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Fritz Agency
Christian Dittus |
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NEVER SIMPLE
A Memoir
NEVER SIMPLE is a darkly funny and devastating memoir of Scheier's growing up in '90s Manhattan with a mentally ill single parent who constructs a world of lies so elaborate that it's less a childhood and more a couple decades of gaslighting. Once Liz discovers that the father who died before she was born is an entirely fictional character created by her mother, the rest of the deception tumbles down as she follows tenuous links to the truth.
This is also a beautifully-written, multi-layered examination of how we create family and what we pass on. As an egg donor, Liz is drawn into a network that is nearly as shadowy and deceptive about genetics as her mother is. As a parent herself, what does she tell her children about family history when she doesn't know what's real? For that matter, how much does she tell them about the horrifying things she does know?
With NEVER SIMPLE, Liz Scheier walks toe-to-toe with the great ur-memoirs THE GLASS CASTLE and THE LIAR'S CLUB. Scheier's prose has a coruscating energy that captures and transfixes the reader as much as it tells a story. If we are unable to look away from the car-crash that is her early life, we are at least given something extraordinary to look at, and as Scheier then pitches us into the fires of her own self-transformation, we are grandly entertained - and made to think - at every turn.
Liz Scheier is a former Penguin Random House editor (at Bantam and both the Roc and Del Rey science fiction imprints) who also worked at B&N and Amazon before moving to Washington, DC. She is the mother of two and a feature writer and reviewer for Publisher's Weekly.
This is also a beautifully-written, multi-layered examination of how we create family and what we pass on. As an egg donor, Liz is drawn into a network that is nearly as shadowy and deceptive about genetics as her mother is. As a parent herself, what does she tell her children about family history when she doesn't know what's real? For that matter, how much does she tell them about the horrifying things she does know?
With NEVER SIMPLE, Liz Scheier walks toe-to-toe with the great ur-memoirs THE GLASS CASTLE and THE LIAR'S CLUB. Scheier's prose has a coruscating energy that captures and transfixes the reader as much as it tells a story. If we are unable to look away from the car-crash that is her early life, we are at least given something extraordinary to look at, and as Scheier then pitches us into the fires of her own self-transformation, we are grandly entertained - and made to think - at every turn.
Liz Scheier is a former Penguin Random House editor (at Bantam and both the Roc and Del Rey science fiction imprints) who also worked at B&N and Amazon before moving to Washington, DC. She is the mother of two and a feature writer and reviewer for Publisher's Weekly.
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Book
Published 2022-03-01 by Henry Holt |