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Sherman Alexie's works refute the American Dream by discussing the history between the Native Americans and whites, the racial problems between Native Americans and whites, and the assault of invulnerable people against whiteness and colonialism, as well as their people.

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Sherman Alexie’s book “You Don’t Have to Say You Love” goes into details of the racial and assault problems within his childhood, bringing awareness towards the awful things within society. Throughout the book, Sherman Alexie shines a spotlight on his family's troubling deeds, they’ve been involved with “murder and attempted murder” (Alexie, 300), relatives and close associates were also involved with “Rape, child rape. Assault. Robbery. Drug possession and drug dealing.” (Alexie, 300) and many other crimes. All of these events have affected Sherman and his other relatives in some way or another, haunting them no matter how long it was. His stories don’t support the American dream, instead, he writes about the harsh realities of the people living in  America, showing that it is not a happy little world for every single person.

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Sherman Alexie's New Book Is An Emotional Memoir About His Mother

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Sherman Alexie's New Book Is An Emotional Memoir About His Mother

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In the interview, Sherman talks about his messy and difficult relationship with his mother. Domestic abuse and assault towards his mother against white people and their people were discussed as well. As Sherman is being interviewed, he talks about his feeling towards his mother, assuming that he is “freed from my mother and her endless accusations, falsehoods, exaggerations and deceptions” however, when writing the memoir, he found out that it was not the case, instead she was a victim. Although Sherman and his mother complicated relationship, he slowly grew an understanding towards her as he talks about the history between him and his mother.

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RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:

Sherman Alexie won a National Book Award for "The Absolutely True Diary Of A Part-Time Indian." It was a novel, and it sprang from his experiences living on and leaving the Spokane Indian Reservation in Washington state. Now Alexie has gone straight to nonfiction with a raw, emotional memoir about his mother. Here's our own David Greene.

DAVID GREENE, BYLINE: To understand Sherman Alexie's tense, messy, infuriating relationship with his mother, you have to know this. They once didn't talk for three years. It wasn't like they were estranged. They spent time together and still didn't talk. Alexie can't remember why. He does remember vividly that moment from his childhood when a beloved cousin was murdered over the last swig of alcohol in a bottle. He wept and wept until his mom just told him to shut up.

It was Lillian Alexie, though, who kept the family going while Sherman's own father went off drinking. She earned money. She stayed up nights making these beautiful, handmade quilts. And when you open this new book, called "You Don't Have To Say You Love Me," one of those lovingly made quilts is the first thing you see.

SHERMAN ALEXIE: The endpapers of the book are actually the quilt my mother made for my wedding to my wife.

GREENE: That must have made the first time you saw the book in hardcover very special.

ALEXIE: I've never cried looking at my book so often (laughter). I imagine I'm going to spend the whole summer doing iMessage, iChat therapy (laughter) with my psychiatrist.

GREENE: Sherman Alexie does try to make sense of conflicting emotions. And his book reflects that tension. It veers from prose to poetry. Here's Alexie reading from one of his poems written not long after his mother's death in 2015. It's called "Lasting Rites."

ALEXIE: (Reading) I assumed I'd be freed from my mother and her endless accusations, falsehoods, exaggerations and deceptions. But looking at this book, I was obviously mistaken because my mother continues to scare the [expletive] out of me.

GREENE: And it's not just the memories that scare him. He says he's still literally haunted by her.

ALEXIE: Because I'm bipolar, because I'm obsessive compulsive, because I'm an alphabet soup of mental illness acronyms, I see things. I see ghosts. I don't believe in ghosts. I see them all the time. And so my mother kept appearing in my vision. I'd see her in my peripheral vision in the supermarket. I'd be trying to find which apples I wanted, and my mom would be looking at me, judging my apple-picking ability. So...

GREENE: That doesn't sound fun to have a ghost constantly judging you.

ALEXIE: No, not at all.

GREENE: Well, I mean, you write about how Lillian Alexie was just beloved in the community.

ALEXIE: Well, she was revered by many, but she was also reviled by many in our tribe for many of the same reasons she and I had a difficult relationship. Over the years, she founded the youth club on the reservation. She founded the senior citizens organization. She was the drug and alcohol treatment counselor. So at her funeral, one of my cousins got up, and he talks about how she was so generous but she was also so mean, and that she's probably scolding Jesus in heaven for playing the wrong welcoming song.

GREENE: (Laughter).

ALEXIE: But in talking about the book these last few weeks, I'm realizing that what I've written - it's a memoir. It's about me and my mother, but it's also, on one level, the biography of a great, complicated human being with all this unrealized potential. You know, my mom's face is on the cover. But I'm realizing this could be the kind of book, you know, called Roosevelt, or Churchill, Jefferson - and that because she's only - and I put that in heavy quotation marks - Native American woman from a small tribe in a small place, her greatness in that place went unrecognized. She should have led the tribe. She never did.

GREENE: You know, what comes to mind is when you wrote that if she'd come back to life and you could ask her one question, it would be was there ever a moment in your life when you felt powerful.

