarah Laduke produces our program bookmarks for next week and thanks for listening for
the book show.
I'm Joe Donnelly.
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0