When she is seventeen, Emily Merritt’s beloved father give her the piano she has always wanted. A few days later, having lost his job, he sells Emily’s piano and took the family out of their fine two-story house in Cleveland, Ohio and takes the family down to his hometown Knoxville, Tennessee and into his mother’s three-room house.
The loss of her piano casts a shadow over Emily’s life of poverty in Knoxville, a city she could never love.
David Madden, the author of 15 works of fiction, including Bijou, set in Knoxville, turns to the memoir genre to tell the story of his close relationship with his mother over seven decades.
Rather than develop a conventional narrative, Madden employs an impressionistic style that enables the reader to experience Emily’s memories as he imagines them, in brief, sharply focused scenes.
Throughout the rest of her life, Emily longs to return to Cleveland, Ohio, where she had an idyllic youth with many boyfriends and girlfriends, and where she had been a good swimmer, a good piano student, and had done well in school. Her great love of life in the present is expressed in her love of men and dancing in highway honky-tonks, along with her six beautiful girlfriends. Having divorced her lovable, alcoholic husband, Emily falls deeply in love with alcoholic married men. She doesn’t enjoy whiskey or smoking, but she’s not a church goer.
She moves like a nomad from house to house and from job to job, as a clerk in dress shops, cashier in restaurants and hotels, and as a practical nurse. Petite, she knows she is lovely and charming, but needs to control her gift for sarcasm when dealing with bosses who fire her and the many landlords who evict her for failure to pay rent.
Emily is a courageous fighter as she raises three boys in poverty. A third son dies soon after birth. She enlists the governor’s help in her fight to get paroles for two of her boys. Dickie, the dark brother, is a life-long petty conman, but little brother John, known affectionately as “Sunshine,” becomes a legendary rescuer of wayward boys and girls, and runs for mayor of Knoxville twice. A sometime provider for all the family, Jerry, the middle brother, becomes a merchant seaman, a soldier, and finally a professor and a successful writer in all genres.
A voracious reader, Emily Merritt is very articulate and witty, and uses colorful expressions. Having enjoyed all his life listening to his mother talk, David Madden’s memoir inspires the reader to listen eagerly too.