In Spite of Everything: A Memoir (2024)

i didn't hate this book, or even dislike it. but i did find it mind-bogglingly solipsistic. it's supposedly a memoir, so i guess i shouldn't be surprised. & i probably wouldn't have minded at all had the book truly been a straight memoir. but the text is peppered with references to studies on divorce & its impact on child development, how sexual attractions helps & hinders the success of marriage, the psychology behind the housing bubble, etc. it's as if thomas hopes that the book will work as a sociological examination of the personal failings of generation X if it doesn't work as a memoir. the result is that it doesn't really succeed as either.

thomas goes into excruciating detail about the breakdown of her own parents' marriage & how growing up a child of divorce with an absent (alcoholic) father predisposed her to being preyed upon by older men. this leads to her theory that all marriages are in some way incestuous--that we seek to extract the kind of parental love & attention from a spouse that we didn't get from a parent. perhaps this is true for thomas, but i think it's quite the leap to assume that it's remotely true of everyone else, even other adult children of divorce! i mean...jesus christ!

when thomas offers her incest theory, she also starts writing a lot about how she started going to therapy in her 20s, & realizing the emotional scars she was carrying around from her parents' divorce & feeling abandoned due to her father's alcoholism & her mother's depression, etc etc etc.

listen. not that it' a contest, but in the Great Revue of f*cked Up Childhoods, i've got thomas beat in every category. i'll see your alcoholic & raise you a speed habit. i'll see your depression & raise you some paranoid schizophrenia. i'll see your divorce & raise you three children pleading with you to get divorced every day for at least ten years, before the marriage finally dissolves when one parent keels over dead on the couch one day. okay? i started therapy in my early 20s & am still at it in my early 30s. the difference is that i can look at all this f*cked up childhood stuff & say--so the f*ck what? i'm 32 now & my life is my own. i don't especially feel the need to write a memoir in which i basically hash out my therapy so that it can be printed & placed on a bookshelf for my children to read when they get old enough. i guess i don't know how to put it into words, but it sounded to me like thomas had made some kind of rotten decisions in her life, done some things for the wrong reasons, & was looking to blame it all on someone else. divorced parents looked like a good choice. maybe even tie it in with the "epidemic" of divorce affecting generation X children & portray an entire generation of people as fundamentally incapable of having healthy relationships & making smart choices! it's not us, it's the environment!

or maybe it's you.

i mean, there comes a point where maybe you need to stop blaming mom & dad.

there also comes a point where maybe you consider what you learned from being a little too well-informed about the details & emotional maelstrom of your parents' divorce & you don't write an even more detailed & confessional account of your own divorce. thomas repeatedly explains how she & her ex-husvand worked together to shield the children from some of the potentially more traumatizing elements if the divorce, but she doesn't hold anything back in this memoir. which her kids could conceivably read someday. i mean, hopefully by the time they do, they'll also be old enough to handle it, but it all seems a little counter-intuitive to me.

there were a million little things in the book that just made me feel like thomas isn't the most self-aware person in the world. she remarks that she & her husband bought a BMW & felt kind of shame-faced over it, but it was a really good choice because they have two little children & needed a safe, reliable car. personally, i think my second-hand saturn from 2002 is pretty safe & reliable & it only cost $2800. bear in mind that thomas & her husband live in new york city, where you don't even need a car--not even if you have children! it seemed obvious to me that they bought the BMW as a status object & were using the kids to justify it. just like they used the kids to justify a six-figure remodel of their kitchen. just like they used their kids to justify taking out an ARM for a multi-story brooklyn brownstone they couldn't actually afford. they keep saying they want the kids to have a place that feels like a real home, a place that is comfortable & safe & warm. well, guess what? trust me when i tell you that a two-year-old doesn't give two f*cks about whether you have a viking range in your kitchen. or marble countertops. or seatwarmers in your luxury sedan. don't use the kids to justify & excuse your own desire for things that you can't really afford.

after her divorce, thomas moves into an apartment in a neighborhood that she "wouldn't have felt safe walking around in five years before". i think that says a f*ck of a lot more about thomas than it does about the neighborhood, especially in light of the fact that there has been an 80% reduction in violent crime in new york city over the last thirty years (compared with a 40% reduction in the rest of the country). she says the kids had to stay with her ex because they wouldn't be safe in her new place. well, guess what, lady? a whole sh*tload of other kids grow up in "bad neighborhoods," not because their parents don't love them, but because their parents don't have the money to buy a co-op in park slope. sometimes you live within your means & everything works out okay anyway.

