Never Simple

Liz Scheier's darkly funny and touching memoir - with shades of Jeannette Walls's The Glass Castle and Mira Bartók's The Memory Palace - chronicles growing up in '90s Manhattan with a brilliant, mendacious single mother.

Scheier's mother Judith was a news junkie, a hilarious storyteller, and a fast-talking charmer you couldn't look away from. She was a single mother whose devotion crossed the line into obsession, and when gripped by the mental illness that plagued her daily life, became a violent and abusive liar whose hold on reality was shaky at best.

On an uneventful afternoon when Scheier was eighteen, her mother sauntered into the room to reveal two important things: first, she had been married for most of Scheier's life to a man she'd never heard of, and second, the man she'd been told was her father was entirely fictional. She'd made him up. Though these two big lies marked a significant moment, it was just the beginning; it required dozens of smaller lies to support them. By the time she finished, Judith had built a farcical, half-true life for the two of them, complete with a fake social security number and a fabricated husband.

One hot July day twenty years later, Scheier receives a voicemail from Adult Protective Services, reporting that Judith has stopped paying rent and is refusing all offers of assistance. This call marks the start of a shocking journey that takes the Scheiers, mother and daughter, deep into the cascading effects of decades of lies and deception.

Never Simple is the story of learning to survive - and, finally, trying to save - a complicated parent, as feared as she is loved, and as self-destructive as she is adoring.