OCTOBER 2015 - AudioFile
The choice to narrate his own work is the sole flaw in Bill Clegg's near-perfect debut novel. It’s a beautifully crafted story of hope and survival in the face of an almost unimaginable family tragedy that captures listeners from the opening paragraphs to the poignant ending. The characters, even the supporting ones, are fully realized and offer a range of personalities at once unique and accessible. Clegg's presentation offers little range of pace or inflection and fails to provide the differentiation that would lift the narration to the rich level his prose. However, this distraction absolutely does not warrant abandoning the audiobook. Any listener who answers "yes" to the question posed in the title will find stepping away from this exceptional audiobook is not an option. M.O.B. © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine
Publishers Weekly
★ 06/29/2015
In this sorrowful and deeply probing debut novel, literary agent and memoirist Clegg (Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man) delivers a story of loss and its grueling aftermath. The story opens with an unimaginable tragedy: a Connecticut house is consumed by fire in the wee hours before a wedding. The bride's mother, June, is the only survivor. Everyone else—Lolly, June's daughter, with whom she had a strained relationship; June's womanizing ex-husband, Adam; June's ex-con boyfriend Luke, 20 years her junior; and Lolly's fiancé, Will—all die in the blaze. But where was June when the explosion occurred? Clegg pieces the mystery together through the voices of his characters. There's Luke's lonely, scandal-courting mother, Lydia, who shoulders secrets about her son; 15-year-old Silas, a stoner who was the last to see Luke, with June, the night before he died. And there's Rebecca, Kelly, and Cissy—caretakers of the Moonstone motel in Moclips, Wash., where June holes up for nine months after the fire and wastes away. The conclusion of the family's narrative is foregone: due to the fire, everyone ends up dead or alone. But it's Clegg's deft handling of all the parsed details—missed opportunities, harbored regrets, and unspoken good intentions—that make the journey toward redemption and forgiveness so memorable. (Sept.)
National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author Darin Strauss
"Like the question it poses, Did You Ever Have a Family is brutally direct yet it's got an enormous symbolic power. You hold in your hands a great book of kindness—every restrained, exquisite sentence comes loaded for bear. It's been a lot of years since a novel has so moved me. Number Bill Clegg among that endangered species: major American writer."
“7 Books You Need to Read This September&rdq Vulture
“[Did You Ever Have A] Family melds several grieving voices into a detailed mosaic of a town split between locals and weekenders, a mystery in which the stakes really matter, and a recovery story more original than Clegg’s own.
“19 Awesome New Books You Need To Read This Buzzfeed
Heartbreaking but quietly optimistic, Did You Ever Have a Family is a rumination on horrific loss, healing, forgiveness, and the families we choose for ourselves.
Star Tribune
"[Did You Ever Have a] Family is a quiet and beautifully written novel that will keep readers turning the pages…. There is no resignation here. Rather, Clegg seems to say, it is the courage to intervene in another’s life that defines the notion of family.”
San Francisco Gate
"This isn’t your typical mystery, it’s something better: a real-life thriller in which resolution takes the form of acceptance. While [Clegg] never suggests anything as simplistic as closure for these tormented souls, he manages to find ways for them to move forward from this tragedy, making it seem a little less random than it did at the beginning, and that in and of itself is a kind of mercy."
Boston Globe
How do you continue if all at once, everyone you love has been wiped away? With crosscutting perspectives and a voluminous cast of characters, Clegg constructs a layered narrative with some dexterous plot twists.
Los Angeles Times
Illuminate[s] how grief, guilt, regrets and the deep need for human connection are woven into the very flammable fabric of humanity…. Clegg's emotionally direct, polished novel is at once heartrending and heartening. It's a gift to be able to write about such dark stuff without succumbing to utter bleakness, and to infuse even scorching sadness with a ray of hopefulness.
A- review Entertainment Weekly
"Did You Ever Have a Family is the first full-length foray into fiction for Bill Clegg... but it reads like the quietly assured work of a veteran novelist.... it’s rare to find a book that renders unimaginable loss in such an eloquent, elegant voice."
Buzzfeed
One of Nineteen Awesome New Books You Need to Read This Fall (2015)
People
In measured prose, Clegg unspools the stories of June and the other survivors as they face unimaginable horror and take their first halting steps toward hope and community."
NPR
In trying to tell the faceted story of a single moment as seen by a hundred different eyes, Clegg has attempted something daring. And the wonder of it is how often his experiment succeeds...
