Montgomery, Lee

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Montgomery, Lee

PERSONAL: Married.

ADDRESSES: Home—Portland, OR. Office—Tin House Books, 2601 N.W. Thurman St., Portland, OR 97210.

CAREER: Tin House Books, Portland, OR, editorial director;Santa Monica Review, CA, editor;Iowa Review, fiction editor. Tufts University, Medford, MA, worked in department of psychology; worked at Oregon Health and Science University, Portland.

AWARDS, HONORS: Iowa Short Fiction Prize, 2007, for Whose World is This? Stories.

WRITINGS

NONFICTION

(Editor, with Mary Hussmann and David Hamilton) Transgressions: The Iowa Anthology of Innovative Fiction, University of Iowa Press (Iowa City, IA), 1994.

(Editor) Absolute Disaster: Fiction from Los Angeles, Dove Books (Los Angeles, CA), 1996.

(With David L. Lander) Fall Down, Laughing: How Squiggy Caught Multiple Sclerosis and Didn’t Tell Nobody, Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam (New York, NY), 2000.

The Things between Us: A Memoir, Free Press (New York, NY), 2006.

Whose World is This? Stories, University of Iowa Press (Iowa City, IA), 2007.

Executive editor, Tin House. Contributor to Story, Black Clock, Denver Quarterly, and Iowa Review.

SIDELIGHTS: Lee Montgomery is an editor and writer who won widespread acclaim for her book The Things between Us: A Memoir. Montgomery grew up in a quirky New England family. Her mother was a heavy drinker who started the day with gin; her beloved father apparently ignored his wife’s serious case of alcoholism. Montgomery’s book recounts her youth, and her conflicts with her flamboyant, troubled mother. As a young person, Montgomery seeks escape through drinking and drugs; later, she moves to the Pacific Coast. In her new life on the other side of the continent, she keeps in close touch with both her parents, but she and her siblings—a sister nine years her senior, and a brother six years older than she—stay away from their childhood home as much as possible.

Then the family is drawn back together when their father faces impending death, due to stomach cancer. The author shifts between her own feelings about her past and her dread of the future, to recounting the daily progress of her father’s disease, to an account of her mother’s drinking, which continues to spiral out of control. A Publishers Weekly writer credited Montgomery with writing in a “lyric and nuanced” style, one that avoided “both sentimentality and New England stoicism” to make “a tender portrait of modern death and real American families.”Library Journal contributor Nancy R. Ives praised the author for writing “with precision and grace, showing how a parent’s decline and ultimate death can unite a family and lead to self-discovery, forgiveness, and healing.” Elaina Richardson reviewed the memoir for O, The Oprah Magazine, and remarked that Montgomery’s family members “undeniably qualify as dysfunctional, but they are also quick-witted, charming, voracious storytellers, and as fearful as the rest of us in the face of death.”

“The title refers to the obstacles that keep family members alone and apart but also the idiosyncratic ways in which family members pull together when confronted with the unthinkable,” remarked Amy Finch in the Boston Phoenix.“The Things between Us is a beautiful tribute to a funny old guy who laughed loud and often, and whose daughter did the best she could to make him less lonely as he left the planet.”

In an interview with Dave Weich on Powells.com, Montgomery mused: “Death is a great advisor, and I’m not the first person to say that. When you look at life through death, that lens, it’s much more precious. Trespasses are much more forgivable. You’re able to appreciate the things that did go right, in my case the lovely things about our family and my parents. It provided perspective.”

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES

BOOKS

Montgomery, Lee, The Things between Us: A Memoir, Free Press (New York, NY), 2006.

PERIODICALS

Booklist, July 1, 2006, Margaret Flanagan, review of The Things between Us, p. 14.

Kirkus Review, June 15, 2006, review of The Things between Us, p. 621.

Library Journal, August 1, 2006, Nancy R. Ives, review of The Things between Us, p. 98.

O, The Oprah Magazine, August, 2006, Elaina Richardson, review of The Things between Us, p. 148.

Phoenix (Boston, MA), September 27, 2006, Amy Finch, review of The Things between Us.

Publishers Weekly, September 19, 1994, review of Transgressions: The Iowa Anthology of Innovative Fiction, p. 52; December 16, 1996, review of Absolute Disaster: Fiction From Los Angeles, p. 45; June 26, 2006, review of The Things between Us, p. 46.

Review of Contemporary Fiction, spring, 1995, Brooke Horvath, review of Transgressions, p. 181.

Studies in Short Fiction, spring, 1996, Kevin J.H. Dettmar, review of Transgressions, p. 302.