Returning Frankie's Rocks: How a Son's Journey Into the Heart of Compulsive Collecting Led Him Back to His Mother

By Dana Hornig

An exploration of a son's relationship with his mother. Returning Frankie's Rocks is a fascinating story of a son's relationship with his mother and an intriguing insight in the world of compulsive... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1585424161
• ISBN13: 9781585424160
• Release Date: June 2005
• Publisher: Tarcher
• Length: 238 Pages
• Weight: 0.96 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.4" x 9.1"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Compulsion And Healing

When I started reading this book, I had little or no sympathy with Dana Lustig, and his decision to return all the little rocks his late mother had collected from Britain's ancient landmarks seemed inane. Although Lustig makes interesting connections between his mother's private, secret pathology and the collecting obsession that affects nearly one out of every three of us Americans, it is still something of a shock to see a son washing his mother's dirty linen in public. I guess if she didn't want the world to know about her mania for British rocks she would have destroyed her collection, or (for we collectors hate to throw anything away) she might have been more upfront, asked her son never to expose her peccadillos to the world. She wasn't the world's best mother, by Dana's account, so maybe a bit of filial resentment motivated his memoir, which takes the familiar "creative non-fiction" format of ANGELA'S ASHES and turns it into a travelogue in which we see the now middle aged Dana trotting back to England and trying to alert officials and the media in each town that he has landed and that long ago his mother had done a bad thing and tried to steal their history. Some of the officials are sympathetic to his quest, others treat him like he's some kind of shady character. British wit and understatement are in short supply nowadays, or so it seems from Lustig's colorless interactions with these bureaucrats and tabloid hacks. How I wish this book had an accompanying CD in which we could hear the revealing radio interview his mother gave, long ago, in which Dana finds her voice still speaking to him from beyond the grave. He parses her syntax to little bits, isolating the words in which she condemns herself, and shows them to us as proof of his thesis. This book deserves more attention. It is ultimately a warm, healing portrait of a man who, while attempting to right family wrongs, comes to understand his beloved "Frankie" wasn't as awful as all that.