Author of the week: Richard Russo

last updated 8 January 2015

Richard Russo’s mother never left him, said John Williams in The New York Times. In his first memoir, Elsewhere, the Pulitzer-winning novelist, who has frequently used fiction to revisit the New York mill town where he grew up, focuses on the obsessive woman who raised him. Abandoned by her husband when Richard was young, Jean Russo clung to her son, even following him to the University of Arizona and, after he married, moving in with him. She also began exhibiting signs of obsessive-compulsive disorder, wrapping books in plastic and showing aversions to certain colors. “After my mother’s death, I thought about her constantly, and she was visiting my dreams, which suggested there was unfinished business,” he says. “When you don’t understand a parent’s life, in a way, you kind of don’t understand your own.”

Russo’s relationship with his mother was nothing if not complex, said Linda Wertheimer in NPR.org. “I still remembered the brave, young woman,” he says. “But I’d be lying if I said that there wasn’t a whole world of resentment that built up, not because I didn’t want my mother in my life, but that she didn’t need to be there every minute of it.” Russo also says that he inherited his mother’s obsessiveness, but was able to channel it into writing. “The same traits that closed off one person’s life actually expanded mine,” he says. “What I’m ultimately facing is that all of the blessings in my life are traceable not just to my mother but in some strange way also to her demons.”