Be Sweet: A Conditional Love Story

This is a very intimate book written with a great deal of courage and self-questioning. Roy Blount Jr. lays this book out in a stream-of-consciousness style which makes for compelling reading. He keeps coming back to questioning the unsettling aspects of his relationship with his mother. Child abuse is an unjust and toxic experience for a child that creates chronic stress past childhood into adulthood; Blount does an outstanding job of showing this to be the case, in spite of his well-deserved great successes including development of character and wisdom. Nowadays, inappropriate communication/intimacy from parent to child is identified as enmeshment, a form of sexual-emotional child abuse. A mother who has experienced neglect and/or violated boundaries as a child can without compunction abuse her power with her own children demanding pity for all her life's woes and make them into her caretaker(s). Parents with less than sturdy personalities, possibly due to childhood damage, (esp. without treatment or at least acknowledgement of their inadequacies, awareness of the need to respect other's boundaries, etc.) can be invasive in a very unhealthy way and wholly inconsistent; there is no abiding gratitude for the caretaking by the child - unnatural caretaking and pity created by the needy parent in the plastic brain of a child that could have gone in infinite directions - at the root of it, created because of a sense of entitlement by the parent. Not surprisingly, self-absorbed parents also resent their children's growing autonomy and fear abandonment adding more inappropriate behavior as they grow away. Additionally, this type of parent is capable of projecting profound resentment and rage at their own children - redirected from their feelings about their childhood and/or their abuser. This is the complicated legacy of past abuse or mental instability morphing into other forms of less easily defined abuse that Blount writes about. This author's anger toward his mother's behavior was almost always overridden (with hesitation on several occasions he writes "I hate my mother") by pity for her, the curse of enmeshment abuse; his anger was fiercely directed at historical family members who may have abused his mother, but that history was shown to be unclear (perhaps even unlikely to the extent this mother dramatically described her purported abuse with relish to her own children) as well; in fact, the reader is left to wonder how much physical abuse actually took place of the mother when she was a child and whether it was mostly neglect and a personality which may have been unstable, maybe histrionic, and self-indulgence. This search was especially poignent. It is always difficult to ascertain what is immaturity and narcissism versus what is damage done in childhood which impaired normal functioning and reactions - especially historically. This author seeks understanding of his mother, but solid facts, analyses, definitions and understanding are ill

I was lucky enough to stumble across Roy Blount reading from this book in a Vermont bookstore. I bought it on the spot, telling him that it was the first one of his books that I had paid full price for. He thought this was pretty fun, the store employee sitting next to him didn't. This book is worth its full price.Be Sweet in no way sets out to "make fun of the mother-son relationship". I suppose because Blount is such an irreverent goof-ball on the radio and in print, it seems fair to have that preconception. However, Blount has always let us know that some things are sacred and after you get a short way into this book you realize that family is one of them. He desperately does not want to cast aspersions on his own mother's character, but he has to acknowledge that she did drive him to distraction throughout his life.There were several points in this book were Blount seems to be going off on a tangent. To be honest I began to wonder if he was just filling the space between the covers. Oh me of little faith! In the last third of the book I was progressively more amazed and impressed as I discovered that his seemingly unconnected threads were actually germane to the resolution of his mid-life psychic wrestling match with himself.Bill Bryson's recent A Walk In the Woods similarly surprised me. I don't expect journalists to write deeply personal prose. Roy Blount beats Bryson hands down as far as the psychological depths that are plumbed and illuminated. If the presentation of the psychological dimension of things bores you or insults your sense of decorum, then don't read this Roy Blount book. If you want to know what is going on in the head of middle aged white Southern guys of above average emotional honesty, then this is a pretty good place to start.

I bought "Be Sweet" because my mother was a "Paty Class" member along with Roy's mother and she listened to Roy's daddy teach and I knew Roy's sister, Susan and i wanted to see if Roy Jr. had ever been able to be as sweet as any of our mothers wanted us all to be. At times Roy rambles down the red clay back roads of his Georgia boyhood and I wonder where we are headed...but I do not questioon my desire to followy. Grab a hold of a strong kudzoo vine and swing out over the arcane waters of the 'be sweet' mother and her "ya-ya" off spring.

Any book by Roy Blount is vital; so is any piece of journalism, from his paen to Krispy Kreme donuts to his classic profile of Joe DiMaggio. This book is a future classic; people will be amazed it wasn't more appreciated at the time. It combines the deeply felt with the deeply funny--the hardest trick in the literary book.

If you have never read Roy Blount, Jr., start with Be Sweet:A Conditional Love Story. Then begin to work your way through his many works. If you read Be Sweet, you'll understand the foundation for this man's incredibly deep vein of humor and his unique ability to observe this human race and mine the genuine humor that life creates. He's a classic.