ALEXIE: You know, indigenous women in Canada and United States are the single most vulnerable people in terms of domestic violence, in terms of assault, in terms of murder. And my mother was not spared from feeling that powerless against the world - not only against whiteness and colonialism, but against some of the villains inside our own tribe.

So I don't know if she ever had a chance to feel good about herself. You know, in one of the poems in the book, I talk about if I could time travel, I wish I could go back and be her parent. And maybe if I could go back and adore her as a good parent to a good child, then maybe that would have taught her how to be adoring more consistently. I don't know that she was ever adored.

GREENE: I feel like, being someone myself who had a complicated relationship with my mother, there is something universal here when it comes to these kinds of relationships.

ALEXIE: You know, one of the things I'm doing at the readings is I will ask the crowd to raise their hand if they had a bad mother. And very few people have raised their hand. So I think culturally speaking, it's incredibly difficult for people to speak about having a bad mother. And I think it's even more difficult for a man to say it.

I mean, I was so terrified, and I'm still terrified, of the ways in which I might be accused of misogyny. I mean, because the guilt and the shame and the self-judgment I feel even now talking about her, talking about the ways in which I failed her is enormous. Because the thing is, regardless of how bad a mother she could be, at some point in my adulthood, I actively became a bad son.

GREENE: In what way?

ALEXIE: I became responsible for my actions and my own emotions. I did not do enough to even try to reconcile with her, to try to forgive her, to try to talk about it. We never had this conversation that this book has in equal parts self-protection but also about revenge, about vindictiveness. I think as much as this book reveals how complicated and difficult and terrible my mother could be, it also reveals how difficult and complicated and terrible I can be.

GREENE: Sherman Alexie, it is - it's always such a pleasure talking to you. We really appreciate it.

ALEXIE: Well, thank you, David.

(SOUNDBITE OF BALMORHEA'S "BALEEN MORNING")

MARTIN: That was our co-host David Greene speaking with Sherman Alexie. His new memoir is called "You Don't Have To Say You Love Me."

Copyright © 2017 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio record.

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Sherman Alexie's New Book Is An Emotional Memoir About His Mother

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RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: Sherman Alexie won a National Book Award for "The Absolutely True Diary Of A Part-Time Indian." It was a novel, and it sprang from his experiences living on and leaving the Spokane Indian Reservation in Washington state. Now Alexie has gone straight to nonfiction with a raw, emotional memoir about his mother.

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Sherman Alexie’s and Yuyi Morales’ Thunder Boy Jr. Rocks Picture Book World

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Sherman Alexie’s and Yuyi Morales’ Thunder Boy Jr. Rocks Picture Book World

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Throughout the article, Sherman Alexie, the author of Thunder boy Jr, talks about the themes and issues he believes need to be addressed no matter how controversial they are. Thunder Boy Jr. tells a story of a Native American boy and his struggle of finding his own identity despite being named after his father. “I think I get banned for the absolute best reasons: Because I am honest about how we flawed and fragile humans operate in this flawed and fragile world,” concedes Alexie. “I write about the glorious mess of being a walking, talking primate. And people sometimes get scared of that.” Even though Sherman talks about the struggles and speaks out about the racial views between both parties, his books have been controversial towards some and are banned in several schools despite his books trying to convey a message towards people to bring awareness towards these controversial opinions and views.

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Sherman Alexie has long been known for giving voice to the Native American experience. Engaging his pen in "fancydancing" has paid off. He has received numerous accolades for his poetry, novels, and short stories.

In 2007, Alexie broke into the young adult genre with the semi-autobiographical novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers). Not only has it received high praise, including the National Book Award for Young People's Literature, it has also raised its share of controversy, having been banned in several school districts.

"I think I get banned for the absolutely best reasons: Because I am honest about the way in which we flawed and fragile humans operate in this flawed and fragile world," concedes Alexie. "I write about the glorious mess of being a walking, talking primate. And people sometimes get scared of that."

But Alexie does not let the criticism get to him. He continues writing about the themes and issues he believes need to be addressed, especially in relation to living between the two worlds of Indian reservation and white society.

"Fancydancing, as a ceremony practiced by Native Americans, is a continually evolving art form based on ancient traditions. I hope my writing is the same." - Sherman Alexie

"I have been so grateful for the response to my young adult novel," Alexie shares, "and have received such amazing letters from young folks about how much the book means to them. And I just kept thinking that I needed to write a book for even younger children. Essentially, I wanted to write the kind of children's book that I wish was around when I was a kid."

That book he wished for is being released May 10, 2016 as Thunder Boy Jr. (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers). In this book, a Native American child wrestles with discovering his own identity even though he is named after his father. As with many of Alexie's other literary works, this picture book hits a nerve with Alexie and conveys messages he believes need to be addressed.

"My father was the primary source of my reading ambitions. He read everything and handed me books all the time. And they were books of all kinds. I am an egalitarian reader to this day because of my father. I read in all genres." - Sherman Alexie

"I am vehemently against naming our children after ourselves. It's too possessive. I always struggled with being named after my father, with the expectation that I would be like him. I think I rebelled precisely because I didn't want to be exactly like my father. Turns out, you can't avoid being mostly like your father and mother. I am good with being Sherman Jr. now, but I suspect that I would have given myself a name like Zephyr or Wonder Horse when I was a kid. Or Dr. Alexie, since my original life plan was to become a pediatrician."

