Welcome to group texta monthly column for readers and book clubs about the novels, memoirs and short stories that make you want to talk, ask questions and stay in another world for a while.
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When Liz Scheier came home to Manhattan during her freshman year of college, she told her mother that she was thinking about getting her driver’s license. Her mother’s reaction was enough to instill fear in every family member: “I have something to tell you.”
Scheier learned that she had no birth certificate—in fact, there was no birth certificate at all—and that her mother, Judith, was married to a man who was not her father when she was born. Suddenly, an apprentice permit was her least concern. How she had a Social Security number and a passport were matters for another day.
“No one lies like family,” Scheier writes in the preface to her memoir, which is appropriately titled, albeit understated. NEVER SIMPLE (Holt, 288 pp., $26.99)† “This is the story of inventing the biggest lie I was ever told.”
The book reads like a Nancy Drew mystery in which everyone’s favorite amateur sleuth has done intense personal work and now possesses the courage and self-awareness to turn her magnifying glass inward. Scheier approaches her childhood as a detective (she’s actually a product developer and former editor), room by room, block by block and year after year, as she points out the fractures between the fiction she was raised with and the facts she pieced together on her own. own.
Here are the basics: Scheier grew up with her mother in a rent-stabilized three-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side. Her father was not in the photo. “It was a secluded life in the center of a huge city,” she writes. “We were anonymous, a mother and daughter who talked about our mother-daughter life. I didn’t know then how many eyes were on us.” Judith Scheier’s finances were a mystery—she’d worked as a lawyer in her thirties but never had a job again—and she spent most of her time following her daughter, keeping a close eye on her behavior and where necessary. (or not) to criticize. She can be loving, funny and warm, or she can explode into a violent rage. After such an incident, Scheier ran away from home and was picked up by police officers who begged her not to take her home. The strangeness of her family life—the unanswered questions, the tension and isolation—had finally taken its toll.
As she grew older, Scheier made it her life’s work to create space between herself and her mother, but she kept finding herself drawn back to the lonely planet where Judith cooked and smoldered, alienating friends and neighbors. Judith stopped paying rent, so when she was in her 20s, with her student loans to worry about, Scheier donated her eggs and used some of the proceeds to pay off her mother’s debt. Ultimately, Judith was evicted and moved to a homeless shelter.
For reasons that are becoming obvious, it was not an option for Scheier to offer her mother a bed in her own home. Neither of them abandoned her mother. How she juggles the excruciating decisions about Judith with her own marriage, a move and the birth of her children is indeed an achievement.
†Why don’t you call her less often, well-meaning friends would ask in astonishment and I would laugh in disbelief,” Scheier writes. “My mother was the vortex of a hurricane, whose screaming winds and tons of swirling debris only had to touch me to sweep me up.”
At the beginning of “Never Simple,” I may have been one of those well-meaning friends. By the time I reached the end, I was grateful that Scheier had weathered the storm.
Discussion Questions
When Scheier considered how she might describe her mother to her children, a friend said, “She will be a story, not a weapon.” What does this mean? And how are friends the real heroes of this book?
The dedication to “Never Simple” is “For Judith Scheier, who tried.” Discuss, preferably using words like ‘compassion’ and ’empathy’.
Suggested Reading
†This is just my face: try not to stare,” by means of Gabourey Sidibe† When your mom stops singing on the subway and your dad moves a “cousin” (who turns out to be his wife) into your bedroom, you’ve got the makings of a solid memoir. Bonus points if you grow up to be a movie star like Sidibe. With a wicked sense of humor that reminds me of Scheier’s, Sidibe takes readers behind the scenes of another New York City childhood.
†Crying in H Mart”, by Michelle Zauner. †Her love was harder than hard love,” Zauner writes in her memoir about the loss of her mother. “It was brutal, industrial in effect. A wiry love that never gave way to an inch of weakness.” That industrial love is where the similarities between Chongmi Zauner and Judith Scheier begin and end, but their daughters’ stories are both told from a sibling-free perspective, so they’re interesting to read together.
