Mary Trump: "Too Much and Never Enough"

I'm not done with Mary Trump's memoir, but I have to say I found the idea irresistible. A Trump-insider tell-all is a tasty thing. If the tell-all is written by someone professionally conversant in psychobabble? You have my attention, and my credit card.

This is not a fully plausible book--although I was surprised to see that Mary does actually name the person who took Trump's SAT. Too often, bits of dialog are "reconstructed" to give a you-are-there vibe--but couldn't Mary simply say, "Here's what I believe might have happened," without becoming a crazed writer of a soap-opera script?

In any case, if you accept that this is partly a work of fiction (as maybe all memoirs are), you can start to feel spellbound. There's Mary arriving at the White House for a family reunion, appalled that she is getting only one "comp" night at the Trump Hotel, and surprised that the hotel is not as gilded or as tacky as she might have imagined. There is Freddy's descent into alcoholism...as he sees his pilot-career dreams fading, fading away. There's Mary, Sr., like Eleanor Melrose, retreating into a fog of self-medication, unable to stand up to her husband or to raise her kids. And there's Maryanne, whispering that she'd prefer not to vote for her brother's presidential dream--but also feeling the tug of family loyalty. (I don't mean to sound callous. Alcoholism is a scary thing. I do think--serving up these stories in a kind of gothic page-turner format--you're encouraging readers to see your inventions as fictional characters.)

I think, from certain angles, the Trump family can look like an unusual Victor Frankenstein disaster, and this is what Mary Trump wants us to see. But I wonder if--from *other* angles--these family problems are pretty much standard problems, found in *more* families than Mary is aware of.

Anyway, I'm absorbed. The writer knows how to write. A strange summer treat.

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