Though Thunder Boy Jr. is told from the perspective of a young boy, the illustrations by Yuyi Morales help bring all the characters to life. "I created the concept of the book as a story of a family in which they all let us hear their voices," says Morales. "I decided that, even though the story is told from the point of view of Thunder Boy, there will be an opportunity to see the story evolve in conjunction with the family interaction-and the family as a part of the world. I knew that I wanted to make a connection between the intimate search for identity with family, community, and the people and things that we care for. I also wanted to explore how we all learn who we are from each other. As Thunder Boy builds strength and detaches from his father into his very own person, his sister is also observing Thunder Boy, wanting to play with him, fight with him, follow in his footsteps-all of it in her own search of learning who she is. At the end, nothing is separate, because we all find out about who we are as we learn from and care for each other."

Morales is known for her boldly colored, dream-like illustrations. And though Thunder Boy Jr. incorporates features of her signature style, overall it is a departure from what she's done in the past. "As I accepted to illustrate this book, I was looking for my own place to live and work, and I found a run-down house. The roof and many walls had to be re-built, and as the building came down, I realized how beautiful the old material was ... bricks and wood that had been textured and colored by the weather and time. Not only did I use the rubble to rebuild the house and my studio, I also decided I would create the illustrations for Thunder Boy Jr. with all the colors and textures that were the core and bones of the house where I would be living this part of my own story.

"What I did in order to create the illustrations for Thunder Boy Jr. was to begin collecting the most luminous, out-of-the-ordinary, and even rotten pieces of wood from the piles of rubble that the construction workers were gathering. My own contractor would tell his workers, 'Do not throw anything away until La Señora has had a chance to come and collect all that she wants from the garbage.' He is my friend and was making fun of me, but what was true was that those pieces of discarded material were my treasures.

Interior spreads from Thunder Boy Jr.

"I scanned all those pieces of wood and the clay I had been collecting, and I created a digital palette in my computer. From the sketches, I painted the line-work using ink on textured paper, and then I also scanned those drawing into my computer. Then I began painting. Taking from all the colors and textures I had, I began filling up the blank spaces of the world of Thunder Boy Jr. "

" Thunder Boy Jr. came to me as I had just moved to live in my birth-town, Xalapa, in Mexico. I had for a while decided that I would only illustrate my own stories. When I got the manuscript for Thunder boy Jr. I was very taken by the fact they thought of me to illustrate a story written by one of my favorite authors ever (Sherman's books have been very present in our home while my son was growing up). And then ... the story is about one's search for identity, which is something that had been very present during this time of change for me." - Yuyi Morales

Thunder Boy Jr. has received excellent early reviews. But both author and illustrator have found fulfillment in creating Thunder Boy Jr., making it a success in their eyes. "I am very pleased with the illustrations in Thunder Boy Jr.," admits Morales, "but not only because I created these images, but because I was able to add my voice in proposing an exploration between children and parents, and among learning, emotions, and conquering challenges. I was able to be part of a narrative in which children know they do amazing things as they live everyday lives. Sometimes the biggest mountains to climb are right there on the shoulders of our elders, and the most amazing universe to discover is the world of our community."

Satisfaction is short lived, however, and Alexie and Morales have moved on to new projects. So what can readers expect to see from them in the future? Morales shares, "What you will see next is RUDAS, a new Niño book, this time a celebration of his rude little sisters." And from Alexie? "I am under contract for seven wildly different projects, so you'll get something soon. I just don't know what. And I plan on writing more picture books, yes, and am developing a few ideas now. I next want to write a book about an Indian girl's adventures in the world. My ambitions are global and impossible to achieve, but they keep me motivated. I hope everybody in the world eventually reads one of my books."

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Sherman Alexie's and Yuyi Morales' Thunder Boy Jr. Rocks Picture...

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Interior spreads from Thunder Boy Jr. "I scanned all those pieces of wood and the clay I had been collecting, and I created a digital palette in my computer. From the sketches, I painted the line-work using ink on textured paper, and then I also scanned those drawing into my computer.

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Alexie, Sherman Joseph. You Don't Have to Say You Love Me. Little, Brown and Company, 2017. "Sherman Alexie's New Book Is an Emotional Memoir about His Mother." Interview by David Byline Greene. NPR.org, 20 June 2017, www.npr.org/2017/ 06/20/533617441/ sherman-alexies-new-book-is-an-emotional-memoir-about-his-mother. Accessed 18 Feb. 2022. "Author Sherman Alexie Targets Young Readers." Interview by Renee Montagne. NPR.org, 21 Sept. 2007, www.npr.org/templates/story/ story.php?storyId=14586575. Accessed 18 Feb. 2022. Meythaler, Amy. "Sherman Alexie's and Yuyi Morales' Thunder Boy Jr. Rocks Picture Book World." MackinCommunity, 2016, www.mackincommunity.com/2016/04/ 04/sherman-alexie-yuyi-morales/. Accessed 17 Feb. 2022.