Pull Me Up: A Memoir

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review from Discover Great New Writers
Having carved out a niche for himself with a regular column in The New York Times, Barry now trains his keen eye on his own story in Pull Me Up. The eldest of four children, he recounts his amusingly idiosyncratic childhood in a slightly off-kilter Irish-American clan of Deer Park, Long Island, including a father who believes in UFOs and a mother whose collection of seashells and garden statuary threatens to overtake the very refuge it guards.

But Barry's youth gives way to a young adulthood when his career as a reporter begins to accelerate while his parents face financial setbacks and deteriorating health. Barry paints a tender but troubling portrait of his forbears. His mother faces lung cancer with quiet stoicism, nursing a beer and countless cigarettes by the blue light of the television. His father screams in agony from the bedroom upstairs, begging to be rid of the pain caused by the untreatable migraines he has endured for nearly 20 years.

But despite the obvious suffering -- including Barry's own bout with cancer in his late 30s -- Pull Me Up is not a memoir of overwhelming heartbreak. Instead, Dan Barry delivers a story of poignant beauty and wry humor from the details of his suburban American family's life, in true reportorial fashion. (Summer 2004 Selection)

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"New York Times columnist Dan Barry sings, to startling and profound effect, the song of his life. Beginning with his boyhood in a distant time when Kennedy was president and Mantle was God, Barry weaves the rhythms of Galway, Ireland - his mother's birthplace - and Deer Park, New York, to tell the story of an unforgettable American family." "From his comic recollections of a familiar yet distinctly quirky upbringing to his account of landing a job in one of the nation's greatest newsrooms, Barry writes so crisply that we feel his emotions as we recall our own. We remember again the timeless joy of playing for a Little League team, this one oddly called the Ducks, as well as the riotous indignities of being hazed on the high school bus. Later, we experience the thrilling responsibility of working as a small-town, New England reporter; the galvanizing fear of facing a life-threatening illness; and the spiritual calm that comes from just shooting baskets." As he tells his story, Barry draws poignant portraits of those who shaped his life: his mother, Noreen, passing on her father's stories of the banshee's wail as a blue veil of cigarette smoke envelops her; his father, Gene, railing against big-business conspiracies when he is not in the clutch of cluster migraines; his three siblings beside him in the back of the family station wagon, joining their parents in searching the night skies for the UFOs that they fervently believe will one day appear; and a young woman in upstate New York who answers a bold question from Barry that changes their lives.

FROM THE CRITICS

Wendy Wasserstein - The New York Times

Pull Me Up is an extraordinarily lyrical look at a mid-20th-century working-class Irish-American family. Unlike other recollections of that period, Dan Barry's memoir of life in suburban Long Island is neither retro nor campy. In the flat world of parking lots, tract homes, yellow school buses and Little League, Mr. Barry has managed to find the richness of heart of a now oddly distant America.

The New York Times Book Review

There seems to be a notion afoot that the memoir has overstayed its welcome, that there is something inherently tacky about the parade of seminobodies exhibiting their stumps of addiction or abuse...I hope we can always celebrate a writer who, trying to make intelligent sense of life's confusions, gives us a memoir that is witty, self-aware and peopled with strong characters. That's the case with Pull Me Up, by Dan Barry.—Phillip Lopate

Publishers Weekly

Although Barry is the New York Times's "About New York" columnist, his memoir isn't the story of his award-winning journalism career. More like Pete Hamill or Frank McCourt, Barry wants to recount growing up Irish and Catholic on Long Island in the late 1950s and '60s. "Pull me up" was his mom's morphine-soaked plea as she lay dying of lung cancer on the living room sofa-and what a shock it was that his mother was the first to go, as his father had suffered through paralyzing cluster migraines for 20 years. Barry takes readers back to what he calls the Eisenhower years, when gas stations handed out "plaid stamps," women's perms had a distinct "chemical whiff" and delis made potato salad loaded with bacon. He lovingly details seasoning his baseball mitt, oiling, binding and hiding it under his mattress. He relives his Catholic school upbringing, complete with hazing from upperclassmen and pedophilic assaults from Brother Noel, but also those wonderful teachers who helped him realize his calling as a writer. After college came various jobs and romances, even marriage and adopting a baby, all of which is very entertaining, but is horribly interrupted six months after Barry's mother dies, when he finds himself diagnosed, at age 41, with cancer. Perhaps anyone's struggle to survive a deadly illness transforms their life; as Barry puts it, he knew "what it was like to nearly drown," and then felt the "sting of a saltwater blessing" on his face. This is a beautiful book. Agents, Todd Shuster and Lane Zachary. (May) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

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