My Mother's House

Set in the bucolic, yet brutal South of his youth, My Mother's House is a memoir by novelist David Armand. It recounts the young author's early memories of being born to a schizophrenic mother, then given up for adoption, only to be raised in a home with an alcoholic and abusive step-father. In this sharply-remembered portrait of the people and places that shaped him, Armand paints his seemingly negative experiences with a sympathetic and understanding brush. As the reader follows Armand through his childhood and later into adult life--when he is reunited with his mother after she makes a failed suicide attempt--a surprisingly new world of hope and possibility is rendered, despite the overwhelming challenges of this reunion. [Armand's] writing is reminiscent of Hemingway: straightforward descriptions of manly action punctuated by laconic dialogue."-- New York Journal of Books "Armand writes in a comfortingly familiar literary voice that blends Ernest Hemingway's laconic but rhythmically complicated explorations of the mysteries of masculinity with William Faulkner's more fabulist, Southern Gothic twang. It's a heady, seductively intoxicating combination."-- Richmond Times-Dispatch