The Book-Eater Strikes Again: Losing Mum and Pup
Losing Mum and Pup: A Memoir
He was clutching my arm. It wrenched my heart. This was terra nova to me: the delusional parent who must be denied for his own good. Every fiber of one’s being reflexively inclines to accede to the wishes of a parent. It is contra naturnam (to use a WFB term) to say no to someone who has raised you, clothed you, fed you from day one - well, even if, in Pup’s case, these actual duties were elaborately subcontracted; still, it feels as though you’re disobeying and in contravention of the Fourth Commandment. This is the crushing, awful daily lot of the children of Alzheimer’s patients. “No, Mom, let’s not put our fingers in the blender, okay?”
Clever, touching, but what - pray - is a “WFB term?” As Christopher Buckley has never merely been a prize-winning satirist and former White House speechwriter, here he is not merely a grieving son. He is the only child of Patricia Buckley and conservative icon William F. Buckley Jr., people he accurately describes once, and only once, as “larger than life.” This puts a particular spin on the memoir of his bereavement, which the author identifies in the book’s opening line: “I had more or less resolved not to write a book about my parents. But I’m a writer, and when the universe hands you material like this, not writing about it amounts to either a waste or a conscious act of evasion.”
Both impulses are correct. Fish swim, and writers write. At the same time, this is not simply a well-known author writing about a notional parent abusing sleeping pills and contemplating a luncheon with long-dead friends. No, the man relieving himself out of a stopped limousine is one of the best-known public intellectuals of the 20th century. At some point reading urine reports the author mailed to close friends and family, one wonders if William F. Buckley Jr. have wanted this to be part of his legacy. It seems unfair reading about a senescing titan’s failings and foibles.
Yet, Losing Mum and Pup stays far away from being a tell-all-book. It is warm, authentic, interspersed with anecdotes from Buckley’s childhood, and his reflections on being a parent himself. The author’s accustomed pacing and wit remains in the book’s darker passages. On bringing a copy of Ecclesiastes to his mother’s bedside, “I’m agnostic now, but I haven’t quite reached the point of reading aloud from Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion at the deathbed of a loved one.” It’s a clever book.
It is the last few chapters of Losing Mum and Pup that trade most heavily on the Buckley name. Receiving condolences from George W. Bush is not an experience many could relate to, although it’s an amusing scene that says much about our 43rd president (‘He was quite a guy.’ ‘Yes, sir, he was’). The nineteenth chapter is the strangest: some fifty pages previously the author on several occasions discusses suicide, which his father would consider, “if it weren’t for the religious aspect.” But here in chapter nineteen a recently bereaved Buckley strong arms his father’s biographer, Sam Tanenhaus, into not reporting a similar conversation in a piece for the New York Times. It is a very strange episode, and Buckley makes much of the “timing” of such a revelation; still Sam Tanenhaus winds up looking like a gentleman and a reporter who pulls his punches, Christopher Buckley like something of a bully, and one generally wonders why this chapter remained in the book, at all.
Whether or not Christopher Buckley successfully writes about the experience of losing one’s parents without trading on his parents celebrity, is a conclusion each reader likely will have to make for himself. Either way, it is an interesting, engaging book worth reading; I read it in all of a day, which given my infidelity to any single book at any single moment in time, tells you something about it’s ability to capture and hold a reader’s interest. For me, it ranks as a three or a four out of five stars, and for you I more than usually cannot say. If you are particularly inclined to lionize the author’s late parents, and wish to retain that inclination, Losing Mum and Pup: A Memoir
