Uphill Walkers: A Memoir of a Family - Hardcover

When Blais's father died unexpectedly in 1952, he left a family of six, and Blais's life changed forever. Blais, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the Miami Herald and author of the best-selling In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle and The Heart Is an Instrument, was the second oldest. She was five at the time, barely able to comprehend the situation. Her mother, widowed and pregnant, had a large family to support with meager resources. Here Blais chronicles her family's struggle to survive, tracing each sibling's growth to adulthood and her strong-willed, Irish American mother's progress toward old age. Especially poignant is the account of her older brother Ray's decline into mental illness and the resulting pain and frustration for the entire family. Although Blais captures both the feeling of growing up in the Fifties and Sixties and the warmth and camaraderie of her large family, her skillful, reportorial prose has a tone of objectivity and distance that is disconcerting in a memoir. Recommended, with some reservations, for public libraries.
- Nancy R. Ives, SUNY at Geneseo
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Blais won a Pulitzer Prize as a Miami Herald reporter and positive reviews (and strong sales) for In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle (1996). Her memoir tells the story of a large, rambunctious Irish family in rural Massachusetts, raised by a widowed single mother at a time when all families were expected to be nuclear. Her book is full of the fascinating trivia of childhood--favorite foods and sibling rivalries and slogans from TV ads and shared poetry and crushes on rock stars--but its unifying arc is the impact on the family of older brother Ray's mental illness. Blais carries the story to the present, with her mother an aging but still dignified matriarch, Raymond deceased at 54, the four sisters nurturing another generation as mothers and aunts, and baby Michael, born after his father's death, a supportive, sometimes impish uncle. Involving and beautifully written. Mary Carroll
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