Never Tell Our Business to Strangers: A Memoir (Playaway Adult Nonfiction) [Englisch] [Sonstiges Zubehör]

I've just finished this book and my head is still spinning a bit. It's difficult to sum it up in a neat review, because the writing and the story itself are uneven. There are many moments of gritty honesty and revelations about how love can survive beyond all reason, but there are also pages of repetitiveness and navel-gazing.

In short, Jennifer grows up in a volatile household-- it's filled with cursing and screaming and walking out and her dad getting arrested and several episodes of adults smacking and kicking her... and yet there's also love. I would think that most kids growing up in this kind of family would wind up bitter and hateful toward her parents, but she manages the opposite. She's attached to them in ways that go beyond "normal." As she herself realizes toward the end of the book, it felt cult-like. Her parents' crimes, being on the lam, and all the covering up, created this insultated threesome who depended on each other and emotionally unloaded on each other all the time.

For the first half, I admired Jennifer for managing to love her parents so deeply despite their screw-ups, crimes, and even their abandonment (like leaving her with a drug-addicted aunt). By the end, though, I was too bothered by their crimes and no longer understood Jennifer's fierce loyalty and love for them. It was hard to swallow that she judged her mother for staying married to a murderer, while at the same time talking about how much she loves her dad still and wants to hug him when she thinks about him sitting in prison writing letters to find loopholes to get out, or his affair with his wife's sister, or whatever. In other words, if she thinks her mother should have walked away from a murderer, why shouldn't she hold herself to the same standard? What he did was deplorable, and it seems an insult to his victims' families to still talk about him lovingly.

The other thing that bothered me was the incessant crying. On literally every third page or so, the author is describing scenes of weeping. Weeping in public, sobbing in each other's arms, sobbing on the phone... again, at first, this was sort of comical ("emotional Italians!"), but by the end, I felt like it was a strange need to document every moment that ever made her or anyone she knew cry.

Then there's the issue of the ending, which comes abruptly in a "Now I'm going to tie it all together and tell you what I've learned" sort of way, and it doesn't end with a natural conclusion... I hoped that it would have a more promising ending, with Jennifer being married or in a good relationship, or with children of her own, or something else that gives us a sense that she's making good on these thoughts about not repeating the cycle. As it is, it's pretty remarkable that she's as sane as she is... it's impressive that she didn't seem to soak in much of her parents' morals.

All of the book's faults aside, I still really liked it. It was a perspective on life I've never read before, and there were some genuine moments of insight, and some moments of very good writing. Had it gone through stricter editing, this might have been a 5-star book. As it stands, it feels more like a "diamond in the rough" than a fully realized book.

Jennifer Mascia's memoir of a life spent on the lam with her larcenous parents (one of whom was a mob shooter and a cocaine addict) is surprisingly relatable, even for those of us who haven't had criminals for parents. The writing is not slick or seamless, but conversational in a way that makes the first three-quarters of the book highly engaging.

For me, the book broke down after the death of Mascia's charismatic, mysterious father. The recounting of her mother's illness, decline, and death and of Mascia's research into her father's criminal history seemed less well-written than what had come before, and seemed repetitive and merely personal -- it was less transcendent than the earlier parts of the book that detailed the family's vivid ups and downs.

Even so, the book is worth a read, especially if you're Italian, New York Italian, or interested in mob stuff or psychology.

this seemingly never ending book is redundant--if boredom and repetition could kill the author would be in the same league as her father. this is the story of a murderous ex-con drug dealer who is himself a philandering drug addict and his wife who met him in prison where she was visiting another boyfriend (classy lady!). The wife is aware her husband is a murderer and low rent dirt bag but she's one too so they become a couple. then they decide that their drug soaked life of crime should include a child so the author is born. in her book, she states over and over and over and over how horrified she is by their crimes but truth is her tone conveys she secretly thinks it's somehow romantic and glamorous. she has aggrandized the two derelicts so much that she tries to portray them as criminals with hearts of gold. people who kill people, sell drugs, steal, use drugs etc., but who are really swell anyway. the author is entitled to love her parents despite their amoral and criminal conduct but her desperate and poorly edited effort to make us love them too and understand her love for them is lame. her parents were just two losers like many others. the fact that they had a child who loves them does not change who they were, what they were or excuse what they did.