Sherman Alexie Discusses His New Memoir

Sherman Alexie's interview with Alden Mudge appears in print in the June issue of BookPage, but Literary Hub has kindly posted a digital version for your perusal. Alexie, the author of several poetry collections, recently penned a memoir about living with his abusive mother, Lillian. "'What I’m realizing now,' Alexie explained to Mudge, 'is that the writing of the book was just the first half of the ceremony. Now I’m entering into the second half of the ceremony, bringing it to the public, starting to talk about my mother, and hearing the stories of other people’s mothers.'" Let's start there:

Lillian Alexie died at the age of 78 in 2015. For the previous 20 or so years, whenever possible, Sherman avoided visiting her at the Spokane Indian Reservation in Wellpinit, Washington, where he and his witty twin sisters grew up in poverty. He believes he inherited his bipolar disorder, diagnosed in 2010, from her. She was a complicated woman—generous to many, withholding or worse to Sherman, loved or despised by family members and neighbors. She was a brilliant quilt maker who wouldn’t sleep under her own quilts (“Quilting was her philosophy,” Alexie writes)—or teach her native language to her children. In a heartrending chapter Alexie decided to include only at the last moment, he writes that he has not worn a pair of moccasins in 40 years because of her behavior at a powwow in Arlee, Montana.

“That was an incredibly traumatic experience,” Alexie says with some anguish. “I find myself wondering, what do I do as an Indian when some of our most sacred moments—like a powwow—aggravate my PTSD?”

Lillian’s death unleashed a torrent of poems. “They came first without bidding and without structure. They just came. I would just write and write and write,” he says. He thought the resulting work would be a book of poetry. “Then I realized that I had more stories to tell, stories that needed to be told in nonfiction form. I thought the structure of the book was going to be framed by the first chapter of her being diagnosed and the last chapter of her dying. I just assumed it was going to be a much more traditional structure. But as I started writing the nonfiction, it started arriving in much more improvisational fashion. And I realized that the way my mother and I lived our lives, and the way our tribal culture works, and my mother’s cosmology and our own mental illnesses, shared and separate, that the very construction of the book—this back-and-forth in time, back-and-forth in emotion—was going to match the way it felt to be her son.”

Read on at Literary Hub.