Losing Mum and Pup

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Christopher Buckley: Losing Mum and Pup (EBook, 2009, Grand Central Publishing)

electronic resource

English language

Published Feb. 20, 2009 by Grand Central Publishing.

ISBN:
978-0-446-55664-4
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OCLC Number:
417645922

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3 stars (1 review)

In twelve months between 2007 and 2008, Christopher Buckley coped with the passing of his father, William F. Buckley, the father of the modern conservative movement, and his mother, Patricia Taylor Buckley, one of New York's most glamorous and colorful socialites. He was their only child and their relationship was close and complicated. Writes Buckley: "They were not - with respect to every other set of loving, wonderful parents in the world - your typical mom and dad." As Buckley tells the story of their final year together, he takes readers on a surprisingly entertaining tour through hospitals, funeral homes, and memorial services, capturing the heartbreaking and disorienting feeling of becoming a 55-year-old orphan. Buckley maintains his sense of humor by recalling the words of Oscar Wilde: "To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose both looks like carelessness." Just as Calvin Trillin and Joan Didion …

2 editions

Review of 'Losing Mum and Pup' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

Christopher Buckley's bittersweet memoir of his final year with his stylish mother and famously conservative father lends a human scale to a couple that so often appeared larger than life.  Personally, I was never particularly enamoured of William F. Buckley, Jr.'s politics or even his books, despite being piqued by God and Man at Yale and amused on occasion by the capers of fictional CIA agent Blackford Oakes.   However, from the time I was a small boy who loved big words, I was flattered to be compared favorably to the legendarily eloquent Buckley, for whom it was perfectly natural to toss off a word like "postprandial" when one intended to take a stroll after a lunch.  (Despite his legendary command of the English language, it was apparently his third language.)  In addition, although no sailor myself, I have always had an outsized admiration for anyone who could captain or navigate …