"Jessica Hendry Nelson knows the power of clean, sparse prose, and her keen eye for the small, most telling details of character show an insight into the human psyche well beyond her years. Her story is oftentimes a dark one, but Nelson holds strong, knowing that saving those we love may first begin, and end, with saving ourselves. A remarkable debut by a wonderfully talented writer." —James Brown, author of The Los Angeles Diaries
"The direction one should go is immediately to a book store and pick up a copy of If Only You People Could Follow Directions. What a great reading experience. Jessica Nelson is a genius at composing the perfect duet between autobiographical resonance and wholly inventive incident. The city of Philadelphia itself is a shady character here —but mainly this is an indispensable tale of family dysfunction and redemption. It's like being read to by an excitable, melancholy, and vivid storyteller extraordinaire." —Howard Norman, author of Next Life Might Be Kinder
"If Only You People Could Follow Directions breaks apart the pieces of family relationships, turns the pieces around, and puts them back together in a way that shows us how love, pain, death, addiction, mental illness, beauty, rage, and compassion are all embedded within one another. Jessica Hendry Nelson has remade autobiography into an unforgettable kaleidoscope where what seems broken is really, and astonishingly, precisely the thing holding your heart together. So you can keep going. So you know what love is. You will never say "family" the same way again." — Lidia Yuknavitch, The Chronology of Water
"Memory doesn't move in a straight line. It is chaotic, digressive, and imperfect. While most memoirs force life into the restrictions of straight lines, Nelson embraces the chaos by moving back and forth in time, free associating among memories, and organizing her life into a series of essays. What could be just another memoir of a family disintegrated by substance abuse becomes a vibrant and challenging exploration of abuse, obsession, coping, family, friendship, and self–discovery."– Josh Cook, Porter Square Books, Cambridge, MA
"This memoir in essays brings to mind Jo Ann Beard's The Boys of My Youth. It's a book for anyone who has ever been young and trying to find themselves – which is to say, it's a book for everyone. Nelson's punch–you–in–the–heart prose is incandescently beautiful.– Michele Filgate, Community Bookstore, Brooklyn, NY
"A stunning debut. Nelson is a writer to watch, not just for her sure–footed prose and her adept storytelling ability, but also because she survived a family defined by addiction and psychological destruction. Nelson grew up as the daughter of an alcoholic father and a mother who varied between best friend and neglectful parent. Her brother Eric is also an addict and suffers from bipolar disorder. It is no surprise that she and many of her closest friends had plenty of exposure to drugs, alcohol, and destructive behaviors during her formative years. Despite her background and her childhood, Nelson graduated from the University of New Hampshire with a degree in English and earned an MFA in Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. Her survival is a story in and of itself, but it is her writing that is the true standout in this memoir." – Terry Louchheim Gilman, Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore, San Diego
"Nelson writes in stark, harrowing detail about the devastation alcohol and drugs have inflicted on her family over the years… as Nelson strives to find balance and peace, she manages to offer hope that survival is possible." —Publishers Weekly
09/23/2013
Nelson, an editor at Fiddleback literary journal, writes in stark, harrowing detail about the devastation alcohol and drugs have inflicted on her family over the years. Her alcoholic father begins an endless cycle in and out of rehab, hospitals, and jail while she and her younger brother are only in grade school. She recalls one particular night when her mother bundles them up to get their dad after he’s smashed his truck. As her father gets into the car, covered in blood and broken glass, he hands the kids candy. His legacy is a daughter who wants “to be held so badly I shake like a hooked fish” when she gets a rare hug from someone, turning to sex and drugs as a teenager; and a son who smokes pot at age 12 and is ultimately diagnosed as bipolar on his way to building a rap sheet. Their mother, no stranger to alcohol use herself, is trying to hold the household together and only has time for her son as he steadily self-destructs. Nelson is gifted student with an escape hatch—going off to college. Although her family’s struggle to break out of the pattern of addiction and enabling is not an easy one, as Nelson strives to find balance and peace, she manages to offer hope that survival is possible. (Jan.)
★ 2013-10-21
It takes a virtuoso writer to make another familial memoir of addiction seem as vital and compelling as this stunning debut does. Where most memoirs have more of a novelistic, chronological continuity, Fiddleback senior nonfiction editor Nelson structures this book as a series of autobiographical essays, most of which could stand on their own; they are the nonfiction equivalent of a series of interconnected short stories. That form perfectly suits her story of a family in which "the roles have been pre-prescribed, written into our DNA." The father will die young after long absences in jail or rehab or another relapse after a short stretch of sobriety. The mother will also self-medicate as she tries to sustain the illusion of family, one that is always falling apart. The son will inherit "the dead father's legacy, this disease," and is often missing and feared dead. The older sister will write this memoir after studying abroad, falling in love, earning her MFA in creative writing, teaching college, publishing in a number of highly regarded journals and maintaining a facade that masks her genetic code: "We are an imperfect people, full of contradictions. Do as I say, not as I do. That sort of thing. Outsiders see me as the most put together, but I harbor a secret: I am just better at faking it. I make it through the day." Yet some days have been a whole lot tougher to make it through, to sustain a sense of "my real life, the one outside the theater of my brother's addiction." As it does in the cycles of recovery and relapse, prison and release, chronology jumbles, and verb tenses shift. The book's excellent centerpiece, "A Second of Startling Regret," unravels the family dynamic and illuminates the "self-sabotaging brain." Even the occasional misstep into writerly precocity--"There is something heroic about fishermen--all that faith in the dark"--can't compromise the author's unflinching honesty and her story's power. An unforgettable debut.
