Love and Fury: A Memoir, by Richard Hoffman
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Love and Fury: A Memoir, by Richard Hoffman
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An acclaimed author reflects on his upbringing in a post–World War II blue-collar family and comes to terms with the racism, sexism, and other toxic values he inherited.Finalist for the 2014 New England Book Award in Non-Fiction Richard Hoffman sometimes felt as though he had two fathers: the real one who raised him and an imaginary version, one he talked to on the phone, and one he talked to in his head. Although Hoffman was always close to the man, his father remained a mystery, shrouded in a perplexing mix of tenderness and rage. When his father receives a terminal cancer diagnosis, Hoffman confronts the depths and limitations of their lifelong struggle to know each other, weighing their differences and coming to understand that their yearning and puzzlement was mutual. With familial relationships at its center, Love & Fury draws connections between past and present, from the author’s grandfather, a “breaker boy” sent down into the anthracite mines of Pennsylvania at the age of ten, to his young grandson, whose father is among the estimated one million young black men incarcerated today. In a critique of culture and of self, Hoffman grapples with the way we have absorbed and incorporated the compelling imagery of post WWII America and its values, especially regarding class, war, women, race, masculinity, violence, divinity, and wealth. A masterful memoirist, Hoffman writes not only to tell a gripping story but also to understand, through his family, the social and ethical contours of American life. At the book’s core are the author’s questions about boyhood, fatherhood, and grandfatherhood, and about the changing meaning of what it means to be a good man in America, now and into the future.From the Hardcover edition.
Love and Fury: A Memoir, by Richard Hoffman - Amazon Sales Rank: #1780854 in Books
- Brand: Hoffman, Richard
- Published on: 2015-03-31
- Released on: 2015-03-31
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.27" h x .66" w x 5.27" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 224 pages
Love and Fury: A Memoir, by Richard Hoffman From Booklist The best memoirs transform seemingly ordinary lives into page-turning tales and make sense of unusual circumstances. Hoffman succeeds on both accounts with this intensely personal and candid reflection on his experiences as a son, father, and grandfather. Hoffman recounts his father’s diagnosis with a terminal bone-marrow disorder, his son’s unexpected return home after missteps at university, and his unwed daughter’s decision to carry a child to term. With poetic language and smart humor, Hoffman shares the challenges these changes posed to his life as a writer and husband, inviting readers into the intimate space of his family home, as son, daughter, and Damion, the child’s father, move into the Hoffman household. This new, crowded lifestyle forces the author to reconcile his relationship with Damion, a man of Jamaican descent, with the legacy of his father’s racism. Throughout, Hoffman masterfully manipulates time, spinning memories into a story of family loyalties, honest dialogue, and difficult loss. A fitting follow-up to Half the House (1995), and a must-read for fans of Richard McCann, Christa Parravani, and James McCourt. --Diego Báez
Review “Though he returns repeatedly to the notion that he can’t comprehend his feelings, Hoffman’s descriptions of them are often virtuoso.... His vision is rare.” —Boston Globe“An astute, thought-provoking and lyrical narrative.” —Portland Press Herald“Bracingly introspective.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune“Hoffman’s writing is water for the heart, words that will quench those struggling with self-examination, family reconciliation, or damage done by physical or societal ills.” —Concord Monitor“Love & Fury is as clear, as elemental, as essential, as water. Richard Hoffman has a remarkable way of both conjuring his flesh and blood onto the page while at the same time allowing them to dissolve in our hands. He tracks what is known, what is remembered, what is surmised, and comes to the edge of what will always remain a mystery—then, again and again, takes one thrilling step across that threshold.” —Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City“In a time when so much American writing seems to be inspired by situational comedies on television, by blockbuster films and sexy blogs, what a soul-saving joy it is to encounter Richard Hoffman’s masterful and necessary Love & Fury. What makes Hoffman so good at the memoir form is a rare combination of honest self-scrutiny, fairness, intellectual rigor, and emotional bravery. But what makes this book so important is what Hoffman excavates here layer by layer: how shaped and often shackled we are by the past, one that is bloody, racist, patriarchal, and as class-stratified as ever. With a poet’s ear and a short story writer’s eye, this fine memoir will move you the way all great literature does—it will wake you up, it will make you see, it may even change how you live this one life you’ve been given.”—Andre Dubus III, author of Townie: A Memoir“A terrific memoir by an articulate writer who has honed his literary skills over a lifetime, who knows what he is thinking and feeling at every moment (as opposed to what he should be thinking and feeling), Love & Fury sets new standards for honesty, daring and bracing self-examination. Hoffman peels away the lies, vanities and convenient half-truths in a struggle to attain that rarest and seemingly least-valued of contemporary virtues, humility. He is aided by a pack of troubles, which keeps the story-telling tense, gripping and fierce. Hoffman shows us just how complex a business is it to try to be decent, day to day, in a perfect storm of ambivalence.”—Phillip Lopate“Love & Fury says something true and revelatory about the broken but stubborn connection between fathers and sons. I read page on page with my mouth open, my own heart-breaking memories flooding alongside Hoffman’s. This is the book I needed—though when I took it up, I did not know that. I am grateful that this hard work has been done, and we have this comfort—an unsparing examination of just how resilient family can be.”—Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Carolina“Sifting the connections between our fathers and ourselves is often an exhausting, frustrating and somehow irresistible business. Few have explored them with such rigor, compassion and exemplary self-scrutiny as Richard Hoffman. His Half the House, brilliant and challenging, is an extremely tough act to follow; in Love & Fury, Hoffman manages it with characteristic candor, insight and grace.”—Jabari Asim, author of The N Word“A reckoning with searing disappointment, Love & Fury is, equally, the transformation of disappointment into the true expression that alone defines our hope.”—James Carroll, author of Warburg in RomeFrom the Hardcover edition.
