You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me: A Memoir

A searing, deeply moving memoir about family, love, loss, and forgiveness from the critically acclaimed, bestselling National Book Award-winning author of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.

Family relationships are never simple. But Sherman Alexie’s bond with his mother Lillian was more complex than most. She plunged her family into chaos with a drinking habit, but shed her addiction when it was on the brink of costing her everything. She survived a violent past, but created an elaborate facade to hide the truth. She selflessly cared for strangers, but was often incapable of showering her children with the affection that they so desperately craved. She wanted a better life for her son, but it was only by leaving her behind that he could hope to achieve it. It’s these contradictions that made Lillian Alexie a beautiful, mercurial, abusive, intelligent, complicated, and very human woman.

When she passed away, the incongruities that defined his mother shook Sherman and his remembrance of her. Grappling with the haunting ghosts of the past in the wake of loss, he responded the only way he knew how: he wrote. The result is a stunning memoir filled with raw, angry, funny, profane, tender memories of a childhood few can imagine, much less survive. An unflinching and unforgettable remembrance, You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me is a powerful, deeply felt account of a complicated relationship.

Sherman Alexie is one of the most acclaimed and bestselling novelists in America. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, which won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, was a #1 New York Times bestseller and has more than two million copies in print.

Along with the National Book Award, the novel was a 2008 Horn Book Award Winner for Excellence in Children’s Literature, a Booksense Book of the Year Children’s Literature Honor Book, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist, and one of the New York Times Notable Children’s Books of 2007. Alexie has also written eleven books of poetry, three story collections, and three novels for adults: Reservation Blues, Indian Killer, and Flight.