Rain or Shine: A Family Memoir

Rating:
Summary: Like nobody's loved you. . .
Review: The reference in the title is to the dedication of the author's father, a celebrity rodeo announcer, who never missed a day's work because of the weather. It's also a shorthand reference to the old song "I'm gonna love you like nobody's loved you. . ." Her book is not only a tribute to her famous father but an account of a difficult father-daughter relationship that soured from worshipful love to bitterness and eventually to a kind of grudging respect in his last years before dying in 1980.

The book is also a family memoir, characterizing the lives of those awkwardly related to her by blood or marriage: the author's mother and stepfather, an older aunt and her husband, and her father's second wife. Each of them is as vividly drawn as the larger-than-life Western luminary at the center of the story - Cy Taillon, whose golden voice and gentlemanly manner won the devotion of rodeo cowboys and fans from San Francisco's Cow Palace to Madison Square Garden from the 1940s to the 1970s.

Not surprisingly, what the author's story reveals casts her father in a somewhat different light, first as the hard drinking, gambling, womanizing ne'er-do-well who married the author's singer-dancer mother after a one-day courtship. Following the rodeo circuit out of a home base in Montana, they fought and loved each other passionately, a Scott and Zelda of the Western plains, and then broke up. Following a spectacular crash at an air show in Great Falls in 1946, at which Cy used the microphone to calm the startled crowd, he became the hero he was destined to become. Assuming a life of rectitude with a new devoted wife and two new sons, he was finally launched in the career rodeo people will always remember him for. Meanwhile, his first wife languished in a miserable second marriage, and his daughter grew up, loving her absent father deeply while stubbornly unwilling to come to terms with the man he had become.

Thanks to the University of Nebraska Press for reprinting this wonderful memoir. It offers a fascinating window into the world of the rodeo circuit, at least as it once was. For rodeo-going readers, it does much to explain the evolution of the role and persona of the rodeo announcer and the elevation of rodeo cowboying into a kind of gallantry. It's also an entertaining story told by an author with a gift for both sentiment and satire. With her eye for the absurd detail, she can unerringly find the irony in an often rueful story. The many family photos are also a wonderful addition to the book.

Rating:
Summary: Childhood on the Western reaches of memory
Review: Yay! Cyra McFadden's memoir is back in print! I had snapped up all the used hardcover editions I could find a few years ago when I heard it was out of print. But why?

Because this slim memoir is the kind of story that unfolds in the reader's head like a gorgeously-shot film, one that's perfectly cast and shot on locations that evoke the internal emotions of its characters to stunning effect. Cher once actually owned the movie rights on this book, then I heard nothing more of it. Her instincts were right on. If there was ever a book that cried out to be adapted into a film or a play, this is it.

McFadden grew up in the West, the daughter of Cy Taillon, a legendary rodeo announcer and his wife Pat, a one-time showgirl with charisma enough to match her husband's. Cyra grew up a little cowgirl gypsy, as the family roamed the Western rodeo circuit together by car in the 1940's.

McFadden's eye for detail in regard to smells, sounds and her childhood consciousness is extaordinary, as is her realistic depiction of her parents' tumultuous love for one another that is the basis of the story and McFadden's adult questing. The smell of cattle, the sonorous voice of her father, the taste of all-hours road food and the touch of sequins on her mother's old costume gowns....this book is filled with details that will linger in your imagination for years. Old family photos accompany the text and they are intimate and haunting. All is told in a voice that is unsparingly honest, as well as sympathetic. McFadden cherishes her vagabond childhood and gives us a technicolor look at the richness of its place and time.

Buy this book if you love a well-written memoir. Or buy it because you love the West. Buy it because you love cowboys and showgirls and all-night trips down dusty highways. But buy it, and many copies of it, because you will want your friends to experience its cinematic poignancy after the movie in your head ends.

Obviously, one of my all-time favorite pieces of writing. Woefully under-read and underappreciated, I encourage English teachers to consider this in a curricula on memoir writing. It is lasting stuff.

Rating:
Summary: Childhood on the Western reaches of memory
Review: Yay! Cyra McFadden's memoir is back in print! I had snapped up all the used hardcover editions I could find a few years ago when I heard it was out of print. But why?

Because this slim memoir is the kind of story that unfolds in the reader's head like a gorgeously-shot film, one that's perfectly cast and shot on locations that evoke the internal emotions of its characters to stunning effect. Cher once actually owned the movie rights on this book, then I heard nothing more of it. Her instincts were right on. If there was ever a book that cried out to be adapted into a film or a play, this is it.

McFadden grew up in the West, the daughter of Cy Taillon, a legendary rodeo announcer and his wife Pat, a one-time showgirl with charisma enough to match her husband's. Cyra grew up a little cowgirl gypsy, as the family roamed the Western rodeo circuit together by car in the 1940's.

McFadden's eye for detail in regard to smells, sounds and her childhood consciousness is extaordinary, as is her realistic depiction of her parents' tumultuous love for one another that is the basis of the story and McFadden's adult questing. The smell of cattle, the sonorous voice of her father, the taste of all-hours road food and the touch of sequins on her mother's old costume gowns....this book is filled with details that will linger in your imagination for years. Old family photos accompany the text and they are intimate and haunting. All is told in a voice that is unsparingly honest, as well as sympathetic. McFadden cherishes her vagabond childhood and gives us a technicolor look at the richness of its place and time.

Buy this book if you love a well-written memoir. Or buy it because you love the West. Buy it because you love cowboys and showgirls and all-night trips down dusty highways. But buy it, and many copies of it, because you will want your friends to experience its cinematic poignancy after the movie in your head ends.

Obviously, one of my all-time favorite pieces of writing. Woefully under-read and underappreciated, I encourage English teachers to consider this in a curricula on memoir writing. It is lasting stuff.