About the Author Richard Hoffman is the author of Half the House: A Memoir; the poetry collections Without Paradise, Emblem, and Gold Star Road, winner of both the 2006 Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize and the 2008 Sheila Motton Award from the New England Poetry Club; and the short story collection Interference and Other Stories. He is senior writer-in-residence at Emerson College and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.From the Hardcover edition.
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Most helpful customer reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful. "Made Of Coal And Steel And Violence And Trucks And Shame" By Susan K. Schoonover Apparently college professor and poet Richard Hoffman found success with a previous memoir HALF THE HOUSE. That book tells the story of his abuse by a sports coach and its publication even led to the arrest of the perpetrator some twenty years after the incidences with some help from Hoffman's father. In this second memoir LOVE AND FURY Richard Hoffman returns to his home town of Allentown, PA which he mines for some additional material using the diagnosis of his father's fatal illness and funeral as bookends. I haven't read HALF THE HOUSE and apparently in addition to the abuse that is revealed in that volume Hoffman discusses the debilitating illnesses and eventual deaths of two of his brothers from Duchenne muscular dystrophy. These events are alluded to but are not the focus of LOVE AND FURY. Instead in LOVE AND FURY Hoffman discusses his father's World War II experience, racism, pornography, people like his family that he deems "white trash", Catholicism and the alcoholism of both he and his son. A large portion of the book is about the father of his grandson a young man from Jamaica who is currently incarcerated due to gun and drug charges. Hoffman attempted to help this unfortunate person with not the best results. LOVE AND FURY tends to feel disjointed and the material appears stretched to its maximum length which leads me to give this short memoir/collection of essays just three stars.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful. OUR PORTION, A SINGLE SHARE By AKA Italian critic, writer, filmmaker poet and philosopher Pier Paolo Pasolini said an author cannot ventriloquize outside his own social class. What Richard Hoffman does iso well, over and over is to shine the light on his particular class: white, Catholic, American academic from an East Coast mill-town working class family who was sexually abused as a child by an athletic coach, whose long-suffering mother smoked too many cigarettes, whose father, after retirement, ended up sitting in soft chair watching TV all day “because he earned the right to do it. “Rhetorically and stylistically Hoffman’s exceptional memoir paints the picture of the landscapes in which the people who he loves enter and exit. The people are his immediate family--wife daughter and son, living in North Cambridge, Massachusetts; his family of origin-- father mother, brothers, in Allentown, Pennsylvania; and the struggles of his daughter, her child and black boyfriend who are trying to carve a place for themselves and meanwhile crowd into the small North Cambridge house with Hoffman and his wife, who is also a working-class academic, and who, at one point in the memoir, has to deal with cancer.Hoffman elegantly writes that no matter who we are, we are all here for a brief season of seasons that we have no name for. “Life” is too commonplace a word.” Lifespan has a span, a bridge in it that the author cannot muster feelings for. So he settles for “our portion: a single share of the plentitude of time, with little or nothing to do with anything but love.”LOVE AND FURY is a notable memoir for its honesty, curiosity, insight and true voice. Additionally, Hoffman weaves an interesting and noteworthy thread through the generations: the author’s father expects that life might not fair, but the rules ought to be the same for everyone; while the author’s daughter and her mate know that life is not fair and the rules are not the same for everyone.The Virgin Knows
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful. Love & Fury by Richard Hoffman is a memoir of ... By Lori K I received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.Love & Fury by Richard Hoffman is a memoir of his complicated relationship with his father and other members of his family. It moves between past and present, exploring Hoffman's questions about why he is unable to understand his father, the love he nevertheless feels for the man who was both violent and loving toward his sons, and the grief Hoffman feels when he dies. That grief resurrects the pain of his mother's death decades before, and the even earlier deaths of two of Hoffman's three brothers due to muscular dystrophy.At the same time he's dealing with all those losses he also faces serious problems within his own family. His wife is diagnosed with a serious illness, his son fights an addiction, and his daughter has a child with a black man who ends up being sent to prison. Hoffman tries to make sense of family's experience by placing it within the context of the times in which they live. That involves looking the changing fortunes of working class America, the racism with which Hoffman was raised, and the current prejudices faced by blacks in this country even if they, like the father of Hoffman's grandson, are immigrants from the Caribbean and therefore not really part of the long history of the African American experience of bigotry. Throughout, Hoffman is honest about his mistakes and the ways in which he doesn't live up to his own best intentions.He offers no pat answers, but instead simply describes the process of moving forward, loving and honoring difficult people and while trying not to carry the worst of their struggles and mistakes into the future. In the process he creates a story that's moving, even for those of whose struggle between familial love and fury is far less fraught than his.
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