Irma

November 1, 2022

Over the last five decades, McDonnell has proved himself as a publishing executive (e.g., as editor in chief of Esquire) a writer (e.g., the novel California Bloodstock). Here he relates his realization that all these accomplishments were made possible by his mother, Irma, who was widowed young and raised him self-effacingly but with toughness and smarts to make his own life. With a 35,000-copy first printing.

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February 27, 2023
Novelist and former Sports Illustrated editor McDonell (The Accidental Life) delivers an unfocused memoir of growing up in postwar California with his mother, Irma, and stepfather Norm. Norm was a chauvinist who beat Irma and salved his failures with racist, sexist bluster, on one occasion “rolling a toothpick in his mouth and winking to that a girl in his seventh-grade class was stacked.” After Irma divorced Norm, she built an independent life as a teacher and conveyed to her son simple lessons—“it’s better not to be like everyone else”; be “kind and fair and up for people”—that questioned patriarchal attitudes. The author moves on to his own romantic entanglements and relationships with his sons, crediting Irma with nurturing his love of liberated women and teaching him how to let his own children be themselves. McDonell’s male feminism can be overwrought, as when he castigates himself just for looking at women, or registers “disgust” with Ernest Hemingway’s literary machismo. His writing is itself often Hemingwayesque in its spare, blunt prose, but it also tends to get bogged down in hazy, directionless ruminations. The resulting meditation on what it means to be a decent man isn’t wrong, but it lacks the profundity it’s straining for. Agent: Amanda Urban, ICM Partners.

March 1, 2023
A son's moving tribute to his mother's love and support. In this follow-up memoir to The Accidental Life, McDonell (b. 1944), the former editor of Time Inc. Sports Group, depicts a young widowed mother's determination to raise her son in his father's image. Drawn from diaries and daybooks, the text describes the unique bond shared with his mother, Irma, a connection that intensified upon the premature death of his father, Bob. After Bob's death, Irma restlessly relocated them, with stops in multiple states, before she bought "a new Ford convertible so we can drive to California with the top down." The author had a fairly solitary childhood before Irma's friend Norm arrived and they got married--even though his pessimistic, money-focused worldview clashed with Irma's open-minded optimism. Throughout this touching book, the author reflects on how his father's early death resonated throughout his boyhood and how he and Irma strove to overcompensate for the absence. The true hero of the memoir, of course, is Irma, a schoolteacher who instilled in McDonell the classic values of responsibility and confidence. When Norm began to demonstrate abusive tendencies, Irma remained an "unyielding" rock of stability and unconditional love. Meanwhile, McDonell developed a fierce, cocky independence, playing high school football and partying, often underappreciating the sacrifices Irma made. In the second section of the book, the author switches to a third-person perspective, describing his adult struggles with depression and his successes as a journalist and novelist as well as his experience as a father of two sons without a "philosophy of fatherhood." In a narrative brimming with vignettes ranging from humorously innocent to painfully melancholy, McDonell chronicles how he grew increasingly appreciative of Irma and her innate ability to overcome her own grief to focus on raising the kind, resilient, morally upright man Bob would've fostered himself. A rich and bittersweet portrait of a mother and son spanning miles, decades, and complex emotions.

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Starred review from April 1, 2023
"You think too much," McDonell's stepfather, whom he detests, once told him when he was a boy. Readers will be glad he does all that thinking, since it has led to this splendid memoir about how his life, as he puts it, braided out of his mother's, the eponymous Irma. Roughly chronological, the story is told in three parts: the first, in first person, is about McDonell's childhood; the second, in third person ("Hiding now in the third person . . ."), focuses on his and Irma's adult lives; part three returns to first person as it shares Irma's last years. Beautifully written, the book's uniformly insightful chapters are all brief--some as short as a paragraph, others seldom more than three or four pages. Perhaps the most heartfelt and introspective chapters are those about the author's two sons. "He would trust Irma's wisdom," he writes about raising the boys, concluding by saying, "He wished they had spent more time with Irma." Along the way, the book is enhanced by some wonderful set pieces, arguably the best being one about Africa, lions, and Ernest Hemingway, whom he despises. Sadly, there is little about legendary magazine editor McDonell's professional life; for that, readers will want to turn to his previous memoir, The Accidental Life (2016), which this more-personal volume complements perfectly.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.