Elsewhere, Richard Russo
Elsewhere, Richard Russo
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Elsewhere
A memoir

Author: Richard Russo

Narrator: Richard Russo

Unabridged: 7 hr 32 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 10/30/2012

Synopsis

After eight commanding works of fiction, the Pulitzer Prize winner now turns to memoir in a hilarious, moving, and always surprising account of his life, his parents, and the upstate New York town they all struggled variously to escape.

Anyone familiar with Richard Russo's acclaimed novels will recognize Gloversville once famous for producing that eponymous product and anything else made of leather. This is where the author grew up, the only son of an aspirant mother and a charming, feckless father who were born into this close-knit community. But by the time of his childhood in the 1950s, prosperity was inexorably being replaced by poverty and illness (often tannery-related), with everyone barely scraping by under a very low horizon.

A world elsewhere was the dream his mother instilled in Rick, and strived for herself, and their subsequent adventures and tribulations in achieving that goal—beautifully recounted here—were to prove lifelong, as would Gloversville's fearsome grasp on them both. Fraught with the timeless dynamic of going home again, encompassing hopes and fears and the relentless tides of familial and individual complications, this story is arresting, comic, heartbreaking, and truly beautiful, an immediate classic.

About The Author

RICHARD RUSSO is the author of seven novels and The Whore's Child, a collection of stories. In 2002 he received the Pulitzer Prize for Empire Falls, which like Nobody's Fool, was adapted to film.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Angela M

This memoir is a must read for fans of Richard Russo. I have read all of his novels and his two story collections and I’m always moved by his keen observations of the human condition and his brilliant writing. Born and raised in Gloversville, NY, a small town in upstate NY, Russo tells of his early......more

Goodreads review by Steve

[Reminder to self: KISS – Keep It Short, Steve.] Richard Russo is a great writer. His stories are fast-moving, his characters are recognizable, and his words entice without adornments. In fact, I like him so much I read this to become a completist. You might imagine that a memoir by a writer of his c......more

Goodreads review by Esil

I listened to Richard Russo read his memoir Elsewhere. What a treat! This very personal portrait of his relationship with his troubled mother seemed to much more personal as told in his own voice. Rather than start by telling us that his mother had a mental illness, and that he had a hard go of it l......more

Goodreads review by Margaret

As with Isabelle Allende's memoirs, I was interested to see how much of real life Richard Russo used for his novels like Empire Falls and Nobody's Fool, especially since the most outrageous things generally turn out to be the true ones. In this case, Russo is heart-breakingly open about his early li......more

Quotes

“It’s rare for a novelist to write candidly about the real behind the imagined. About a lifetime of work and the very person who inspired it. Yet that is precisely what Richard Russo has done in his memoir.... Redemption is always the prize in a Russo story. Nowhere do we see that more clearly than in Elsewhere, a brave little book in which a writer spins deprivation into advantage, suffering into wisdom, and a broken mother into a muse. Wanting him to be anywhere but Gloversville, Jean Russo did everything she could to make her son leave. And then, unable to feel whole anywhere outside it, she eventually brought him home.” —Marie Arana, The Washington Post
 
“Intimate and powerful...an impeccably told tale.” —Julia M. Klein, Chicago Tribune

“A gorgeously nuanced memoir about Russo’s mother and his own lifelong tour of duty spent—lovingly and exhaustedly—looking out for her. . . . Russo is the Bruce Springsteen of novelists . . . in a paragraph or even a phrase, he can summon up a whole world, and the world he writes most poignantly about is that of the industrial white working class.” —Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air
 
“Filled with insights, by turn tender and tough, about human fidelity, frailty, forbearance, and fortitude.” —Glenn C. Altschuler, The Philadelphia Inquirer

“Moving and darkly funny. . . Russo mines grace from his gritty hometown [and] the greatest charm of this memoir lies in the absences of self-pity and pretension in his take on his own history.” —Amy Finnerty, The Wall Street Journal
 
“Heartfelt and generous.” —Tricia Springstubb, Cleveland Plain Dealer
 
“One of the most honest, moving American memoirs in years... Russo's straightforward writing style is even more effective in Elsewhere [and his] intellectual and emotional honesty are remarkable.” —Michael Schaub, NPR.org
 
“Rich and layered... an honest book about a universal subject: those familial bonds that only get trickier with time.” —Kevin Canfield, Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Russo conjures the incredible bond between single mother and only child in a way that makes his story particularly powerful.” —Nicholas Mancusi, The Daily Beast
 
“Russo brings the same clear-eyed humanism that marks his fiction to this by turns funny and moving portrait of his mother and her never-ending quest to escape the provincial confines of their hometown.” —Joanne Wilkinson, Booklist
 
“An affecting yet never saccharine glimpse of the relationship among place, family and fiction.” —Kirkus

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