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If Only You People Could Follow Directions: A Memoir (2013)

by Jessica Hendry Nelson(Favorite Author)

3.58 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

1619022338 (ISBN13: 9781619022331)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

Counterpoint

review 1: This book is a disjointed memoir of Jessica Hendry Nelson chronicling the battles with mental illness, drug addiction, and alcohol addiction running in her family. Each chapter is sort of an individual essay relating a story of a single relationship her life be it her mother, brother, father, friend, or boyfriend. It's an interesting concept for writing a memoir in the form of linked stories, but it didn't play out very well for me. I think my major issue was the fact that the stories are not in any kind of chronological order, which makes it unnecessarily difficult to piece together how the separate stories relate to each other. In a book that is already not designed to tell a through story the mixing up the timeline seemed like a poor choice. I think the book suffered fr... moreom trying to be overly creative.
review 2: From the prologue’s Letter to Eric through to the final essay of If Only You People Could Follow Directions, Nelson writes with a precision of language that is so crisp and compelling in its own right that it seems almost enough to caulk the cracks in the family foundation upon which the book’s premise rests. From start to finish, the reader is tugged back and forth between wanting to learn more about the curious details of Nelson’s family and upbringing and the inventiveness at work on the sentence level. This balance of intrigue—that between story and craft—is a feat accomplished by only the best of writers. In an often lyric prose style, Nelson’s essays circle the genetic causes, the central questions, and the possible future outcomes surrounding the family’s battles with drugs, addiction, and codependence with both humility and irreverence. As she dips in and out of these spheres, other truths emerge, transforming the weight of the heavy subject matter into magnificent portraits of landscape and a striking perception of humanity that steals your breath just when you think you can’t take any more. Nelson gives us salvation in the form of a moose sighting, hope in an expanse of a frozen body of water, the complexity of familial love in the loss of memory, sudden truth in the garish excess of commercial Florida, unexpected reversal through the disillusion of tradition, and so much more. This is not a book of personal epiphany, but one that is as outward looking as it is inward from the perspective of a writer with eyes wide open, heart full. less

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