Yossarian Slept Here: When Joseph Heller was Dad and Life was a Catch-22
Erica Heller
Yossarian Slept Here: When Joseph Heller was Dad and Life was a Catch-22
Like his most famous work, Joseph Heller was a study in contradictions: eccentric, brilliant and voracious, but also mercurial, competitive, and stubborn, with a love of mischief that sometimes cut too close to the bone. Yossarian Slept Here is his daughter's darkly funny, poignant memoir about growing up a Heller — from her colourful family members and her parents' tumultuous marriage, to her father's celebrity friends and the family's eccentric neighbours.
2.9 out of 5 based on 8 reviews
|
Omniscore:
|
| Classification |
Non-fiction |
| Genre |
Biography, Literary Studies & Criticism |
| Format |
Paperback |
| Pages |
288 |
| RRP |
£8.99 |
| Date of Publication |
October 2011 |
| ISBN |
978-0099570080 |
| Publisher |
Vintage |
| |
Like his most famous work, Joseph Heller was a study in contradictions: eccentric, brilliant and voracious, but also mercurial, competitive, and stubborn, with a love of mischief that sometimes cut too close to the bone. Yossarian Slept Here is his daughter's darkly funny, poignant memoir about growing up a Heller — from her colourful family members and her parents' tumultuous marriage, to her father's celebrity friends and the family's eccentric neighbours.
Reviews
The New York Times
Blake Bailey
“… frank but loving … [It] comes as close as possible, I dare say, to deciphering the enigma behind the obsessive, pitch-black fiction … the author shares her subject’s sense of humor, and is herself a good writer to boot.”
26/08/2011
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The Spectator
William Leith
“Erica Heller tells us first-hand stories about stuff like her parents’ horrible divorce, and their illnesses and deaths. The mental cruelty! She writes about it calmly and stoically.”
22/10/2011
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The Sunday Times
Stephen Amidon
“[A] well-written, occasionally harrowing memoir ... As with Heller the author, one never knew whether to expect raucous good times or cutting critiques from him as a father. “Children had no amnesty when it came to the wicked barbs of Dad’s idiosyncratic wit,” Erica writes. “Whether you were four or 44, you were on you own, and the precision of Dad’s jibes were almost incomparably masterful.” His daughter seems to have been a prime target of Heller’s boorishness.”
09/10/2011
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The Financial Times
Leo Robson
“[A] likeable memoir … though she acknowledges that Something Happened is considered by many, “including the author himself”, to be his best work, she is writing as a daughter, not an appreciator: “There were years of verbatim conversations contained in it, and the dynamic between father and daughter ... was strikingly familiar. The parental need, the perverse competition to ‘outfox’ the child – was that, I wondered, universal?” Erica Heller admits that she has never read Catch-22, despite trying “perhaps a hundred times”, and the agonising and bewildering experience of reading, aged 21, this portrait of parent-child one-upmanship is surely one of the reasons.”
07/10/2011
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The Independent
Emma Hagestadt
“Heller's book shows a robust acceptance of her father's overbearing personality and Don Draperesque approach to marriage and fatherhood … The New York of the period leaps off the page.”
07/10/2011
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The New York Times
Janet Maslin
“She is both charming and combative … Ms. Heller still sounds amazed that when she herself received a diagnosis of breast cancer, her parents fought about how to visit her in the hospital without running into each other. “Get healthy so I don’t have to do this anymore,” she says her father instructed when he visited her after surgery.”
27/07/2011
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The Literary Review
Jeffrey Meyers
“Erica Heller’s memoir is an article inflated into a book. She writes in an awkward ladies-magazine style — French wines are ‘lovely’, wedding cakes ‘beautiful’ — and her frequent attempts at humour fall flat. The first half of her memoir is told mainly from the imperceptive viewpoint of a child. She describes gooey desserts, praises garbage on the streets of New York and calls her mother’s hair colourist ‘close-to-saintly’. But she provides very little analysis of herself or anyone else. She indulges instead in pointless name-dropping — ‘Mario Puzo was a shy, humble man’ — and her comments on Heller are banal”
01/10/2011
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The Washington Post
Heller McAlpin
“Yossarian Slept Here awkwardly attempts to intertwine Heller family history with that of the legendary Apthorp apartment building, erected by William Waldorf Astor on Manhattan’s Upper West Side in 1908 … Erica’s chapters on its troubled condominium conversion come as distractions from the Heller story. The real focus of “Yossarian Slept Here” is neither literature nor real estate but dislocation: displacements caused by success and divorce.”
19/08/2011
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