“Ten Books to Read in September” BBC
This first novel arrives with a shout…Clegg covers the full spectrum of human emotion in this beautifully nuanced story."
The Daily Telegraph (UK)
A quiet, measured and engrossing piece…. a poignant portrait of fractured family lives. Clegg’s prose conveys the numbed grieving state of mind, its quietness fitting its subject of deep clear-eyed sadness…. It approaches grief gently and, in the end, its gentleness is its triumph.
The Guardian (UK)
"A quiet novel of devastating power. Clegg has drawn a tale of prodigious tenderness and lyricism.... that reveals the depths of the human heart. [Did You Ever Have a Family] is a wonderful and deeply moving novel, which compels us to look directly into the dark night of our deepest fears and then quietly, step by tiny step, guides us towards the first pink smudges of the dawn."
The Times (UK)
Clegg has produced a moving, clever novel that subtly dissects the relationships between mothers and their children, lovers, neighbors and strangers. Did You Ever Have a Family is an unpretentious work about how a life can be salvaged from the ashes. Bill Clegg is an author to watch.
The Sunday Times (UK)
"Clegg is a gimlet-eyed observer and is masterly at deftly sucking in the reader as he fashions an emotional tsunami into a profound, mesmerizing description."
Vanity Fair
Bill Clegg’s Did You Ever Have a Family limns the far reaches of grief.
Vogue
[An] unexpectedly tender fiction debut.
"Five Things I’m Loving" Glamour
"The sharp writing and haunting characters had me glued.
Shelf Awareness
One of the year's most hotly anticipated books.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Cunningham
"The force, range, and scope of Bill Clegg’s Did You Ever Have a Family will grab you with its opening lines, and won’t let go until its final one. I can’t recall another novel that so effortlessly weds a nuanced, lyrical voice to an unflinching vision of just how badly things can go for people. I read it deep into the night, all the way through, telling myself it was getting late, I could finish the book in the morning. I finished it that night, however, slept a few hours, and then, in the morning, started reading it again."
Man Booker Prize-winning novelist Anne Enright
"Full of small-town secrets and whispers, Bill Clegg has woven a richly textured tale of loss and healing. This is a deeply optimistic book about the power of human sympathy to pull us from the wreckage of our fate."
Bestselling author Elinor Lipman
"I marveled my way through Did You Ever Have a Family, at not just the masterful writing and storytelling, but at the emotional authenticities of every persuasion. It's a wondrous thing when a writer gets things this right, this absorbing, and this beautiful. Bravo, Bill Clegg, and thank you."
starred review Booklist
"Clegg is both delicately lyrical and emotionally direct in this masterful novel, which strives to show how people make bearable what is unbearable, offering consolation in small but meaningful gestures. Both ineffably sad and deeply inspiring, this mesmerizing novel makes for a powerful debut."
2015 Man Booker Prize Judges (Longlist Finalist)
A brilliantly constructed debut set in the aftermath of catastrophic loss.
The New York Times Book Review
PRAISE FOR DID YOU EVER HAVE A FAMILY
“Masterly…The vignettes provide deft reprieves, a mosaic of a community and its connection to the tragedy. And connection—the way people and their lives fuse—is this novel’s main concern."
Wall Street Journal
"Honest and earnest."
The Daily Beast
"[Clegg] tells the story in plain, innocence-drenched sentences that bring to mind the wonderful Edmund White, as if to adorn the events would be dishonest."
Salon.com
PRAISE FOR NINETY DAYS
"Clegg has rebuilt his career as an agent and become one of the best-known faces of addiction recovery."
Vanity Fair - Jay McInerney
"Bill Clegg... has written a streamlined, hair-raising, high-torque memoir...Even though we know how the story must end, it's hard to believe Clegg will survive the ordeal he describes in such horrific detail."
Details
"Clegg...cuts through the addiction-memoir noise, recounting the glamour and pathos of self-destruction with efficiency and disturbing clarity."
Vogue - Jonathan Van Meter
"You won't be able to stop reading until it's all gone - and you will crave more...what makes Clegg's book especially riveting is the remarkable speed of his vertiginous fall from grace....Portrait is a spare, elegant book, one that shows admirable restraint in the face of extreme, even pathological behavior (A Million Little Pieces this is not.) Clegg may not have been able to control his demons, but he is utterly in charge of this material, with a voice that is knowing and self-deprecating in exactly the right measure."
