Book Review – Raising Mama – A Memoir written by Larry
Michael Sullivan
By Judith
Martin-Straw
It’s always a delight to
discover that old friends are still around. When the Beachhead received a review
copy of Raising Mama, I had already decided that Larry Sullivan had washed away
in Hurricane Rita, or emigrated to Canada out of political disgust. Neither of
those turned out to be true, and our happy author is said to be alive and well
in New Mexico. For his part, Larry sent a note apologizing for referring to the
Beachhead in the past tense. Our mutual friend Mark Twain can be called in to
comment for both sides - “Reports of my demise have been greatly
exaggerated.”
It’s one thing to hear stories about
someone’s wild family or crazy parents when sitting around, shooting the
breeze. It’s quite another to get them all sequential, substantiated and
put to rest in a volume of memoirs. If you’ve read Ricky Bragg’s
life in ‘All over but the Shoutin,’ consider that volume to be a
mild jar of store bought salsa. This one is like the infamous homemade
tongue-searing green sauce served at the Sullivan house for those willing to dip
their tortilla chips into a possible second degree burn. Raising Mama starts off
in a cotton field in Shake Rag, Tennessee, where a very small girl is working
like a machine trying to win the approval (and reward) of her father. She meets
the goal, but the reward is unfairly withheld, and insult sets the tone for her
anger and her actions through the rest of her days. Dorothy, known as Dot,
raises Larry, his sister Karla and a whole lotta hell.
When you have a parent this extreme,
putting her down on paper is perhaps the best way of putting it all in
perspective. While the reader marvels at how they made it from one jump to the
next, seeing what drove her, and why, opens these stories up into a larger
motif.
It’s an irony not lost on
Larry Sullivan that writing a book about the kind of people who never read books
makes for open literature. Go ahead and tell the truth - they’ll never
know, anyway. While the book is as much about Larry as it is about Dot, other
major characters include the American South, Pop Music of the late 50’s
and early 60’s, Class Consciousness, Racism, Serial Monogamy and Human
Nature. In a wild decade that moves around the south, out to the west coast and
back to the south again, Larry sticks with Dot through multiple marriages and
divorces with two half brothers, dozens of sudden changes of residence, and the
realization that even poor kids with wild mothers can be smart.
I was
bit disappointed in the abrupt ending, but of course, a sequel is required. The
promotional materials enclosed with the book tell us the next installment is
titled “Trailer Trash”- but you’d have no way of knowing that
just from reading the volume. I’d love to read “The Return of
Memphis Slim”, but there’s another volume needed between here and
there - how did he live long enough to grow
up?
For those who remember Larry Sullivan
when he lived in Venice, and enjoyed reading Memphis Slim in the Beachhead, this
book is a homegrown treat. If you never heard of Larry Sullivan until today, you
should read this book, and marvel at the storytelling skills of a bona fide
survivor.
Posted: Mon - January 1, 2007 at 03:12 PM