2019 Eric Hoffer Award Finalist 2018 Next Generation Indie Book Awards Finalist in Memoirs (Other) 2018 International Book Awards Finalist in Autobiography/Memoir 2018 Kirkus Best Books “...poetic and incisive...Many readers will see aspects of their own family histories in this powerful saga of trauma and healing. An alternately wistful and searing exploration of a troubled legacy.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Garber’s extraordinary debut memoir tells the story of her abusive father, architect Woodie Garber....and steadily charts his and her family’s descent into chaos and madness, as Woodie’s commissions dry up and he ceases to receive the recognition he believes he deserves....Recommended for survivors of abuse and those interested in knowing more about the ways in which great professional success often comes at the sacrifice of one’s own family and private life.”
—Library Journal
“I was riveted by this story of an adoring daughter struggling to escape the dominance of her brilliant, charismatic father. Garber writes beautifully about the layered complications of family love.”
—Monica Wood, author of The One-in-a-Million Boy, When We Were the Kennedys, Any Bitter Thing, and Ernie’s Ark
“In Implosion: The Architect's Daughter, Elizabeth Garber has voyaged far into the complexities of memory, navigating the treacherous currents of shame and confusion, and returned, rowing stroke by stroke, sentence by sentence, with a beautiful, clear, heartbreaking tale. Courageous, horrible, terrible, and wonderful, this is a dark and tragic beauty of a memoir that could only be written by someone determined to be fiercely honest in her remembering and her art.”
—Richard Hoffman, author of Half the House and Love & Fur
“Few books have narrated the personal dimension of modernism like this one. The contradictions that bedeviled modern architecture—a passionate yet impersonal elegance—were played out in a glass house dominated by Elizabeth Garber's father, Woodie, a midwestern modern architect extraordinaire. How his daughter made her way through the tangles of his imperious faith makes for fascinating reading. What was it like to live from day to day in the self-conscious embrace of the modern? Elizabeth Garber has the insight and tenacity to tell us that and more.”
—Baron Wormser, former Poet Laureate of Maine, author of ten books of poetry, books on writing craft, two novels, and one memoir, The Road Washes Out in Spring: A Poet's Memoir of Living Off the Grid
“This poignant, very personal memoir by the daughter of one of Cincinnati’s premier modern architects traces his ascent and decline, as they parallel those of his style and discipline at the same moments in time. Elizabeth Garber’s exquisite prose compliments the love of art and architecture she learned from her father. Her forthrightness and honesty resemble the direct, unpainted, and undecorated aesthetic her father promoted, but her gentle sensitivity is all her own. This is a book about something even more complicated than the most difficult art—family life.”
—Jayne Merkel, architectural historian and author of Eero Saarinen
“Implosion is a remarkable feat. Garber allows us to revile her brilliant and destructive architect father as fully as she did when she was coming of age in the 1960s. She also allows us to forgive him as she ultimately does in this wise, searching book. Her story is an echo of the tumultuous cultural revolutions that define her generation. As an architect does, Garber constructs her story room by room, filling the space with both shadow and light. This is a beautiful book, written by a new and exciting writer.”
—Meredith Hall, author of Without a Map
“Elizabeth Garber writes with searing clarity about the years she spent living under the oppressive reign of her father. But this isn't just a book about a deeply troubled father-daughter relationship. Rather, it's a story about a family, an art form (architecture), a generation, and a decade in American history that we're still trying to understand. By reading Implosion, one not only gains access to the intimate, tragic details of Garber's broken youth but also to the public world outside her father's realm: one of parallel turmoil, complexity, and yes: implosion. A finely wrought narrative by a brave, unflinching writer.”
—Jaed Coffin, author of A Chant to Soothe Wild Elephants: A Memoir
“Elizabeth Garber’s memoir drives as well as her dad’s fine sports car: sleek, modernist sentences, high-power clarity of perception, bold telling it like it was. Garber never loses touch with the forms of pain caused by her dad’s illness. She honors the vulnerability of the whole family in the grips of it, including him. In the end, at the heart of the matter is compassion and the kindness of unconditional love, in spite of it all. And the simple beauty of gathering stones found on a clean, sandy beach.”
—Alexandra Merrill, international women’s leadership consultant
"...un-put-downable....Elizabeth, a poet, acupuncturist, and mother, has, like an architect—ecologically using salvage materials—taken the shock and trauma of the family’s disintegration and built from them a powerful narrative you are reluctant to leave."
—The Architectural Record
★ 2018-04-03
A daughter's vibrant relationship with her father decays into warfare and abuse in this coming-of-age memoir. As a young girl growing up in the 1950s and '60s, Garber (True Affections, 2011, etc.) thought that her architect father, Woodie, was the most charismatic man in the world; she even took up his interest in modernist design. With her mother, Jo, and two younger brothers, she helped him build his dream house in the Cincinnati suburb of Glendale, Ohio—a sleek, rectilinear structure that "shimmered like a white mirage...the crushed glass wall panels sparkling, while the Great Room blazed as if on fire, red, orange, and wood reflected and glowed inside the long glass walls." In Garber's warm evocation, the house, complete with Eames furniture, abstract sculptures, and Dave Brubeck records playing on the hi-fi, seems the perfect backdrop for avant-garde family togetherness, circa 1966. But slowly, a gradual accretion of disquieting detail spoils the gleaming facade as she reveals the dark side of her father's world. Woodie's ebullience, she writes, was an aspect of his bipolar disorder, which alternated with bouts of depression that kept him in bed for weeks. His compulsion to be the architect of every element of his surroundings extended to his family, whom he tormented with strict rules, constant demands to do heavy landscaping labor, and harangues about alleged laziness and lack of integrity, which grew more caustic as a difficult project frayed his nerves. He felt threatened by Jo's desire to return to college and her turn toward prison-reform activism, Garber says, and when the white author brought home an African-American boyfriend, her father disapproved. Garber gives a subtle, nerve-wracking account of a familiar generational conflict that tore apart countless families in the '60s, as fathers found their paternal authority challenged by rebellious daughters, long-haired sons, and wives who wanted more fulfilling roles. In this case, the intensifying confrontation pitted Woodie's tirades against his family's muted but mounting defiance. But the author also tells of a far more disturbing aspect of Woodie's domestic tyranny—his ongoing sexual abuse of the teenage Garber. As the household spirals toward dissolution, Garber paints an indelible portrait of the claustrophobic hell that a dysfunctional family can become and of her own anguish and confusion over Woodie's abuse, to which she responded with denial. She's cleareyed in her depiction of his monstrous behavior, but she also portrays the magnetic pull of his personality and his role in shaping her own sensibility. She also acknowledges the irony of an iconoclastic modernist's not being able to cope with modernity. In prose that's simultaneously poetic and incisive, she even finds the frail humanity behind her father's power plays and mood swings; "Crying out, he was small and pitiful, like a statue of a dictator pulled down by peasants," she writes of Woodie's collapsing from a heart fibrillation. Many readers will see aspects of their own family histories in this powerful saga of trauma and healing. An alternately wistful and searing exploration of a troubled legacy.