thomas's attempts to portray something that was surely personally catastrophic & traumatizing, but is not actually at all uncommon, as some kind of weird crippling epidemic that accounts for everything from helicopter parenting to the housing bubble to misogyny (seriously, thomas theorizes that maybe the reason men say sexist things about women is because they're angry with their moms for getting divorced...so explain to me why misogyny isn't just this random thing that started happening in like 1975?) are really labored & honestly not at all relatable. maybe i'm biased because i'm ten years younger than thomas (ie, not really generation X at all--but also not a millennial) & my divorce was just no big whoop. maybe there's a whole swath of the population that would read this book & be like, "wow, i totally get where she's coming from!" i just hope i never meet any of those people.

I found that Susan Gregory Thomas was rather light on details of her life (suddenly skipping over something that was pivotal after a paragraph leading up to it), leaving me feeling that she didn't really want to share her life story. That's fine- but if you're writing a memoir, then I think you need to include the raw and real moments too. It left me somewhat confused at times.
I also felt very tired by the end of the book with all the references to Gen X and generalizing all Susan's problems on being part of that generation. Seemed overdone.
The three stars are because it was a compelling subject and the interactions between Susan and her daughters was beautifully written, I loved the nicknames she threw in there (bunny rabbit, my little mammal, schmushkie). It sounded just like you were there while she was talking to her girls.

Meh. I think Thomas's book just didn't digest very deeply because she's tying her memoir to a lot of research which--for me, at least-- diluted the weight and meaning of either, individually. And, I found lots of the generalizations she makes about Gen-Xers ("facts" which she relies upon to explain just about everything about the lives we live, the choices we make, etc.) don't fit my own experience or those of most of my cohort of friends and acquaintances, no matter whether we come from intact, happy families or homes broken in myriad (and sometimes terrible) ways. With all her self-reflection and all the serious research padding out this book, I just didn't feel like any of it was very meaningful or resonant in the end.

I went back and forth about this book. This is one woman's story about reconciling her childhood to her own marriage and raising her children as a self comfessed helicopter parent of Generation X. There are moments of this book that i could genuinely relate to, but those moments were eventually overshadowed by what I thought at times was her whining and trying really hard to draw general conclusions about an entire generation through her own lens. The piece about the dissolution of her marriage and adjusting to her new life and adjusting her kids to the new arrangement were poignant, but thats a lot of pages to read for a couple good chapters.

If Goodreads would allow half stars I would rank "In Spite of Everything" 2.5 stars. I appreciated the author's honesty and found her own personal story (the memoir portion of the book) interesting but did not like when she theorized/made long generalizations about Generation X. The book is touted as a memoir but big portions of it were sociological commentary. While some of the points she made were very valid (I thought her theory as to why she believes attachment parenting has resonated with many Gen X parents was pretty spot on) she really overgeneralizes.

Both personal and socio-political, the author examines her childhood and those of other Gen Xers who survived divorce, latchkey lives, and the lasting effects of abandonment by a parent. She explores her passion and comittment for raising her own children in a two parent household and the soul-wrenching process and growth she went through after experiencing her own divorce.

It's just never a good sign when I spend the last third of a book anxiously waiting for it to be over. This had potential to be a book I would really like, but it just...wasn't, quite.

I read the review of it in Time last year and thought it might help me address my greatest fear, Divorce. It sat on my shelf for a number of months until the birth of our third child prompted me to devour it in two days. Across the oceans I could see so many parallels in time and culture common amongst a lot of Gen X, but obviously a lot of experience is uniquely your own. I appreciated the writers ability to include both the global and personal in your writing. In reading this book I was looking for nuggets of gold that would help me avoid a divorce. The writer articulated a number of insights that I will carry with me and these provided a catalyst for Kerri and I to talk about our relationship (the good and the bad).

A memoir of the author’s parents divorcing when she was a child, and then she and her husband divorcing many years later. While she speaks in generalities about being a child of divorce and how this experience shaped all of Generation X, I’m sure there are exceptions to the rule. I mean, her husband’s parents didn’t divorce, and yet, her husband was the one who instigated their divorce, so really, it doesn’t matter what your background is. Nobody ever wants to divorce, but it just happens sometimes for whatever reason. Anyway… I am not part of Gen X, so I have no point of reference for anything the author talks about. I wonder if her ex-husband read this book and what he thinks about her telling of events.

