Filial Piety

Murdering the Mom brings brings to mind classic memoirs such as Frank Conroy's Stop Time and Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life (1989). All 3 portray artists as young men during the 1940s into the 1950s. All 3 feature sexual single mothers who attach themselves to problematic men and finally to a man who proves to be a wicked stepfather. All 3 memoirists struggle with images of manhood, and as each youth passes through a "desperado" stage, he finally redeems himself by becoming the adult writer. In the cases of both Wolff and Brenna, the military plays a part.

Murdering the Mom is by far the rawest and most extreme of these 3 books. It is also distinctive for being written by a 57-year-old novelist and teacher who is contemplating his own aging and mortality, and whose concluding perspective goes beyond the closures of Conroy and Wolff. After the mom's death and having written the memoir, Brenna discusses it with his youngest sister, Michelle Renee: "What did you think of the memoir I sent you?" She replies:

Parts of it are funny in a dark way. I didn't expect anything funny. Nothing funny really about the way we grew up. I expected sad parts. But I learned a lot about my dad that I didn't know.... Carol Marie [their older sister] and I talked about the book. We like and we hate it.... She says she's blocked a lot of it out.... Oh, and she said she thought she knew you, but your memoir proves she didn't know you well at all.... But when it comes to the mom's story, at the very least, you're loose with the truth, wouldn't you agree?

Brenna replies: "It's my side of the story. I wish Carol Marie would write her own memoir. I'd like to see our lives from her perspective. Or yours. Or from mom's if she was alive. Every memoir is written by an unreliable narrator."

Brenna's mother in his youth resembled Lucille Ball. She married 6 times. Duffy and Carol Marie are children of her second husband, Hud, who died in a tanker accident. Her third husband was George Allison, who spanked the toddler Duffy for bed-wetting and who secretly molested Carol Marie as Duffy watched. Brenna can't remember when he left, but the mom replaced him with Nick Pappas, her fourth husband, Michelle Renee's father, and Duffy's overbearing antagonist for most of the book.

Pappas is a World War II vet with a sex drive as compulsive as Duffy's bed-wetting. He views Duffy as a momma's boy, and sets out to toughen him up by brutalizing him. They move to Colorado, where Pappas has enlisted in the Air Force as a flight engineer and the mom waitresses in a base cafeteria. Duffy, age 8, comes home from school:

When you round the corner from the kitchen, Pappas is sitting at the table in his blue uniform. When he shifts in his chair, you see that familiar rage contorting his face. You don't have a chance to backpedal before his fist catches you flush on your left eye. Down but not knocked out, just dazed, just dazzled. And not having the faintest idea why Pappas has punched you this time.... Maybe his superior officer chewed him out. Maybe he's nursing a hangover. Maybe he needs a drink or a piece of ass.

The second person and present tense, sustained throughout the book, renders this injustice with ironic distance and with immediacy. One thinks of Kuprin's statement: "The horror, gentlemen, is precisely this. There is no horror." In any case, Pappas orders Duffy to cover the bruise with a hat, return to school, and say that he tripped and fell if anyone asked.

With the birth of Michelle Renee, the colorful Grandma Inez (the mom's mom) moves in. She is "a tough, hard drinking, chain-smoker who has had two husbands and...