The Nearly Departed: Or, My Family & Other Foreigners - Hardcover

Cullerton, Brenda

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41 ratings by Goodreads

9780316162531: The Nearly Departed: Or, My Family & Other Foreigners

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0316162531 ISBN 13: 9780316162531

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company, 2003

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The journalist and fashion writer offers a memoir of her very eccentric family, from her mother who wore three pairs of glasses, one on top of the other, and gardened in black underwear to her brother who lived in a tar-paper shack on the front lawn.

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About the Author:

Brenda Cullerton is an occasional ghost writer who continues to develop slogans for the sometimes fickle world of fashion. She has also written several books on interiors and the home.

From Publishers Weekly:

Advertising slogan writer Cullerton tells the unexpectedly funny story of her "nearly departed," "brilliantly impaired" family. Picture her mom wearing "three pairs of glasses, one on top of the other," gardening in her Connecticut yard in her underwear. Or her formerly globe-trotting playboy dad, now bedridden, hurling curses worthy of a Tourette's sufferer, demanding his soda. As Cullerton meditates on her dotty family's eccentricities, she realizes there's a method to their madnesses. From her 71-year-old pot-smoking Uncle Larry, who "could be Hunter Thompson's version of a gonzo Santa Claus," to her ditsy Aunt Janet, who can't understand why the chickens in the butcher shop only have two legs, there's a desperate drive in all of them to escape the mediocrity of sameness, refusing to celebrate holidays and anniversaries ("commercial events invented by `Hellmark' ") or to live in the houses they actually own (more than one sleeps in the car with one hand on the wheel). While the anecdotes are amusing-e.g., her mother believes Barney is black, not purple; she parks in handicapped spaces, telling her daughter to limp as they leave-there's no mistaking it was often painful being raised by such people. Cullerton's mom enjoyed being difficult, seeing herself like sand irritating an oyster's membrane. But as this memoir shows, from such grit come pearls. By the time both parents are finally "departed," Cullerton begins to realize they haven't quite gone; they're with her, in her, still. Photos.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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