This is a memoir that gets to the heart of the writer, who spares herself nothing, and works hard not to cast blame. Just the facts, but the facts are processed through thoughtful, well-meaning, and hopeful heart. The difficulties of her separation are, at every step, modulated by awareness of resources beyond the average, unwillingness to call upon available help. One unremarked thread that kept surfacing for me was "How hard must it be for women without her resources?'

In Spite of Everything: A Memoir
Susan Thomas Gregory
Not even sure what made be add this book to my Goodreads TBR list. However during the great TBR purge of 2012, I ended up keeping it on the list and finding it in a local library. I can’t remember what drew me to add this book to the list in way back on July 31, 2011 as I am neither a Gen X’er nor a child for divorce, but I gave it go anyway.
Susan Thomas Gregory rights a memoir about the scars that divorce has left on the children of Generation X and how she fought hard not to repeat the same sins of her parents. We learn about her childhood growing up with an alcoholic father and a sometimes absent mother; their cross country move and her subsequent struggle when her dad moved out on the family. Later we see her troubled adolescent and college years until she settles into a horrible job after graduating college. The book continues on and focuses on her meeting and eventually marrying her husband and snippets of their life together as it falls apart. Throughout each chapter there are lots of references to Greek Mythology and Eminem ( the rapper) as well as social commentary and research about a variety of things including starter marriages, children’s’ response to divorce, helicopter parents and the housing market. Mortgage crisis as it relates to generation X. The most interesting part is her commentary and “research” on how sons raised by single mothers are often times victims of emotional incest, from having to be the man of the house. This part was mostly completed by her own personal stories of 2-3 men who fall into this category, but I still found the analogy interesting nonetheless.

When I finished the book, my first thought was that I really wanted to read/know her husband’s version of the story because hers literally left me so lost. In the beginning, it sounded like a mutual decision, but as she gave more detailed toward the end of the book, it seemed to be all on her husband. HE came off looking like an ass, but with a much more detailed story behind it. I guess that’s what ends up happening in a divorce memoir.

Part divorce memoir, part generation X study I felt this book didn’t really have a firm idea of what it was and because I belonged to neither of those groups ( knock on wood), I struggled to find how she, according to the description, was stunned to find her marriage coming to an end or how she vowed to never let her kids know divorce. I’m sure hindsight is 20/20 but she never really focused on how she did those too aside from making a promise to herself and trying to go for some marriage counseling. I did enjoy her social commentary, but I just wasn’t able to relate to her childhood or her subsequent divorce.

I don’t even remember why I put this book on my to-read list. I have no idea where I saw it (was it a recommendation?) or if maybe I read another review (on Oprah.com, perhaps?), but the subject matter of this honest, powerful memoir hits closer to home than anything I’ve read in some time.

Thomas starts the book with the following:

For most of my generation—Generation X—there is only one question: “When did your parents split?” Our lives have been framed by the answer. Ask us. We remember everything.

I may not be a part of Generation X, but I have grown up surrounded by friends coming from divorced homes and now find myself in the situation of being an adult child of separated parents—a recent occurrence that I would not have believed even if my current self had traveled back in time to tell me about my future.

What Thomas’ memoir does right is relay the emotional wounds that can exist after a major familial upheaval, like divorce. Her divorce from her husband ravages not only her emotional spirit, but her physical self as well, and I felt for her with every passing page. What’s wrong with the book, then? I had no major problems with it, but did feel that Thomas attempted to toe some line between memoir and objective nonfiction about the ravages of divorce upon a generation without altogether successfully fusing the two. But, by the end of the book, I didn’t notice this (it becomes 100% memoir somewhere past the middle) and didn’t really care either. Her honest voice and vivid retelling of difficult—even tragic—memories held my attention for hours at a time until I turned the final page.

Here is a paragraph from early in the book that has been rumbling around in my head from the moment I read it:

Our fear is that “alone” is the central truth that lies at the heart of the universe, and that we cannot provide them [our children] with an unimpeachably happy childhood, our children will be forced to stare into that void by themselves, too. But what if that isn’t true? What if there is more than this? What if the only truly perfect gem that we can really keep and share with our children is that none of us is alone—that they can remain loved and secure, in spite of everything?

Have you read this book? What did you think?

This (very short) book is more sociological commentary than the memoir I expected. I’m fascinated by the dichotomy of 70s parenting (e.g. “benign neglect”) vs. the helicopter deal going on today, of course instigated by the effect of 70s parenting. I’m not sure what to say other than this book, though smart, is a little bit boring. As a child of the 70s I thought it'd be more relatable.

