by Mary L. Trump
Publishers Weekly The unraveling of a family prefigures the unraveling of a nation in this wounding account from clinical psychologist Trump. One year after publishing 2020’s Too Much and Never Enough, an exposé of her uncle, Donald Trump, the author checked into treatment for “dissociation... and increasing social isolation.” Sensing her condition was linked to childhood trauma, she revisited her early years, which were dominated by her grandfather, real estate developer Fred Trump. Much of the memoir outlines her self-interrogation: her parents, Freddy and Linda, spent “glittering evenings at Manhattan clubs,” yet Freddy, who left the family business to become a pilot, encountered “stifling control and blanket disapproval” from his father, who called him “a goddamned chauffeur in the sky.” After Freddy descended into alcoholism, he and Linda divorced, leaving a five-year-old Trump and her older brother, Frederick, with an angry and inattentive mother. Trump endured sexual abuse from a teenage neighbor, life-threatening asthma that Linda ignored, and her father’s early death, only to have Donald and his siblings steal Freddy’s portion of the inheritance from her grandfather. The material can be astonishingly bleak, but Trump’s clear and concise prose shines, and she has a well-trained eye for the melancholy that runs through her family. It’s an astute and occasionally explosive plunge into an American dynasty’s heart of darkness. Agent: Pilar Queen, UTA. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved Book list Mary Trump, niece of Donald, has written about her extended dysfunctional family in Too Much, Never Enough (2020). Here she returns to the topic, with the emphasis on her parents. Those who’ve read the previous book will know her father, Freddy, namesake of his tyrant father, was a hopeless alcoholic, in and out of rehab; her mother was disappointed, disillusioned, and beholden to the Trump family even after her divorce. Without the Trump name attached, this would still be a moving (if somewhat disjointed) look at a sad childhood. But Trump’s readers get it by now. In her family, cruelty was a feature not a bug. From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission. |
