Losing Mum and Pup: A Memoir

In twelve months between 2007 and 2008, Christopher Buckley coped with the passing of his father, William F. Buckley, the father of the modern conservative movement, and his mother, Patricia Taylor Buckley, one of New York's most glamorous and colorful socialites. He was their only child and their relationship was close and complicated. Writes Buckley: "They were not - with respect to every other set of loving, wonderful parents in the world - your typical mom and dad."

As Buckley tells the story of their final year together, he takes readers on a surprisingly entertaining tour through hospitals, funeral homes, and memorial services, capturing the heartbreaking and disorienting feeling of becoming a 55-year-old orphan. Buckley maintains his sense of humor by recalling the words of Oscar Wilde: "To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose both looks like carelessness."

Just as Calvin Trillin and Joan Didion gave readers solace and insight into the experience of losing a spouse, <ST1:PERSONNAME w:st="on">Christopher Buckley</ST1:PERSONNAME> offers consolation, wit, and warmth to those coping with the death of a parent, while telling a unique personal story of life with legends.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. I am okay with the fact that he is still clearly not at peace with his parents despite his protestations to the contrary. The entire existence of the book indicates a lack of peace. But I'm fine with this! Where would we be memoir-wise if we only wrote when totally at peace? We'd have so little to read. What worked: he doesn't hold back. (Oh sure, he holds back on his personal life and his suspect relationships with his lovers/wife and children, but I suppose that is outside of the scope of this book. He can write those books later! Seriously.) He's quite the enjoyable narrator--funny, self-deprecating, and to the point.

What's a little painful: constant reference to "Mum" and to "Pup." For reals? Can we get some evidence to the fact that this is how he daily referred to his mom and dad? If so, fine. Unbelievably pretentious and painful, but at least he's just being accurate. The two too many references to the "Lion of the Right" doing some mundane or humiliating action. We get it. He's a titan in your eyes, and should be in ours. Glad "Christo" wrote this. Really helped me see that not all is what it appears to be. The limelight marriages are often not the perfect connections the media make them out to be. The "greats" are often terribly flawed and sadly prove to be inadequate role models, even and especially for their own children.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Not everyone is able to come to terms with the truth of who their parents were so soon after their deaths. I appreciate that the "sinner" in life is not viewed as a "saint" in death. I think it was a truthful tribute and hopefully helped the author get through the difficult time.

First of all, I am adding an extra star to counteract the petty commentators on here who indulge in ad hominem attacks against the author or drag their own irrelevant politics into their reviews.

I watched Firing Line and read National Review for years. I am a fan of William F.Buckley and do not think any of his conservative successors hold a candle to him. He did not have to indulge in yelling or name calling to get his point across, but always drew upon reason and knowledge of his subject matter. I wish the younger version of him were still around to bring some reason into our current political discourse.

As far as the memoir goes, I pretty much assumed it was a cathartic exercise for son Christopher. I do think there is some bitterness about being neglected by two very busy parents who were mostly into their own lives and not that of being parents. I know many parents like this; it's not unusual. Meanwhile, I have read some of Christopher's novels and don't think this memoir is up to his usual style. But he is a humorist, and of course this is a rather somber topic. I enjoyed most his reminiscences about sailing with his father. I wish there were a little more of this kind of thing in the book. But as someone who has lost both his parents, I can commiserate with so much of what he went through.

A great book about the Buckleys and about the pain and process of losing parents. Brutally and beautifully honest.

I have enjoyed many of Christopher Buckley's novels. He has a keen comic sense and, usually, an engaging style. But I was unhappy with Losing Mum and Pup, his memoir of his parents and their deaths within a year of each other.

First, this book is not what it purports to be. It is not so much a memoir of Pat and Bill Buckley, but of Christopher Buckley, Christo, himself. Yes, it would be impossible for the narrator to absent himself in such a work, but Christopher has employed no suppression devices whatever. It seemed to me a sloppy book, both in conception and in execution.

It is self-indulgent and vainglorious to a fare-the-well. Not only does the writing fall into flaccidity--the heavy adjectivizing, the cloying appending of "great" to almost every friend of Wm. F. Buckley, but we're also treated to a scorecard on the number of books the Buckley clan, particularly pere and fils (no longer linked in mortal combat), has published.

Buckley relies on his comic style and supplies it de trop (as both Buckley pere et fils might say) as a substitute for hard thinking. Indeed, while we are told that Pat and Bill didn't get along all that well, though they were obviously mutually codependent, we are not vouchsafed much to flesh out the assertion. Rather, we are left accepting Christopher's conclusion: he has told us but he has not shown us.

Overdrive, my title above, is, indeed, the excellent title of one of William F. Buckley's own self narratives. I chose it to title this review because I think Christopher's book is both glib and jejune. He'd rather get in a bon mot than get to the crux of most matters.

Speaking, also, of bons mots, Christopher would benefit from a remedial course in Strunk and White before he falls into the not so good trap of reproducing, as in aping, his father's sometimes (but not always) amusing baroque writing style. For example, instead of telling us that he's put on weight, Christopher goes for the needlessly embroidered "additional avoirdupois." He continuously apostrophizes the reader (e.g. "But you probably know this..."), an extremely annoying tic. And, for a man brought up by one of the most celebrated wordsmiths of the twentieth century, he is sloppy about words. Example: referring to the fire that destroyed his parents' rented Swiss villa, he refers to it as an "immolation" rather than as the "conflagration" that it actually was. At one point he cites his fathers "diktaks" (maybe a typo) when he clearly means "diktats." I am sure he knows these words: the point is the sloppiness. A good writer will make mistakes, but he will also find them when he reads the typescript and fix them. Christopher has not.

William F. Buckley's style was sui generis. In the case of his son it is simulacrum. While such a style may, by some, be considered an appropriate homage, I suggest that Christopher would be better served by more stringent discipline (and by the whip hand of an editor not bedazzled by the Buckley mystique). Buckley pere received (mainly) kudos for a style that is ostentatious and show-offy--a outrance (as he put it). If Buckley fils continues in the vein he has mined in Losing Mum and Pup he is in danger of losing what heretofore was a much more effective and authentic voice of his own.