The Tender Land
A Family Love Story
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4.2 • 12 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
An extraordinary memoir of a family haunted by tragedy: “I’ve read very few contemporary novels that can rival Finneran’s nonfiction.” —Jonathan Franzen
A superb portrait of family life, this “absorbing and thoughtful” memoir is a love story unlike any other (Library Journal). The Finnerans—Irish Catholic parents with five children in St. Louis—are a seemingly unexceptional family whose lives are upended by a catastrophic event: the suicide of the author’s fifteen-year-old younger brother after being publicly humiliated in junior high school.
A gentle, handsome boy, Sean Finneran was a straight-A student and gifted athlete, especially treasured by every member of his family. Masterfully, the book interweaves past and present, showing how inseparable the Finnerans are, and how the long accumulation of love and memory helps them survive their terrible loss.
“Unforgettable in its restraint and quiet beauty,” The Tender Land is a testament to the always-complicated ways in which we love one another (Publishers Weekly). In quietly luminous language, Kathleen Finneran renders the emotional, spiritual, and physical terrain of family life—its closeness and disconnection, its intimacy and estrangement—and pays tribute to the love between parents and children, brothers and sisters. In doing so, she “reminds us of how complicated, unique, and fragile an organism the family is” (The Boston Globe).
“[Great writers] change us. Kathleen Finneran fits in this niche. . . . Her prose sings.” —USA Today
“Beautifully written . . . Like life itself, this memoir evokes both sadness and joy.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Unforgettable in its restraint and quiet beauty, Finneran's debut memoir lovingly reveals her family's tragic history and her own painful coming of age. Born in the late 1950s into an Irish Catholic family, she and her four siblings had a comfortable life in suburban St. Louis, thanks to her mother's thrifty management and her father's success as a salesman. But depression and suicide ran in the family and the question of what caused her youngest brother Sean's suicide when he was 15 permeates the book as much as it has haunted the Finnerans--Kathleen was also disposed to depression and another sister tried to overdose at age 28. As a self-conscious, overweight child, the author at times felt ignored by her parents. Nonetheless, at a young age she understood the need to protect her mother from sorrow, so she "made up stories." Sadly for the author, her first sexual experience coincided with the night Sean died, making sex and death forever inextricable for her. She found comfort with a woman lover who was her best friend, despite her mother's cautious warning about being "different." Readers will relish Finneran's skill in capturing her characters. "My mother," she writes, "ends each day this way, dusting in the dark, and in the morning, as soon as she wakes, she dusts again, in daylight." To Sean's suicide note, which disclosed teenage loneliness and disappointments, Finneran offers an exquisite counterpoint in the form of this love letter.