The New York Times - Dwight Garner
"Mesmerizing...reading it is like letting the needle down on a Nick Drake album. [Clegg] tells his story in short, atmospheric paragraphs, each separated by white space, each its own strobe-lighted snapshot of decadent poetic memory....Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man is the lightly narcotized sensorium of Mr. Clegg's prose."
Darin Strauss
"Like the question it poses, Did You Ever Have a Family is brutally direct yet it's got an enormous symbolic power. You hold in your hands a great book of kindness—every restrained, exquisite sentence comes loaded for bear. It's been a lot of years since a novel has so moved me. Number Bill Clegg among that endangered species: major American writer."
Michael Cunningham
PRAISE FOR PORTRAIT OF AN ADDICT AS A YOUNG MAN
"Bill Clegg's Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man stands up to Frederick Exley's great memoir of alcoholism, A Fan's Notes . . . . But really, forget comparisons. Read the book."
Anne Enright
"Full of small-town secrets and whispers, Bill Clegg has woven a richly textured tale of loss and healing. This is a deeply optimistic book about the power of human sympathy to pull us from the wreckage of our fate."
Elinor Lipman
"I marveled my way through Did You Ever Have a Family, at not just the masterful writing and storytelling, but at the emotional authenticities of every persuasion. It's a wondrous thing when a writer gets things this right, this absorbing, and this beautiful. Bravo, Bill Clegg, and thank you."
Library Journal
★ 07/01/2015
In small-town Connecticut, on the eve of her daughter's wedding, June Reid's house literarily explodes, killing ex-husband Adam, lover Luke, daughter Lolly, and Lolly's fiancé, Will. What follows is a propulsive but tightly crafted narrative that moves back and forth in time and from character to character as Clegg builds out his opening scene to take in those sometimes surprisingly affected. The breakup of June's marriage, the troubled relationship between June and her daughter, the tensions between June and Luke, the small-town tragedy of Luke's mother, the complicated backstory of the lesbian lovers who run the West Coast hotel where June fetches up—all these and more reveal the fine-grained sorrows of the human condition, rendered in polished, quietly captivating prose. As the stories emerge, so do their connections—and the idea of connection itself. "Did you ever have a family," says June flatly at a moment of crisis before the blast, capturing the weight family carries in our lives, and the consequence of every relation, every action, resonates throughout the text. VERDICT Readers may come to this debut novel because of agent/memoirist Clegg's reputation, but they'll stay for the stellar language and storytelling. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 3/9/15.]—Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal
OCTOBER 2015 - AudioFile
The choice to narrate his own work is the sole flaw in Bill Clegg's near-perfect debut novel. It’s a beautifully crafted story of hope and survival in the face of an almost unimaginable family tragedy that captures listeners from the opening paragraphs to the poignant ending. The characters, even the supporting ones, are fully realized and offer a range of personalities at once unique and accessible. Clegg's presentation offers little range of pace or inflection and fails to provide the differentiation that would lift the narration to the rich level his prose. However, this distraction absolutely does not warrant abandoning the audiobook. Any listener who answers "yes" to the question posed in the title will find stepping away from this exceptional audiobook is not an option. M.O.B. © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2015-05-06
Hours before a wedding, a fire kills the bride, the groom, her father, and her mother's boyfriend. "When something like what happened at June Reid's that morning happens, you feel right away like the smallest, weakest person in the world. That nothing you do could possibly matter. That nothing matters. Which is why, when you stumble upon something you can do, you do it. So that's what I did." This is the florist speaking: she will put the daisies she picked for the wedding into more than a hundred funeral arrangements. Other characters, particularly the parents of the dead, will have a harder time figuring out what comes next. June—who has lost not just everyone she loves, but her house, her clothes, and her passport as well—gets in a car and drives to the West Coast. Lydia Morey, whose handsome son, Luke, was June's much-younger boyfriend, is stuck in town dealing with small-minded gossip and speculation. Silas, a teenage pothead who was working at the house the day before the accident, slowly unpacks what he knows about the cause of the fatal blast. Literary agent and memoirist Clegg's (Ninety Days, 2013, etc.) debut novel moves restlessly among many different characters and locations, from the small town in Connecticut where the fire occurred to the motel in the Pacific Northwest where June lands, darting into the past then returning to the tragedy in its utter implacability. Yet the true subject of the book is consolation, the scraps of comfort people manage to find and share with one another, from a thermos of pea soup to a missing piece of information to the sound of the waves outside the Moonstone Motel. An attempt to map how the unbearable is borne, elegantly written and bravely imagined.