The author focuses primarily on divorce and perhaps it just did not resonate with me as my parents are still married as am I. It gets pretty depressing, especially when she describes her young daughters’ reaction to her split. Although I did agree with several of her (potentially) controversial theories on divorce. I have to say the lead-up to said divorce is not very smoothly rendered. It seems to come from nowhere even though you know from the outset the outcome.

The writing is good if not a bit too scholarly (and pretentious). It’s funny because at one point she pokes fun at a book for its use of the word “numinous” only to go on to use it later. I don’t know, there’s just too much minutia and textbook references and too little intrigue for me with a bunch of God thrown in at the end. Not for me.

"For most of my generation--Generation X--there is only one question: 'When did your parents split?' Our lives have been framed by the answer. Ask us. We remember everything."

This memoir brought back the painful feelings experienced during my adolescence and my parents' divorce. It was hard to read at times for personal reasons.

I can't really recommend it as an enjoyable book, except for the parts where the author reflects on how modern motherhood and parenting has been altered as a reflection of the insecurity we feel lingering from our parents' divorce and dysfunction.

This book made me anxious and even more neurotic about my parenting. So by all means, avoid this book if you're a worrier. It's not purely a memoir as we recognize the form, since there are thousands of mini case studies sprinkled throughout the book about how parents in their 20s, 30s and 40s still resent their parents for the benign neglect that was so commonplace during our youth and the selfishness that our parents exhibited.

The funniest part of the book is when the author asks her mother to share her (the author's) first word. Reluctantly her mother confesses it was, "Scotch!" Ha.

The beginning of the book was strong, and I found myself (as a Gen-Xer) relating to much of it. It's humbling when you think you are so unique, and then read statistics that describe yourself so accurately. But the 2nd half of the book lost me. I felt she didn't own her fault in her divorce (4 years of living separate lives, and she didn't see a problem?) and tried to gloss over the affect it will have on her own children. The premise - "In spite of everything" - that she ended up getting a divorce, but that somehow she made different choices than her parents; that she found a way to do it in a less-damaging way - wasn't proven. I cringed as I read about the post-divorce situation. And the final chapter seemed to candy coat where everyone ended up - trying to put a "happily ever after" where one doesn't exist. The honesty in the first half was lost when she became an active participant in her choices, rather than a victim of others'.

The author says it herself, in reference to her whole generation: the book is one long exercise in "excruciating self-analysis." I think that's more a class thing than a generational thing. Upper-middle (and lower-upper) literary kind-of-intellectual people can be very self involved. I'm not without sympathy. I know how a divorce makes you obsessively sift through all the details of your life to find out exactly which of your perceptions were delusions and how your life made you construct those delusions. I'm just not so sure that all those details make a good book. And the conclusions she came to about characteristics of generations, again, seemed to me more about social class. I particularly hated her passage about smothering or needy single mothers damaging their boy children. It sounded to me like the same kind of thinking that blamed refrigerator mothers for autism. And Oedipal and Medea complexes...really?

An odd book to finish on Valentine's Day! This is a memoir of a woman's divorce, reaching back to her own parents' divorce and attempting to sort through her life and see how the pieces fit together and impact each other. She writes well, and the account held my interest and made me grateful for my own parents' determination to stay together.

As is often the case with memoirs, I wonder how true her voice and perspective are. I just happened to find a link on Goodreads to her blog, and she writes there in a foul-mouthed, hatefully angry manner that is such a put-on that I have to question the veracity of her book.

Marriage is hard, no doubt about it. I like the quote I saw last week: "It doesn't get easy; it just gets less difficult." But it is definitely worth the struggle, if you can get past our modern culture's lie that it's all about your own happiness.

The book talks about Gen X marriage in the shadow of boomer divorces, and the longing not to do what our parents did – the longing not to break up.
"We weren’t the only ones. The particular memorabilia that comprise each family’s unhappiness are always different, but a lot of our friends were going through the same basic stuff at the time — and a lot of people our age we didn’t know were, too. The divorce epidemic of the 1970s and ’80s wiped out nearly half our generation." On just about every page, I gasped out loud in recognition of some character or situation.
Our “lives center around our own kids’ childhoods, around saving them from the smallest pain”—In Spite of Everything is as good as it gets. It shows us how our parents’ screw-ups inevitably screw us, and how our own strenuous attempts to “reverse-engineer karma” can founder like even the best of marriages.

