Who Could Ever Love You

June 20, 2024
Mary Trump, niece of Donald, has written about her extended dysfunctional family in Too Much, Never Enough (2020). Here she returns to the topic, with the emphasis on her parents. Those who've read the previous book will know her father, Freddy, namesake of his tyrant father, was a hopeless alcoholic, in and out of rehab; her mother was disappointed, disillusioned, and beholden to the Trump family even after her divorce. Without the Trump name attached, this would still be a moving (if somewhat disjointed) look at a sad childhood. But Trump's readers get it by now. In her family, cruelty was a feature not a bug.

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Starred review from July 15, 2024
The unraveling of a family prefigures the unraveling of a nation in this wounding account from clinical psychologist Trump. One year after publishing 2020’s Too Much and Never Enough, an exposé of her uncle, Donald Trump, the author checked into treatment for “dissociation... and increasing social isolation.” Sensing her condition was linked to childhood trauma, she revisited her early years, which were dominated by her grandfather, real estate developer Fred Trump. Much of the memoir outlines her self-interrogation: her parents, Freddy and Linda, spent “glittering evenings at Manhattan clubs,” yet Freddy, who left the family business to become a pilot, encountered “stifling control and blanket disapproval” from his father, who called him “a goddamned chauffeur in the sky.” After Freddy descended into alcoholism, he and Linda divorced, leaving a five-year-old Trump and her older brother, Frederick, with an angry and inattentive mother. Trump endured sexual abuse from a teenage neighbor, life-threatening asthma that Linda ignored, and her father’s early death, only to have Donald and his siblings steal Freddy’s portion of the inheritance from her grandfather. The material can be astonishingly bleak, but Trump’s clear and concise prose shines, and she has a well-trained eye for the melancholy that runs through her family. It’s an astute and occasionally explosive plunge into an American dynasty’s heart of darkness. Agent: Pilar Queen, UTA.

Starred review from August 15, 2024
A second tell-all memoir from the former president's niece. Mary Trump, a clinical psychologist, expands her vehemently critical assessment of her family outward after the first memoir, Too Much and Never Enough, skewered Uncle Donald. With raw authenticity and bracing detail, she painstakingly reveals the devastating psychological impact of the Trump clan's outraged reaction to her first tell-all, which forced her to check herself into a treatment program utilizing experimental ketamine therapy. Three years prior, she'd had treatment for "intensive trauma" and a dissociation condition, all exacerbated by the fact that "Donald Trump is my uncle." Looking inward, she peels back the traumatic layers of her early life growing up in Jamaica, New York, with parents Freddy, a commercial airline pilot, and Linda, a flight attendant. Sadly, her parents' idyllic romance curdled beneath the constant mockery and "stifling control and blanket disapproval" of her grandfather, real estate mogul Fred Trump, the "unaffectionate" family patriarch. Eventually the author would grieve for her parents, who each suffered with personal demons, particularly her father, who succumbed to alcoholism and died prematurely at age 42. Ordeals with chronic asthma attacks (which were ignored by her dismissive mother), sexual harassment from a neighbor, and an indifferent family forced her to shut out the world around her and "turn inward." With blistering frankness, Trump elaborates on the melodrama surrounding her grandfather's will and the numerous lawsuits ("my family's love language") that ensued after Donald and his siblings calculatedly stole her and her father's inheritance from her grandfather's estate. Trump, who is openly gay and a mother to a grown daughter, doesn't skimp on the jarring, revelatory details of her toxic family, telling her truths with lucidity despite the narrative's relentlessly despondent tone and texture. She unpacks the baseline origins of her debilitating stress, self-loathing, and self-isolation in a heartless clan that apparently couldn't care less about her. Another scathing expos� of the enduring fallout from a poisonous, dysfunctional family dynamic.

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