In July, Sherman Alexie canceled his book tour for You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me, his new multigenre memoir about his mother, Lillian, who died in 2015. In a statement posted to his website, he described a sense of being haunted by his mother on tour stops for the book, and mounting grief and depression culminating in a dream in which he envisioned himself and his mother as characters from the screenplay he wrote for Smoke Signals: “In my dream, I am the one fallen to the road,” he writes. “And I reach toward a vision of my dead mother. But she is also the highway construction worker. And she is holding a sign that says STOP. I think the meaning of that dream is obvious.”
When Alexie canceled his book tour, this review was already on the calendar for this issue of the Mercury, but I hadn’t written it yet. With any other book, I might have substituted it with a piece tied to a local reading or event, but in this case, I didn’t even consider it. Alexie, who grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation and has lived in Seattle for more than 20 years, is the writer I think of when someone asks about Northwest authors, and You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me is a work of witness and experimentation that commands our attention. It’s a sprawling, ambitious project—a mix of prose and poems and sometimes even poems Alexie disrupts with more prose. It’s a structural choice Alexie aptly compares to his mother’s insomniac quilting projects, which she sold to keep their family’s electricity on. It’s also a choice that—satisfyingly—demands some work from its reader. But at more than 400 pages, it still reads with the compulsive quickness I’ve come to expect from Alexie’s writing.