NEVER SIMPLE

A former Random House editor and content developer recounts an improbably complicated life courtesy of an eccentric, mentally ill mother.

Scheier’s mother, Judith, was a font of mystery and mistruths. Early on, the author recounts the time she wanted to enroll in driver’s education and needed her birth certificate. “I never filed a record of your birth at all,” said Judith. “Why not?” Replied Judith, “I was married when you were born. But not to your father.” There are multiple misdirections in this simple exchange, enough to set Scheier, ever curious, to playing the role of detective. Her father supposedly died before she was born, but there was much more to it than all that. “Telling exorbitant lies was easier in the ’80s,” writes the author, and were there a lot of them—e.g., the fake Social Security number Judith got for her daughter or how she was able to live in “a luxury neighborhood in one of the most expensive cities on earth for decades without working over a single day.” Scheier sought escape, at one point attempting suicide (“I was irretrievably broken. Entirely unfixable”). In a moment of dark humor, which abounds throughout the narrative, she writes that after taking way too many pills of various kinds, she wound up vomiting for hours in the bathroom, reading her English homework—Steinbeck’s The Pearl—“between heaves.” Later, she endured a “nearly sexless relationship for the better part of a decade,” a union that ended with her partner’s infidelity. “The next few weeks looked like a movie montage of a recent breakup,” she writes, “preferably with myself played by Kristen Wiig.” Eventually, Scheier found new love and motherhood, in between episodes of which she continued to investigate the identity of her father and endured a mother who, though sinking into dementia, still had enough tricks up her sleeve to land the author in an eviction lawsuit, with no end to the mishegoss.

A fraught and sometimes overwrought drama on every page, punctuated by shrewd wit.