Bettyville: A Memoir

I try to keep these posts to one paragraph. But in writing about this beautiful book, George Hodgman’s Bettyville, a memoir of a gay, Protestant, middle age man’s decision to go back to Missouri to tend to his aging mother, it is just too hard to do that. This memoir is so quotable, so moving, so funny, so sad, so painfully honest, so distressing and ultimately, so wonderful. It was one of those books, where I just kept underlining and writing, “Love this.” The author, a former editor at Vanity Fair, is a recovering drug addict, who used to live high and hard in Manhattan and Fire Island. His parents never acknowledged he was gay. Yet they loved him and he loved them back. You will too. He makes small-town Missouri, a place filled with roses, old churches, donuts and meth addicts, come alive. Here are some great sentences. There are just so many. If you want to read more about the author, go to his website, www.Georgehodgman.com.“When she opens her eyes, I put an old soft towel in the dryer to warm up and thren spread it around her feet, which she complains get cold at night.” (p.20)“I was raised to get it right. I was raised to work. These were some of the things my mother taught me by example.” (p.21)“This morning, as usual, there was coffee, ready and waiting. Every night Betty changes the filter and puts the water, some of which she always manages to spill, into our old, huffy-puffy machine. She is very conscientious about this; it almost is the last task, aside from the laundry, that she is able to complete successfully.” (p.23)“In the mornings my mother stands at the window in the dining room, where the silver is tarnished now, in front of a wicker stand where she once kept geraniums, gazing out at the roses for as long as she can bear to stand up.” (p. 24)“Our moods fold into each other’s more and more as the days pass.” (p. 26)“As I leave to take my shower, she picks up her book, oblivious to my concerns, to the demands of the world. Something in her has just let go of all that.” (p.26) “Luckily to distract us there is Wheel of Fortune, a show we despise so avidly we cannot ever miss it.” (p.29)“The sky is the sea here, our object of contemplation in all its moods and shades. My father taught me to observe it.” (p.30)“I have no husband or domestic partner or even beloved pet. Betty would never guess quite how things have been. If pressed to do so, she could not really imagine how I have lived.” (p.33)“Before sleep, I go outside to check the stars, so much more visible here than in New York. They calm me after seeing Betty under siege. I turn on the coach light by the driveway; I leave it burning all night every night. We are expecting no guests but it says that we are still alive, not ready yet to disappear into the dark.” (p.33)“Her emotions are her most delicate possessions, rarely taken out, even for company.” (p.55)“Where do the hidden things go? Not away. Nothing goes away.” (p. 99)“Kindness may have been the most difficult of virtues,but when I have encountered it, it has meant everything to me.” (p.132)“I get angry along with her when she makes a mistake. I get mad when she is less than she was.” (p.135)“I’m not sure I have a tribe, though I think I have always longed for one.” (p. 146)‘Take care of my little girl,’ she said. I am trying.” (p. 229)“I think people who have always felt okay in the world will never understand those of us who don’t.” (p.237)“I told the truth. It was the strangest thing to not try to cover it up.” (p.244)“I can never be a person who has not made mistakes. But I can be someone honest who has lived through them: one of those who look you square in the eye and say, ‘This is how it’s been, and it is okay.” It has been a long, long struggle to hold my head up. I think I have survived because of Betty, more than anyone. I will never stop remembering my mother’s strength, her struggle to remember words, to hang on to the world. I will always hear her at the piano, an old woman practicing, still trying to get it right, to find the right notes. I will see her walking, haltingly, in the dark, doing her best to find her way. We have sometimes struggled with words, but I am Betty’s boy. There are so many things I will carry when I leave Bettyville with my old suitcase.” (p.245)“Sometimes it is okay to be broken open, even if it is sadness that finally connects you to everything you are feeling.” (p.273)“Because I have come through for her. It has taken me so long to feel okay in my own skin, but I feel better, more at home in the world. Most days.” (p.275)“The bane of writing is self-doubt; the gift is friends, real friends, who save you.” (Acknowledgements, p. 277)“My greatest wish is to hurt no one, though I believe we are often the most triumphant when revealed at our most human.” (Author’s Note, p.289)

