NO SON OF MINE: A Memoir, a son's generous gift of forgiveness to a dead mother

NO SON OF MINE: A Memoir
JONATHAN CORCORAN
University Press of Kentucky
$29.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Born and raised in rural West Virginia, Jonathan Corcoran was the youngest and only son of three siblings in a family balanced on the precipice of poverty. His mother, a traditional, evangelical, and insular woman who had survived abuse and abandonment, was often his only ally. Together they navigated a strained homelife dominated by his distant, gambling-addicted father and shared a seemingly unbreakable bond.

When Corcoran left home to attend Brown University, a chasm between his upbringing and his reality began to open. As his horizons and experiences expanded, he formed new bonds beyond bloodlines, and met the upper-middle-class Jewish man who would become his husband. But this authentic life would not be easy, and Corcoran was forever changed when his mother disowned him after discovering his truth. In the ensuing fifteen years, the two would come together only to violently spring apart. As the COVID-19 pandemic raged in 2020, the cycle finally ended when he received the news that his mother had died.

In No Son of Mine, Corcoran traces his messy estrangement from his mother through lost geographies: the trees, mountains, and streams that were once his birthright, as well as the lost relationships with friends and family and the sense of home that were stripped away when she said he was no longer her son. A biography nestled inside a memoir, No Son of Mine is Corcoran's story of alienation and his attempts to understand his mother's choice to cut him out of her life. Through grief, anger, questioning, and growth, Corcoran explores the entwined yet separate histories and identities of his mother and himself.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Y'all remember my four-star review of The Rope Swing? The man who wrote that, wrote this. What I noted then was that I felt removed from the people in his stories, like something I'd expected to be immediate and intimate was not quite that.

Objection overruled, eight-years-ago me.

The story of a Southern son...and Appalachia, where Author Corcoran hails from, is its own thing but is also The South...of a religious Mama who, in firm in her Faith, rejects her child whom she bore, nurtured, and loved, is not new nor is it underrepresented in the literary scene. UPK made the book available to me; I respected the author's chops; I started the read cautiously optimistic that it would be a Good Read. And that it was.

Being raised by a religious mother is often troublesome for a son. She often uses faith as a punishment. Her efforts to parent are more likely to be aimed at one's religious well-being and not quite concerned enough with the problems of being an adolescent. What Author Corcoran does in his memoir is to make you part of the fabric of the troubled (and frankly troubling to my atheist eyes) family he came from, and overcame. His education at elite Brown University, where my own eldest sister graduated from, drew him away from the limited life of his borderline impoverished, uneducated, Bible-believing family; not coincidentally, it introduced him to his desire's fulfillment in the gay demimonde, so to speak, of university life.

Once that genie's out of the bottle, that is that. Gawd stops being The Big Bad, and sex becomes possible to imagine as part of one's life without thunderation and guilt. Until, of course, one goes home.

It might be this bit that truly hit home hardest for me: That fracturing of the idea of Home. The title of the book gives the game away. "No son of mine" is harsh, unforgiving, and stone-cold. Those are words I heard as well. They sever the taproot of family brutally and irreparably. The rest of one's life they resonate, drowning out the less-resonant words of lovingkindness one attracts. One day, if one is VERY lucky, a voice will say "I love you" in the exact canceling resonance to that thunderous rejection...and that good luck came to Author Corcoran, or I simply could not have borne to read or write about this book. I knew that going in, as I follow him on Facebook, so I was in no doubt that this would be the case. Even being uncertain of this facet of his present-day life would have rendered me unable to read the book, so strongly do I feel about it.

What made Author Corcoran write this memoir now is the pandemic just past. His mother died in the pandemic without the two of them being able to reach mutual forgiveness. That is an incalculable agony. Staying silent, not howling one's pain to the world, is just flat imposssible. Being a writer meant that he chose to make this hegira from belief, to education, to rejection, to sad, grieving acceptance of one's losses in words. His life today is a materially and emotionally better one, his loving partnership is a source of acceptance and self-worth support, it is in short a story of succeeding without forgetting his beginnings. What pleased me, as a reader, the most was the fact that I never once felt that he belittled or looked down on his mother, or the world he left behind; that is a spiritual generosity that I can but envy.

In his evocation of a life left behind, Author Corcoran leaves the reader with the sense that he looks on his mother and the life she led, the teachings she imparted, and the world she lived in as a chrysalis from which he emerged, not a trap from which he escaped.

That is the best gift a parent can receive from an adult child. I am deeply saddened that the author's mother is not alive to receive it.