In this latest post, Joseph Edwin Haeger reviews This Never Happened by Liz Scott. (University of Hell Press)
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I am so honored to have received such heartfelt and poignant recognition and review from Sweet Lit. Read on and feel free to share!
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I am so pleased and honored to have been included among the Powell’s Staff Top Fives.
Thank you so much for reading and supporting This Never Happened!
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"Writing a Memoir: In theory I do believe that we all have a story tell; that we are each entitled to the space we take up on the this planet; that each of our voices should be heard. But the decision to commit my story to paper and send it out into the world has been fraught. Feeling entitled myself to have a story worth telling, that my life is worth the ink, feels perilously close to believing that I am extraordinary. A whole book about me! After all, when you write a book where "I" is the topic, isnt that prima facie proof that you, too, are a narcissist?" (page 249)
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SUMMARY: This Never Happened is a genre-bending memoir, told in a non-linear way using photographs, letters, and lists. This is a spare work…alternatively heartbreaking and darkly comic. Like an archeological dig, this memoir goes in search of the answers to the mysteries of my family. It’s an unflinching quest to uncover the truth, leaving no one, including myself, unexamined. In the end, it is about the challenge of making peace with questions that will never be answered and the struggle to forgive.
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When memoir is done well it has the capacity to invoke a far deeper connection than fiction. In memoir, you understand these characters are alive or at least once lived. It becomes not just a story, but a relation of memory, a communing of remarkable vulnerability. Liz Scott, in her memoir This Never Happened, does memoir remarkably well.
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A Celebration of Small Press and Self-Published Books
“Book Review: This Never Happened” — reviewed by Jaylynn Korrell
A tug of war between compassion and resentment.
The trauma our parents cause us isn’t always easily resolved in a therapy session. This Never Happened, a memoir by Liz Scott, exemplifies just how long those wounds can stay unhealed.
A woman now “in [her] eighth decade,” Scott writes this book as a glance back on the foundation that started her journey. With emphasis on figuring out her past, she tries to come to terms with the anonymity that both her parents left of their history. They provided her no glimpse into their own lives and no information about the families they both come from. Left to her own devices, Scott takes it upon herself to piece together their lives and all the things that happened between the silence within her family.
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This Never Happened (April 2019)
by Liz Scott
“I love the spare and darkly humorous voice of this writer, and I really want to read her memoir. In this age of everyone and their cousin sending off DNA to find their roots, this book sounds like the real thing, the deep and painful beginnings of what makes us what we are.”
— Doug C. orders books for Powell’s, has been referred to as a data ninja, and really just wants a nap.
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Anyone who didn’t grow up with a narcissistic parent may be baffled in encountering them. Why’s Joe so infuriated by everything his mother says and does? She seems so charming.
However, anyone who did grow up with a self-centered parent knows that there’s no road too low, no lie too bald-faced, no mirror too dingy to repel them.
Liz Scott knows this like gospel. Her memoir This Never Happened details many of the hundreds of horror stories she lived through because of the narcissistic monster who was her mother. At the beating heart of Scott’s book lies her attempts to cope with that mother, and with the legacy of self-erasure she bequeathed. “This is where I live—somewhere smack between pity and rage, between empathy and indictment. And as hard as I look, I still can’t find a place between mercy and pain.”
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