I was totally hooked on George Hodgman’s memoir BETTYVILLE (such a loving tribute to his mother) by the end of chapter one. If he had called it “Virginiaville, I would have sworn he was writing about my mother and me. Betty is in her early 90’s, is losing her mind (she is afraid she will forget the hymns she still plays on the piano in church), she won’t talk about her encroaching dementia, she is angry, and she doesn’t understand her gay son. The parallels are eerie. On the other hand, this well-written book reaches the universal as George and Betty are all too much like many gay children and their parents of a certain generation in the U. S.Interlaced with Mr. Hodgman’s praise song to his mother is his own story as well. He at thirty-five is a recently unemployed editor from New York who returns to Paris, Missouri for a short visit to his mother’s and winds up staying to take care of her. (Having spent two years in Warrensburg, Missouri teaching English at a college there, I can testify to and smile at the strange names that towns in Missouri are famous for, a list of which the author gives the reader in the first and second paragraphs of his memoir. I had a student from Peculiar, one place that he names although he left off one of my favorites, Nob Noster.) In Paris the most popular verb is “pray,” and graduates of the local high school cannot get into state universities because the school no longer offers a foreign language.Growing up in Missouri, Mr. Hodgman never cared for football (Betty made him go out for the high school team in an effort to make him fit in) although he liked the marching band. As a youngster he watched TV soap operas—“As the World Turns” and “Edge of Night”-- and read MODERN SCREEN and PHOTOPLAY. He knew he didn’t fit in exactly. As an adult in New York, he does way too many drugs but does get into rehab and has difficulty with relationships although he does not find himself tragic: “I may not have had a life partner or a bunch of kids. But I have had loves you can’t quite put a label on, though now I am reconciled to being on my own.” And I loved his comment (he has a great sense of humor) that he does better with “insignificant others” than significant others.The passages in this engaging memoir that are just as moving and sad as the writer’s descriptions of his mother sinking into dementia have to do with how he, his mother and his father always danced around the gay issue. They just didn’t talk about it. George has avoided the topic because he is afraid that if he broached the subject about the elephant that is always in the room, that he might have lost the love that his parents (his father is now deceased) had for him. Here is a passage that will break your heart: “There is much we have said nothing about, and yes, it is too late now. I kept silent. I didn’t tell them who I was. They didn’t ask. We didn’t know what to do about me. She would have helped me, if she had known how. She just didn’t know. I didn’t know what to ask for. I was scared. So was she. We never broke open. It was too frightening and we all have paid the price. My father never knew all of who I was. I never gave him the chance.”But back to this strange and loving woman that Mr. Hodgman calls “mother.” Although age is taking everything away from her and she believes she has lived too long and is “taking someone else’s time,” she is still his mother. He understands that. She read to him as a child (as my own precious mother did for me). Can there be a better tribute about a mother than this? “She gave me words.” Finally Mr. Hodgman summarizes what his mother ultimately means to him in words that will make your eyes burn if you are not careful: “I think I have survived because of Betty, more than anyone. I will never stop remembering my mother’s strength, her struggle to remember words, to hang on to the world. I will always hear her at the piano, an old woman practicing, still trying to get it right, to find the right notes. . . We have sometimes struggled with words but I am Betty’s boy.” And as Mr. Hodgman fantasizes in the Epilogue of what his life will be like when he is old and in the “Liza Minelli ward at Villa Fabulosa, he concludes “and in the end, kindness is everything.”BETTYVILLE is a near perfect memoir about two less-than-perfect but deeply loving human beings. I cannot fathom the kind of reader who would not be taken by it.

I found this book profoundly moving. It is uneven and could have done with better editing, but the further i got into it the more I was hooked. A brave, honest and very affecting account of a son's love for his parents and devotion to his mother as she declines. Also a very honest account of what it is like to grow up gay in a small town before the age of gay rights. It has taught me lot . Throughly recommended.

Mint condition and looks great. Looking forward to reading.

Very thought provoking book. Great price.

Very poignant story, beautifully written

Such a boring book- I'm glad the dog ending up shredding it!