A searing, deeply moving literary memoir of poems and essays that reflect on the author's complicated feelings about his disadvantaged childhood on a Native American reservation with his siblings and alcoholic mother, from the critically acclaimed author of the 2007 semiautobiographical young-adult novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Family relationships are never simple. But Sherman Alexie's bond with his mother Lillian was more complex than most. She plunged her family into chaos with a drinking habit, but shed her addiction when it was on the brink of costing her everything. She survived a violent past, but created an elaborate facade to hide the truth. She selflessly cared for strangers, but was often incapable of showering her children with the affection that they so desperately craved. She wanted a better life for her son, but it was only by leaving her behind that he could hope to achieve it. It's these contradictions that made Lillian Alexie a beautiful, mercurial, abusive, intelligent, complicated, and very human woman. When she passed away, the incongruities that defined his mother shook Sherman and his remembrance of her. Grappling with the haunting ghosts of the past in the wake of loss, he responded the only way he knew how: he wrote. The result is filled with raw, angry, funny, profane, tender memories of a childhood few can imagine, much less survive. A powerful, deeply felt account of a complicated relationship. Sherman Alexie is the author of The Business of Fancydancing: stories and poems and, most recently, Blasphemy, stories, and Face, poetry. One of his best-known books is The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993), a collection of short stories. It was adapted as the film Smoke Signals (1998), for which he also wrote the screenplay. Alexie lives with his family in Seattle."--Provided by publisher.