The novelist Richard Russo reflects on his new memoir, Elsewhere, which considers his complicated relationship with his mother and his childhood in upstate New York:
In the months after my mother’s death, I thought about her constantly, and she was visiting my dreams, as well. All of which suggested there was unfinished business. My last three novels had all featured characters who were puzzled by destiny, asking themselves, “How did I end up here?” Now I found myself puzzling over the same issues with regard to my mother’s life and my own. We shared both a genetic (highly obsessive) nature as well as strikingly similar nurture, having grown up in the same small upstate New York mill town. How could our destinies have diverged so radically? It seemed worth investigating.
Roger K. Miller homes in on Russo's mother's mental illness, which Russo eventually identifies as obsessive-compulsive disorder:
[Russo] believes that in some ways he is like her, that he bears “the same genetic character traits.” He had turned “obsession … and sheer cussedness” to his own advantage. “The same qualities that over a lifetime had contracted my mother’s world had somehow expanded mine.”
The Dish 