We read Mary Trump's book about Donald Trump so you don't have to


*** Source : mashable.com











As a keen student of the shitshow formerly known as the daily news, you may have noticed the president's niece has a book out this week. Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man is the first tell-all written by one of Donald Trump's relatives. The fact that Mary Trump is a psychologist with a Ph.D. adds fuel to the fire, as she diagnoses her uncle with having all the signs of sociopathy and narcissistic personality disorder. (Gee, you think?)

These and other juicy extracts from the book have leaked at a steady clip since the president's unsuccessful lawsuit to block its publication. You can read for free about how Donald leered at Mary the first time he saw her in a swimsuit, that he paid a guy to take his SATs, that he went to see a movie while his brother Fred Trump Jr. (Mary's dad) was dying, and that when Fred Trump Sr. had dementia, Donald tried to rewrite his dad's will to put himself in sole charge of the family fortune.

The question is: Should you bother with the book itself? Is there any meat left on the bones after the best parts have been picked clean? Is Mary Trump's writing going to keep you engaged? Are the 225 pages of this slim volume going to turn fast enough to justify your attention, especially during a year that demands almost all of it?

Answer: It depends. Yes, if you need to be shocked out of the notion that rich families are happy or even interesting to the rest of us. Yes, if you like the idea of a book that reads like bad Successionfan fiction, with little plot and less dialogue. Yes if you love the documentary Grey Gardens, about wealthy relatives living squalid little lives in a disintegrating gothic mansion. And yes, if you like books with an unreliable narrator.

'Trump and his family were socially distant before it was cool'

I don't mean that Mary Trump is lying. If she were a fabulist like her uncle, she would have invented more exciting scenes with him. (I was too bored to count, but there are probably fewer than a dozen scenes in which she talks to Donald directly; the two of them weren't that close.) I mean that she's unreliable as a narrator. Self-contradictions are small but legion. She tells rather than shows. Anecdotes, when they arrive, are delivered in haste and left half finished, with not even speculation to answer the questions they raise.