Bettyville, George Hodgman
Bettyville, George Hodgman
5 Rating(s)
List: $24.99 | Sale: $17.50
Club: $12.49

Bettyville
A Memoir

Bestseller

Author: George Hodgman

Narrator: Jeff Woodman

Unabridged: 10 hr 57 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Recorded Books

Published: 03/10/2015


Synopsis

A witty, tender memoir of a son's journey home to care for his irascible mother-a tale of secrets, silences, and enduring love When George Hodgman leaves Manhattan for his hometown of Paris, Missouri, he finds himself-an unlikely caretaker and near-lethal cook-in a head-on collision with his aging mother, Betty, a woman of wit and will. Will George lure her into assisted living? When hell freezes over. He can't bring himself to force her from the home both treasure-the place where his father's voice lingers, the scene of shared jokes, skirmishes, and, behind the dusty antiques, a rarely acknowledged conflict: Betty, who speaks her mind but cannot quite reveal her heart, has never really accepted the fact that her son is gay. As these two unforgettable characters try to bring their different worlds together, Hodgman reveals the challenges of Betty's life and his own struggle for self-respect, moving readers from their small town-crumbling but still colorful-to the star-studded corridors of Vanity Fair. Evocative of The End of Your Life Book Club and The Tender Bar, Hodgman's debut is both an indelible portrait of a family and an exquisitely told tale of a prodigal son's return.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Richard on February 03, 2015

It goes like this, again and again, in endless towns. There’s a boy, somewhere, a somewhere that’s never New York. He doesn’t know he is not unusual, because there’s no one to tell him; he won’t find that out, and may never come to fully believe it, until he’s left one of those endless towns and com......more

Goodreads review by Michelle on November 18, 2014

I read BETTYVILLE by George Hodgman in a weekend, ignoring my family to finish it, basically in a day. The memoir is riveting, beautiful, brave, honest, compelling, heart breaking, heart opening, funny and true. It is about family, where we come from, how we don't let those closest to us know us for......more

Goodreads review by Hank on May 29, 2016

Beautifully assembled and tenderly sad memoir that focuses in on George's relationship with his ailing mother, his late father and the world he came from (small-town Missouri) in relation to the world he inhabited as an urban adult who works in the high-stress fields of magazine and book publishing......more

Goodreads review by Wheeler on December 06, 2014

Despite the praise, Bettyville by George Hodgman is not particularly illuminating, it does not have a gratifying end and it is mostly a compendium of the same thoughts and scenes, slightly tweaked, repeated ad nauseum. While Bettyville certainly had the potential to be poignant and illuminating, “go......more

Goodreads review by Doug on January 26, 2020

4.5, rounded up. Knowing that the author committed suicide 6 months ago necessarily colored how I read this book, and perhaps I therefore forgave a lot of stuff that would have otherwise made me a bit more critical (some needless repetition; stereotypical self-loathing gay and addiction/recovery trop......more