My Problem With The NYTBR - Sean Manning questions why The New York Times Book Review would review his memoir about his mother’s terrible illness in such a snarky and dismissive way.

Is this true criticism?
The Daily Beast

Three weeks ago, I learned my memoir The Things That Need Doing had been scheduled for review in The New York Times Book Review’s January 30 issue. The NYTBR has a circulation of over a million. Of the hundreds of books its editors regularly receive for consideration, only a dozen or so are selected for review each week. Rarely are these trade paperbacks like mine. You might say I was excited.
I guessed the editors’ interest had to do with the national health-care debate. The book concerns my mother’s death and the preceding year I spent with her at the Cleveland Clinic as she battled congestive heart failure, lung cancer, stomach paralysis, and ventilator dependency. The total cost of her care came to $2.4 million. All but $3,000 was covered by insurance. My mom’s experience could be used as an argument for both supporters and opponents of President Obama’s controversial health-care legislation. Without insurance, she never would’ve been able to live as long as she did. Because of insurance, she’d been allowed to live too long, at a great expense.


I guessed wrong. In last Sunday’s NYTBR, in a review titled “The Problem With Memoir,” a Times staff editor excoriated my memoir and two others (a fourth he praised) in “possibly a futile effort to restore some standards to this absurdly bloated genre”:

Sean Manning [watched] his mother die a lingering death from cancer, and in The Things That Need Doing pummels us with the details of every intubation, change in medication and debate with doctors. Why does he do this? It’s certainly not to memorialize his mother; not only does he tell us little about her, but he also strips her of any and all dignity by describing in voyeuristic detail her vomiting, diaper changes and such. No, the sole purpose of this memoir, like many, many others concerning some personal trial, is to generate sympathy for its author. Manning, who was in his mid-20s when he took his lengthy turn at the bedside, seems on every page to be looking for someone to say, “Poor Sean; how about a hug?” But it’s the reader who will need a hug after choking down this orgy of self-congratulation and self-pity.

This is a gross mischaracterization of my work and motivations.

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