the story or small
How is the story?
One of the dullest memoirs I've ever read.  Some called this book "depressing" or said it was too painful to read.  After reading the reviews, I steeled myself for the worst.  What was so terrible?  Horrible physical abuse?  A painful story about sexual abuse?  There is none of that here (though it seems to be the backbone of modern literature, unfortunately), only a tale of bad parents whom the author lets off the hook with a gentle shrug.  There is no justification at the end of this book.  No reason to be joyous.  No lasting heartbreak, either.  In fact, by the end of the book, the story is so dry you are just begging to be done with it.  I'm a great fan of memoirs.  I've read everything by David Sedaris, Frank McCourt's 'Angela's Ashes', Marcus Luttrell's amazing survival tale of being the sole survivor of a conflict in the wilderness of Afghanistan, the entire Little House on the Prairie series by Laura Ingalls Wilder, and several other memoirs from D-list authors.  I've even read Jenny McCarthy's memoir/biography 'Jen-X' and there was much more substance to THAT book, if you can believe it.This memoir reeks of someone who has an axe to grind...but not against the people she should - Her PARENTS.  Her axe to grind is probably against characters who never appeared in the pages of her memoir - old husbands, old college enemies, ex-friends...This is one of those "look at me now!" memoirs.  "I lived on Park Avenue! Are you impressed with me yet?"  She does mention this several times, throughout.  The problem is that the story is...boring.  Memoirs, when good, evoke EMOTION.  Memoirs are best when served up with heavy doses of reality.  For every painful moment in life, there are usually ten humorous ones.  I didn't laugh out loud, once. I didn't cry either. For all the misery, there are often many moments of joy no matter what state of poverty you live in.  What you get in this book is an uninteresting stranger with a semi-interesting life told in a dull way.Walls still seems convinced that her lazy parents shaped her life in a positive way, but she never tells us WHY she believes this and she doesn't give the reader permission to think, "Wow, your parents were terrible".  In the end, we're supposed to love their quirkiness along with her.  It's like a memoir that ventures out on the 'you should pity me' branch but retracts itself every time you begin to.  I'm not saying Walls should have written a memoir bashing her parents.  However, more realism would have done nicely.  It's okay to love bad parents, too.  She might want to justify her reasons, though.  Why does she still gently praise these selfish, lazy people?  She left this HUGE question unanswered - her respect for them, unjustified.  There really aren't any bonding moments presented in the story or small acts that shine a light through the clouds about the mother or father's personalities and make them lovable at all.Walls narration of events is not candid, but very dry prose. There are also moments of unbelievability - things you really have a hard time believing.  There is no heart and soul to this memoir.  Here, you get a recounting of events, but none of the emotion.  I have a friend who had parents incredibly like Walls' parents...ironically enough, she lives in the same state of denial about the quality of life her parents provided her with.  Her mom was "cool", she was tolerant, open-minded, and someone to be pitied because she ended up pregnant when she didn't really want kids...so she tried to make due with this bohemian, whimsical life that robbed her children of the chance to have a normal mom who didn't bring home strange men at 4 a.m.  She also did this while trashing the values of normal, unselfish mothers to make them think they had some rarity - some gem of a mother.  Yet, they still loved her.  I was hoping Walls could describe this family dynamic more so the rest of us can UNDERSTAND it, but in the end.....Silence.  I wish the editor had sent her back to the drawing board with this story to flesh it out a little more.  For REAL people, these characters were more 2-dimensional than many fiction characters I've read about. 