I saw this on a list of "best books since 2000 (so far)" and it's fine —it's far better than The Unwinding of the Miracle, which I also finished last week — but I wouldn't race out to read it. It is a memoir about the author's mother and ostensibly about the author's horrible childhood, but unlike Jeannette Walls' brilliant The Glass Castle or Tara Westover's amazing Educated, The Afterlife dwells not at all on the author's actual childhood. The details and the emotional trauma have to be inferr...

Very disappointed. This has been on my "to read list" forever. Just couldn't get into it. It was more just his whining then a story of his mother.

This memoir, about Antrim's alcoholic mother, is a beautiful but tortured book. After he wrote it, he felt he had betrayed his mother and fell into a suicidal depression. (He survived, and wrote an amazing essay about it called "The Hospital," published this year in the New Yorker.) But if anything it feels like he pulls his punches. Vivid scenes of his mother's illness and rage are interspersed with meandering subplots about forged paintings and downed church steeples. It's almost as if he coul...

I liked this book for all the reasons a lot of people disliked it: its episodic, digressive style suited the subject matter, I thought. Antrim's memories of his mother provide the frame for a larger exploration of his extended family history, and those memories are suspect due to the nature of his own self-protective, self-interested story. He is upfront about this, writing often of his mistrust and doubt of his own remembrances. "As I remember things now, she was living in an apartment that I h...

I keep thinking about this book. It has marvelous stream of conscious writing throughout, although it also seems blah in spots. I think what I like best about it is the beautiful description of fashion as both an art and as a medium of communication at the cultural level. Much of what the author reveals in that segment could also apply to science or mathematics or philosophy or ... Really insightful.The author's recollections of his mother are at times strong and fill all five senses, while fain...

An interesting personal reading experience even if a bit uneven. At first I was not engaged much with the content but was fascinated by a few very long sentences often sprinkled with semi-colons. Interested but not super engaged. Later, no longer paying much attention to the sentences, I was a bit bored and thought about scrapping it. But then something came into focus. I'm not sure exactly where and when but about 100 pages in his mother and his relationship with her becomes darkly poetic and v...

There was a zany Barthelme-like quality to the earlier novels I read by Antrim that is completely absent from "The Afterlife." This is not to say that the novels were immature or derivative or that "The Afterlife" is plodding or dry. I think Antrim merely set out to write very different types of books and succeeded at each. There's an ambition, a daring, and an inventiveness in "The Verificationist" and "The Hundred Brothers" that I would say comes with youth, the author hoping to stand out. A l...

The Afterlife by Donald Antrim starts off with a hilarious account of his quest for the perfect bed. Then, as is so often the case with Antrim, the comic turns out to be tinged with tragic. The Afterlife is the story of Antrim's complicated, difficult, and often painful relationship with his alcoholic mother, a relationship that is unresolved by her sobriety or, later, her dying, or her death. It is a relationship Antrim is still looking to comprehend and come to terms with.I loved the opening o...

A collection of Antrim's non-fiction essays, originally published in "The New Yorker," about his family, primarily about his relationship with his mother, a recovering alcoholic, an eccentric fashion designer, and the woman whom he desires distance from and connection to all at once. The first essay details her death, and how Antrim deals with it by searching to buy the most luxurious and expensive bed he can; it's funny and sad and heart-searing. The following pieces, though, don't benefit from...

Unfortunately, the work of Donald Antrim is best described as frivolous. He's obviously a smart guy (in a pompous, I know a lot of obscure shit about 19th Century American painting kind of way). Moreover, he's so well connected within the New York literary community that he can basically fluff the first five pages of whatever EXTREMELY LITHE thing he publishes with praise from b-grade critics, Manhattan memoirists, writers-- like himself-- who have to work crummy teaching jobs to cover the rent

I can't recommend this book. While I'm sure the author meant it to be cathartic to write about his mother's passing, it was meandering, getting lost in a story inside another story. Lengthy descriptions of a kimono and the childhood home dragged on. Maybe even a little... grandiose? I initially pushed through in the hope it would get better, but then it didn't and I was close to finishing, so I did.

The Afterlife (Memoir) Donald Antrim. 2006. 195 pages. Seven parts.The memoir is a grief dealing with the eventual demise of the author’s mother from lung cancer, who had been an alcoholic as well as chain smoker. As a nonlinear narrative, there was an obvious intention in attempting to bring life by relating in detail scenes from the past. Or bringing people from the past, who had died, as well. Details that had him conflicted in the end as the author kept coming with I think were bits and piec...

I read more than halfway and had to return this to the library. I enjoy Antrim's writing but he kept talking about how his mother was "terrible" and I kept waiting to see "terrible" show up. If he thinks what he grew up with was terrible, then he might have some white male privilege to unpack.

I've long been reading Antrim in The New Yorker, and this 7-part collection in memoir form was a gift from my sister.Dark, episodic, funny, utterly tragic, clever, confusing at times, Antrim links items to people he loved and hated - his bed/his mother, a painting/his uncle, a book/his father, a box of ashes/his sister - often with clarity.However, the episodic nature of the writing cycled, and I found myself often re-reading. I was continually struck at how much we're shaped, for better or wors...

"Most all of my mother's stories - the angry tales she told me, before and after she got sober - about her life with my father contained, I think, a notion of self-improvement as a process of gathering insights into other people: if we name the faults of those who have hurt us, we will be shielded from pain; if we can collect evidence to justify out anger, we will overcome shame; if we pity our betrayers, we will not have been betrayed, mishandled, misunderstood, or left abandoned. But what happ...