Author Richard Russo has been writing about the burned-out mill town of Gloversville, N.Y., for years. In one Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, he called it Empire Falls; in another novel, it was Thomaston.
Now, Russo has turned his attention to the real Gloversville and his experiences growing up there. His new memoir, Elsewhere, tracks his relationship with a very intense and neurotic mother who was also a gallant single mom. Russo and his mother remained close even through those transitions when children usually begin to separate from their parents, like going away to college. Of his own decision to attend the University of Arizona, Russo writes:
"I expected my mother to put up stiff resistance to this plan; after all, I'd be twenty-five hundred miles away and her mantra had always been that we were a team, that as long as we had each other, we'd be able to manage. So I should have been suspicious when she didn't object to my heading west. But even if I'd twigged to the possibility that she was up to something, I never would've grasped the obvious inference, and it was years before it occurred to me that maybe the westward-ho notion hadn't been mine at all, that she'd steadily been dropping hints — for example, that the best place to study archeology, my current interest, was the Desert Southwest — and that I'd dutifully been lapping them up. Nor did she object when, in the spring of my senior year I announced I wanted to buy a car.
"The reason she didn't, of course, was that we'd need one. Because she was coming with me."