I have few complaints about this book so I won't go into them--they're minor anyway. What I like about this book is how it related to me as a "Gen X-er"(as she calls us)in the way of being from this culture of divorce and how it shaped our personalities, choices and basically, our lives. She compares how divorce is done today as opposed to "back then" and how we function in our relationships to try to avoid it.
Mostly, I found SGT warm and friendly, though at times, a bit narcissistic. She made fascinating connections and insights that I envy as a writer.
I think her audience is pretty limited to those of us of Generation X or perhaps those with some interest or stake in reading about us.

Really liked it. What makes a relationship work? Why did hers fail? Lack of sex with Cal? It was never about sex with Cal? It was perfect at the start. She's a good writer. Thought provoking. Her parents were a trip. Every family is dysfunctional - it's all a matter of degrees?? I'd like to explore this book with the people who are reading it now. Have never tried that Goodreads function. Who has the time.

Is Love really "obsession"? That's my thought at age 61 and I've had it before. I understand caring. I understand infatuation. I understand chemistry, respect, like, etc. But love?

She has such energy, intelligence, good looking too. Did she overthink everything or not until it was too late??

Could I write a memoir? And be totally honest?????

She includes some very interesting insights about Generation X as related to our relationship with spouses and kids. Probably the biggest weakness of the book is that the author occasionally is too focused on her own experience as the child of divorced parents and the resulting loneliness. Loneliness is unquestionably a recurring theme for Generation X, but not all of it was due to divorce even while it remained an ever-present spectre in our lives. That said, a good portion of the book deals with her own divorce, and a discussion of some of the other forces that contributed to the Generation X mindset is probably best reserved for a different book.

Any Gen Xer whose parents divorced, particularly if you are raising children of your own, is likely to find this memoir startlingly familiar. Our Boomer parents tended to handle the dissolution of our families with cluelessness or callousness, and this has reverberated throughout our lives. The author clearly did not work through the damage before starting her own family, and it was heartbreaking to read how history repeated itself in her own marriage. At least she learned enough to make an effort to support her children through the process, but it would have been nice to read some reflection about how things might have been different.

An overwritten, self-indulgent, under-researched memoir that redeems itself, a little, in the final chapter. Thomas takes her own experience, props it up with stats from a study or two, and claims it represents her entire generation. Nonsense! She also expects us to sympathize with her because she and her husband bought a tony townhouse they couldn't afford, and indulged in two lavish kitchen renovations. Gross! I eye-rolled my way through everything but Thomas's closing account of her first Christmas as a divorcee with her confused, unhappy kids.

Intrigued by reviews in the Washington Post and New York Times, I picked up this book and found it a fascinating and insightful read about Generation Xers and the challenges they faced in response to the high divorce rate among their baby-boomer parents. Far from blaming others, the author takes a look deep within herself and her peers to explore life, marriage, parenting, being true to one's self as well as giving to others. Despite the trials and tribulations, this is ultimately a life-affirming tale exploring some time-honored truths. Probably of most interest to urban audiences.

Awhile back I read an author interview that Thomas did and I found her both amusing and insightful. I did not find the same qualities in her book, however. I'm not going to resign this book to the "will-never-finish" pile just yet but have decided to set it down (return it to the library) for now. Perhaps some day when I'm in the mood to listen to someone whine about divorce and make up theories, I'll pick it back up again...

After reading this article, I had to read the book.

I finished the book last night and overall liked it a lot. Susan Gregory Thomas' writing is honest and sharp. She started losing me when she wrote about her 100K kitchen renovation but the last part of the book was as riveting as the article in the Times. I hope she writes more!

I will not be finishing this book. The author is extremely narrow-minded in lumping all of Gen-X together as a generation scarred by divorce. She often generalizes for others based on her own experiences. As a child of divorce myself, I feel bitter towards her assumptions that all children of divorce share these same experiences. It's been difficult for me to continue reading.

Memoir of divorce and self in contemporary New York. I tired of the F word and variations as well as the bitterness since the review promised some humor. The emotionally raw writing needed some editing and some protection for the author's children. Maybe the trouble is that I am the wrong generation and/or not a New Yorker!

This was a very well written book. The rating is not related to the writing or the story. It was interesting. Maybe it is because I have never been divorced or never had children, but I just got tired during this book. She was just constantly, painfully self-aware. I know it was an autobiography but it was too much for me.

I was hoping for more of a memoir, but a lot of the book discusses Generation X, child rearing, and divorce. A lot of it did not ring true for me, as my parents did not divorce. I also couldn't understand how Thomas and her husband could spend $100,000 renovating a kitchen (and then later cry poverty), but hey, maybe that's just me -- a non-yuppie Generation X'er.