From the Publisher
By turns lyrical and stark, Mary Trump writes with honesty, anguish, and unflinching detail about growing up in a family that made a sport of destroying its own. Who Could Ever Love You lays bare the Trump dynastic traumas and demonstrates how those traumas now hold sway over all of us. Mary Trump has written a brilliant memoir.”
—Molly Jong-Fast
“This memoir is the portrait of a spark— is it love, or God, or decency?— the spark inside the rare person that can grow in the hardest ground, the sandiest soil. I honestly don’t know how someone can withstand such a thoroughly poisonous stew of a family dynamic and come out the other end such an intelligent, caring and perspicacious human being. That Mary Trump exists is nothing short of a miracle.”
—Aimee Mann, Grammy Award-winning musician
"Trump’s clear and concise prose shines...an astute and occasionally explosive plunge into an American dynasty’s heart of darkness." — Publishers Weekly, starred review
"With raw authenticity and bracing detail. . . [Trump] peels back the traumatic layers of her early life. . .[She] doesn’t skimp on the jarring, revelatory details of her toxic family, telling her truths with lucidity. . .[A] scathing expose of the enduring fallout from a poisonous, dysfunctional family dynamic." — Kirkus, starred review
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2024-07-17
A second tell-all memoir from the former president’s niece.
Mary Trump, a clinical psychologist, expands her vehemently critical assessment of her family outward after the first memoir,Too Much and Never Enough, skewered Uncle Donald. With raw authenticity and bracing detail, she painstakingly reveals the devastating psychological impact of the Trump clan's outraged reaction to her first tell-all, which forced her to check herself into a treatment program utilizing experimental ketamine therapy. Three years prior, she’d had treatment for “intensive trauma” and a dissociation condition, all exacerbated by the fact that “Donald Trump is my uncle.” Looking inward, she peels back the traumatic layers of her early life growing up in Jamaica, New York, with parents Freddy, a commercial airline pilot, and Linda, a flight attendant. Sadly, her parents’ idyllic romance curdled beneath the constant mockery and “stifling control and blanket disapproval” of her grandfather, real estate mogul Fred Trump, the “unaffectionate” family patriarch. Eventually the author would grieve for her parents, who each suffered with personal demons, particularly her father, who succumbed to alcoholism and died prematurely at age 42. Ordeals with chronic asthma attacks (which were ignored by her dismissive mother), sexual harassment from a neighbor, and an indifferent family forced her to shut out the world around her and “turn inward.” With blistering frankness, Trump elaborates on the melodrama surrounding her grandfather’s will and the numerous lawsuits (“my family’s love language”) that ensued after Donald and his siblings calculatedly stole her and her father’s inheritance from her grandfather’s estate. Trump, who is openly gay and a mother to a grown daughter, doesn’t skimp on the jarring, revelatory details of her toxic family, telling her truths with lucidity despite the narrative’s relentlessly despondent tone and texture. She unpacks the baseline origins of her debilitating stress, self-loathing, and self-isolation in a heartless clan that apparently couldn’t care less about her.
Another scathing exposé of the enduring fallout from a poisonous, dysfunctional family dynamic.
