Frank and Maisie: A Memoir with Parents

by Wilfrid Sheed

Book Overview

From Simon & Schuster, Frank and Maisie is an unforgettable memoir featuring the author's undauntable parents. The novelist and essayist, Wilfrid Sheed, presents an exuberant, often humorous memoir of... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0671449907
• ISBN13: 9780671449902
• Release Date: January 1983
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Length: 296 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.

Customer Reviews

A funny, touching, brimming-with-love memoir

Anyone who reads this book will become --- if they are not already --- an admirer of the author's parents, Frank (Sheed) and Maisie (Ward); and will be moved to laughter and to tears in tracing the fortunes of this exceptionally talented, quirky, and rollicking Catholic family. It is odd, and it can provoke a bit of hand-wringing in some readers, that although Wilfrid remembers his mother tenderly and clearly idolizes his father --- and who wouldn't be smitten by Frank's goodness? --- he has rejected in his own life the very core of his parents' character, their strong, sound Catholic Faith. It makes some of Wilfrid's narrative, though affectionate, sound just a tad patronizing: the agnostic son "explaining" his parent's religious fervor to a supercilious and secular world. But I decided to give Frank & Maisie 5 stars anyway; partly to bring up their overall average (permit me to do this!) and partly because I appreciate the fact that Son Wilfrid NEVER falls into the all-too-common all-warts, my-parents-done-me-wrong genre. Far from it. He has gifted the world with a fundamentally positive and loving re-telling of the family epic, full of wit and drollery but serious for all that. Through this book I actually met Frank & Maisie: met them, appreciated them, loved them. For this I owe Wilfrid many heartfelt thanks. And five stars for gratitude.