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Library | Call Number | Status |
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Searching... Monmouth Public Library | 921 ROBISON 2011 | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... McMinnville Public Library | 928 Robison, Margaret | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Newberg Public Library | 921 ROBISON, MARGARET | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
First introduced to the world in her sons' now-classic memoirs--Augusten Burroughs's Running with Scissors and John Elder Robison's Look Me in the Eye --Margaret Robison now tells her own haunting and lyrical story. A poet and teacher by profession, Robison describes her Southern Gothic childhood, her marriage to a handsome, brilliant man who became a split-personality alcoholic and abusive husband, the challenges she faced raising two children while having psychotic breakdowns of her own, and her struggle to regain her sanity.
Robison grew up in southern Georgia, where the façade of 1950s propriety masked all sorts of demons, including alcoholism, misogyny, repressed homosexuality, and suicide. She met her husband, John Robison, in college, and together they moved up north, where John embarked upon a successful academic career and Margaret brought up the children and worked on her art and poetry. Yet her husband's alcoholism and her collapse into psychosis, and the eventual disintegration of their marriage, took a tremendous toll on their family: Her older son, John Elder, moved out of the house when he was a teenager, and her younger son, Chris (who later renamed himself Augusten), never completed high school. When Margaret met Dr. Rodolph Turcotte, the therapist who was treating her husband, she felt understood for the first time and quickly fell under his idiosyncratic and, eventually, harmful influence.
Robison writes movingly and honestly about her mental illness, her shortcomings as a parent, her difficult marriage, her traumatic relationship with Dr. Turcotte, and her two now-famous children, Augusten Burroughs and John Elder Robison, who have each written bestselling memoirs about their family. She also writes inspiringly about her hard-earned journey to sanity and clarity. An astonishing and enduring story, The Long Journey Home is a remarkable and ultimately uplifting account of a complicated, afflicted twentieth-century family.
Author Notes
Margaret Robison is an artist and the author of four books of poetry. She lives in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The mother of Augusten Burroughs (Running with Scissors) and John Elder Robison (Look Me in the Eye) recounts her own troubled life in this unremarkable tell-all. A Georgia native, Robison spent her childhood under the repressive thumb of her mother, with art her only escape. She met her soon-to-be husband, John Robison, when they were both students at the University of Georgia. It was the beginning of a tumultuous 23-year relationship marked by abuse and the birth of their two sons, John Elder and Chris (who later changed his name to Augusten Burroughs). The family moved frequently, following John's teaching positions, until settling permanently in Massachusetts near Amherst in the 1960s, where Margaret painted and wrote poetry. It was here she met Dr. Rodolph Turcotte-the psychiatrist at the heart of Scissors-and suffered the first of several psychotic episodes. A stroke more than 20 years earlier left her paralyzed on her left side, though still able to write and speak. Robison recounts the key events in her life-from the physical abuse she suffered at the hands of John throughout their marriage to her various institutionalizations and her thinly veiled criticism of Burroughs's own memoirs-with excessive detail that exhausts rather than enlightens the reader. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Poet and essayist Robison's (What Matters, 2001, etc.) autobiography of madness and redemptioncompleting a trilogy of dysfunction of sorts, joining the memoirs of her sons, Augusten Burroughs (Running withScissors, 2002) and John Elder Robison (Look Me in the Eye, 2007).The author was raised in rural Georgia in the 1930s amid a family of secretsa depressed father and a mother defeated by life, and aunts not spoken of who were spirited away to mental institutions. In her search for her artistic voice and confused sexuality, she bent to the will of family and times. Doing what was expected of her, she married John, a young divinity student and later a philosophy professor. John could be loving and kind, but more oftenover decades of married lifedrunk, violent and psychotic, with frequent and recurrent stays in psychiatric hospitals. In the process, he left deep wounds on his wife and children. Finally, depression and psychosis overtook Robison herself and she too was committed. Yet, as she writes, "madness broke through the thick walls of repression," and she began to write. Still, she had to extricate herself from John and from an ersatz and cult-like psychiatrist, under whose spell she had fallen until he tried to rape her. But Robison persevered, continuing to write and teach and finding love and companionship with a woman. Though a stroke rendered her left side paralyzed, she eventually regained the speech she had lost. She also found her voice, and in old age made the story of her life her own. Robison's story, fairly or not, is really one about women and menhow women can become lost and wounded in the world of men and saved and renewed in the world of women.A harshly honest memoir that paints a portrait of a woman and a life, both brave and flawed.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
With her long overdue memoir, Robison, mother of Augusten Burroughs (Running With Scissors, 2002) and John Elder Robison (Look Me in the Eye, 2007), tosses another piece of the family's Rashomon-like puzzle on the table. Is it any surprise that the three pieces do not fit together into a cohesive whole? Although she confirms at least some of Burroughs' assertions about her husband John's alcoholism and abuse, she insists he only physically abused her. She also claims that the reason she and John assigned guardianship of their 13-year-old son to a quack psychiatrist was to keep him in a better school district. But then she acknowledges knowing that the psychiatrist seldom made the boy go to school and that he was having a homosexual affair with the doctor's 33-year-old son. It's too bad that Robison's version of the truth about her family becomes so terribly muddled, due to trauma and psychosis havin. tor. her memory apart, and that her whiny narrative makes it clear that the boys did not inherit their senses of humor from their mother.--Chavez, Donn. Copyright 2010 Booklist