Mother of Sorrows (2005) by Richard McCann

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Mother of Sorrows (2005)

by Richard McCann

1600 St Camillus Dr, Silver Spring, Maryland

Maryland: 2/9

  When I was in undergraduate in Washington DC, a couple of our friend group moved into a 10th floor apartment in one of the big, nice apartment buildings that line some of the avenues out this way.  My memories of Silver Spring are limited to the drive to and from that apartment and being inside the actual apartment, since I didn't own a car and there was nothing a young college student would do in Silver Spring besides sitting in a friend's apartment and watching NFL football and/or the Simpsons.   Editor Susan Straight locates this book in one of the single-family home communities that is more typical for the area than the apartment building I frequented, but Mother of Sorrows could have just as easily been located in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington DC, where half of the connected short-stories occur.

  The description that Editor Straight provided for this book left me questioning if she actually read the same book I did:

An elegant, lovely novel-in-stories, set in 1950s America, when a young boy, after the loss of brother and father, finds solace in the complicated faith of his mother, while realizing his own gay identity.

   This sentence isn't wholly inaccurate, but the narrator is the adult version of the "young boy," and the father plays a very minor role.  Rather, Mother of Sorrows is largely about the relationship between the author-narrator and his real-life brother, Davis.  Both of them were gay, but Davis self-destructed and killed himself accidentally with a heroin overdose in his 30's.  Richard McCann, meanwhile, became a moderately succesful author and teacher and didn't die until 2021.  Mother of Sorrows is about the brother and his relationship with the author, more than anything else.

  McCann pairs a light, elliptical style with the dark themes of a gay identity denied by a parent.  While the book does begin in the 1950s/60's when the two brother are kids, by the end of the book is well into the modern era and Mom is still denying the gay identity of both her children.  Sure to be at the top of my Maryland list if only because it isn't a book about an adolescent girl.