The More You Ignore Me- Jo Brand

The More You Ignore Me
Jo Brand
Harper, Jun 1 2010, $13.99
ISBN: 9780061973581

In Herfordshire, England, Alice wonders what a normal family is. Her maternal grandparents prefer intoxication rather than sobering sobriety. Her mother Gina is either in a pharmaceutical induced stupor or a schizophrenic miasma. Her dad Keith tries to maintain a modicum of normalcy, but living in a cottage with two drunks and a lunatic who prefers to run the streets naked is asking a lot of any person; so the lass created five personas like an actress and not like split personalities as she knows her roles she uses to deal with her family and the neighbors.

When Gina is taken away to the psychiatric hospital for posing nude on the roof after the meteorologist declined her kind offer of a tryst, Keith tries to help his daughter. Gina has fears that she is a chip off the maternal block as her grandparents are considered drunken terrorists by the neighbors and her mom when not confined runs nude in the streets of Herfordshire. Adding to her concerns re her own mental state is her obsession with the singer Morrissey of Smith and Mark while her father struggles with caring for his two females and his attraction to Marie Henty.

Rotating perspective over a couple of decades, this is an intriguing family drama as readers see deeply how Keith and Alice cope with Gina and the grandparents. The story line is summed up with a strong climatic revelatory Dunk that will open the readers’ eyes as it does the morose “This Charming Man” Keith. Although the troubles caused by the grandparents detract from an otherwise profound family drama by adding too much tsuris to the mix. Still readers will relish The More You Ignore Me (The Closer I Get) as “There Is A Light That Never Goes Out” regardless of what happens to loved ones.

Harriet Klausner