Who could ever love you A family memoir

Mary L. Trump

Book - 2024

"Who Could Ever Love You is an intimate, heartbreaking memoir of a father, a mother, and a family's exile. Mary Trump grew up in a family divided by its patriarch's relentless drive for money and power. The daughter of Freddy Trump, the highly accomplished, dashing eldest son of wealthy real estate developer Fred Trump, and Linda Clapp, a flight attendant from a working-class family, Mary lived in the shadow of Freddy's humiliation at the hands of his father. Fred Trump embodied the ethos of the zero-sum game and among his five children, there could only be one winner. That was supposed to be Freddy, his namesake, but Fred found him wanting--too sensitive, too kind, too interested in pursuits beyond the realm of the real... estate empire he was meant to inherit. In Donald, Fred found a kindred spirit, a "killer," who would stop at nothing to get his own way. Even after Freddy's short-lived career as a professional pilot for TWA came to an end, he never stopped trying to gain his father's approval. Finally, at the age of forty-two, he succumbed to Fred's lethal contempt and died alone in an emergency room, with no family by his side. In WHO COULD EVER LOVE YOU, Mary Trump brings us inside the twisted family whose patriarch ignored, froze out, and eventually destroyed his own. Freddy Trump's decline into alcoholism and illness, along with Linda's suffering after their divorce, left Mary dangerously vulnerable as a very young girl. Inadequately and only conditionally loved, there were no adults in her life except for the father she loved, but lost before she could know him; and a mother abandoned by her ex-husband's rich and powerful family who demanded her loyalty but left her with nothing. With searching insight, poignant detail, and unsparing prose, Mary Trump reveals the cold, selfish cruelty that has come to define the Trump family thanks in large part to her uncle, whose malignant ambition has riven our nation and threatens the world"--

Saved in:
9 people waiting
4 being processed

Bookmobile Nonfiction Show me where

BIOGRAPHY/Trump, Mary L.
1 / 1 copies available

2nd Floor New Shelf Show me where

BIOGRAPHY/Trump, Mary L.
0 / 3 copies available
Location Call Number   Status
Bookmobile Nonfiction BIOGRAPHY/Trump, Mary L. Checked In
2nd Floor New Shelf BIOGRAPHY/Trump, Mary L. (NEW SHELF) On Holdshelf
+1 Hold
2nd Floor New Shelf BIOGRAPHY/Trump, Mary L. (NEW SHELF) Due Oct 23, 2024
2nd Floor New Shelf BIOGRAPHY/Trump, Mary L. (NEW SHELF) Due Oct 29, 2024
Subjects
Published
New York : St. Martin's Press 2024.
Language
English
Main Author
Mary L. Trump (author)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
273 pages : illustrations (some color) ; 22 cm
ISBN
9781250278470
  • Prologue
  • Part I. The Dark Beauty of Recall
  • Part II. Black Velocities
  • Part III. The Serial Killer
  • Part IV. The Only Way Out Is Through
  • Epilogue
Review by Booklist Review

Mary Trump, niece of Donald, has written about her extended dysfunctional family in Too Much, Never Enough (2020). Here she returns to the topic, with the emphasis on her parents. Those who've read the previous book will know her father, Freddy, namesake of his tyrant father, was a hopeless alcoholic, in and out of rehab; her mother was disappointed, disillusioned, and beholden to the Trump family even after her divorce. Without the Trump name attached, this would still be a moving (if somewhat disjointed) look at a sad childhood. But Trump's readers get it by now. In her family, cruelty was a feature not a bug.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

The unraveling of a family prefigures the unraveling of a nation in this wounding account from clinical psychologist Trump. One year after publishing 2020's Too Much and Never Enough, an exposé of her uncle, Donald Trump, the author checked into treatment for "dissociation... and increasing social isolation." Sensing her condition was linked to childhood trauma, she revisited her early years, which were dominated by her grandfather, real estate developer Fred Trump. Much of the memoir outlines her self-interrogation: her parents, Freddy and Linda, spent "glittering evenings at Manhattan clubs," yet Freddy, who left the family business to become a pilot, encountered "stifling control and blanket disapproval" from his father, who called him "a goddamned chauffeur in the sky." After Freddy descended into alcoholism, he and Linda divorced, leaving a five-year-old Trump and her older brother, Frederick, with an angry and inattentive mother. Trump endured sexual abuse from a teenage neighbor, life-threatening asthma that Linda ignored, and her father's early death, only to have Donald and his siblings steal Freddy's portion of the inheritance from her grandfather. The material can be astonishingly bleak, but Trump's clear and concise prose shines, and she has a well-trained eye for the melancholy that runs through her family. It's an astute and occasionally explosive plunge into an American dynasty's heart of darkness. Agent: Pilar Queen, UTA. (Sept.)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review

A second tell-all memoir from the former president's niece. Mary Trump, a clinical psychologist, expands her vehemently critical assessment of her family outward after the first memoir,Too Much and Never Enough, skewered Uncle Donald. With raw authenticity and bracing detail, she painstakingly reveals the devastating psychological impact of the Trump clan's outraged reaction to her first tell-all, which forced her to check herself into a treatment program utilizing experimental ketamine therapy. Three years prior, she'd had treatment for "intensive trauma" and a dissociation condition, all exacerbated by the fact that "Donald Trump is my uncle." Looking inward, she peels back the traumatic layers of her early life growing up in Jamaica, New York, with parents Freddy, a commercial airline pilot, and Linda, a flight attendant. Sadly, her parents' idyllic romance curdled beneath the constant mockery and "stifling control and blanket disapproval" of her grandfather, real estate mogul Fred Trump, the "unaffectionate" family patriarch. Eventually the author would grieve for her parents, who each suffered with personal demons, particularly her father, who succumbed to alcoholism and died prematurely at age 42. Ordeals with chronic asthma attacks (which were ignored by her dismissive mother), sexual harassment from a neighbor, and an indifferent family forced her to shut out the world around her and "turn inward." With blistering frankness, Trump elaborates on the melodrama surrounding her grandfather's will and the numerous lawsuits ("my family's love language") that ensued after Donald and his siblings calculatedly stole her and her father's inheritance from her grandfather's estate. Trump, who is openly gay and a mother to a grown daughter, doesn't skimp on the jarring, revelatory details of her toxic family, telling her truths with lucidity despite the narrative's relentlessly despondent tone and texture. She unpacks the baseline origins of her debilitating stress, self-loathing, and self-isolation in a heartless clan that apparently couldn't care less about her. Another scathing exposé of the enduring fallout from a poisonous, dysfunctional family dynamic. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.