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WORK TITLE: Don’t You Ever
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE: VA
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY:
Phone: 540-343-5080
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Daughter of Early and Adria Carter.
EDUCATION:Graduated from Columbia Journalism School.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and journalist. Philadelphia Inquirer, journalist; Roanoke Times & World-News, journalist.
AWARDS:Pulitzer Prize (as member of Philadelphia Inquirer reporting team covering nuclear leaks at Three Mile Island); George Polk Award and Pulitzer finalist (for Roanoke Times & World-News series on poisonings and fraud by exterminators and pesticide users).
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Mary Carter Bishop is a career journalist who has worked on major newspapers in Pennsylvania and Virginia. She wrote a series on poisonings and fraud by exterminators and pesticide users for the Roanoke Times & World-News that won her a George Polk Award and made her a Pulitzer Prize finalist. At the Philadelphia Inquirer, she was part of a reporting team that won the Pulitzer for its coverage of nuclear leaks at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
After spending her career writing about other people and their situations, Bishop tells a much more intimate and personal story in Don’t You Ever: My Mother and Her Secret Son. Here, she writes about how she discovered a half-brother that she never knew she had and how she came to accept, if not understand, the social, cultural, and personal forces that caused her mother to banish her son from her life.
Bishop describes how she grew up believing that she was an only child in a family that was loving and financially stable. Her parents, Early and Adria, worked on a country estate belonging to a wealthy family in Keswick, Virginia. Bishop and her parents lived on the estate, where she enjoyed a stable home life growing up in a pleasant rural setting.
When she was thirty-two years old, however, Bishop made a discovery that astounded her. After applying for a passport, she discovered among the paperwork a startling fact: her mother had another child. Shocked by this revelation, she set out to find out the story. What she uncovered was that her mother had a son, Ronnie Overstreet, who was the product of an affair with a married man that occurred when her mother was a teenager. At this point in the history of America, being an unmarried mother carried a substantial social stigma, with crushing guilt and shame. Adria spent a year at a home for unwed mothers, noted a Kirkus Reviews writer, but eventually had to put him into foster care when she could no longer care for him. She had little choice but to separate herself from her son, giving him the warning that underlies the books title: “Don’t you ever call me Mama.”
Bishop recounts her search for Overstreet and what she discovered when she finally found him, a troubled and bitter man who worked as a barber. She tells of her visits to him and her attempts to connect with a close relative she’d never known, and the troubles that Overstreet endured. These included a diagnosis of acromegaly, a hormonal disorder that causes abnormal growth of the bones in the hands, feet, and fact. He had refused to get the condition treated, and it eventually contributed to his death in 1991.
Along with the story of her half-brother, Bishop also muses on the social conditions that prompted her mother to abandon him, along with the personally baffling contradictions between the loving mother she knew and the one who was willing to completely sever all ties with another child. “That contrast is at the crux of Bishop’s book, which takes a close look at the inner workings of her family and examines how two children both born to the same mother could have such different lives,” commented Casey Fabris in a profile of Bishop in the Roanoke Times.
“This powerful tale lays bare the cancer of shame and its often devastating results,” commented a Publishers Weekly writer. The two main subjects of the book “come across as baffling, complicated individuals, deserving of love and respect despite their flaws, shaped by a society that viewed a mother who had a child out of wedlock as shameful,” observed a contributor to Kirkus Reviews. Emily Dziuban, writing in Booklist, concluded, “Bishop’s research and clear, heartfelt writing render her story deeply personal and culturally essential.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, June 1, 2018, Emily Dziuban, review of Don’t You Ever: My Mother and Her Secret Son, p. 22.
Kirkus Reviews, May 1, 2018, review of Don’t You Ever.
Publishers Weekly, May 21, 2018, review of Don’t You Ever, p. 64.
Roanoke Times, July 16, 2018, Casey Fabris, “Longtime Journalist Reveals Mother’s Secret in Don’t You Ever,” profile of Mary Carter Bishop.
ONLINE
HarperCollins website, http://www.harpercollins.com/ (October 16, 2018), biography of Mary Carter Bishop.
Mary Carter Bishop
Author
ON TOUR
Mary Carter Bishop
Bob Crawford
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A graduate of Columbia Journalism School, Mary Carter Bishop was on the Philadelphia Inquirer team that won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of nuclear leaks at Three Mile Island. Her Roanoke Times & World-News series on poisonings and fraud by exterminators and other pesticide users won a George Polk Award and was a Pulitzer finalist.
Longtime journalist reveals mother's secret in 'Don't You Ever'
By Casey Fabris casey.fabris@roanoke.com 981-3234 Jul 16, 2018 (2)
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As a former newspaper reporter, Mary Carter Bishop spent much of her career telling stories about the lives of others. But in her newly released book “Don’t You Ever: My Mother and Her Secret Son,” Bishop does just the opposite, writing the deeply personal story of her own family.
For the first 32 years of her life, Bishop believed herself to be an only child. Bishop’s parents, Early and Adria, doted on her, their “golden girl.” Bishop paints a bucolic picture of her childhood on the country estate belonging to the wealthy family for whom her parents worked in Keswick, outside Charlottesville.
But when Bishop applied for a passport in preparation for a jaunt through Europe, she discovered her mother had another child. The parents Bishop thought she knew so well had been keeping a jaw-dropping secret from her mother’s past.
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“Because I was so close to them, I thought I knew everything about them,” Bishop said. “To find out at age 32 that I was not my mother’s only child, I was like ‘What? How could this be?’”
Bishop’s mother described her first-born, Ronnie Overstreet, as a “mistake” from an encounter with a married man in her teenage years, leaving her an unwed mother. She still felt ashamed, so she kept Ronnie a secret, even from her own daughter.
Bishop’s book gets its name from a warning Ronnie recalled receiving from their mother: “Don’t you ever call me Mama.”
It was hard for Bishop to reconcile the mother she knew — the one who had “loved me so thoroughly” — with the woman Ronnie described. That she would say such a thing to her own child was shocking to Bishop.
“It was just so unlike her,” Bishop said.
That contrast is at the crux of Bishop’s book, which takes a close look at the inner workings of her family and examines how two children both born to the same mother could have such different lives.
The secret Bishop’s mother guarded for so many years is now documented for all the world to see. Bishop had asked her mother if it would be OK to one day write about Ronnie, whom she finally sought out in 1987 and got to know in the years before his death in 1991. Adria said yes, with one condition: Wait until she was dead.
“I think she realized it was a powerful story,” Bishop said. “In her generosity to me, which was infinite, she couldn’t deny me that story.”
It was a story that needed to be told, Bishop believed, because “everything about it was so infuriatingly unjust.” She listed off a few of those points. Adria was chased out of town into a home for unwed mothers. The pregnancy she was so ashamed of was the result of an older, married man taking advantage of a teenager. Ronnie was ripped away from foster parents who loved him and had wanted to adopt him. The abandoned child was diagnosed as an adult with acromegaly, a rare disorder that noticeably disfigured him but perhaps went undiagnosed for years because he had no family to demand he see a doctor or broach the delicate subject with him.
Though Bishop learned of her half-brother’s existence in 1978, it was years before she walked into his Vinton barbershop to reintroduce herself. They had met before, but Bishop was very young and remembered him only faintly. She’d been told Ronnie was a cousin.
Bishop was working at The Roanoke Times & World-News, as the newspaper was then known, and realized Ronnie had probably seen her byline. It was time to find him.
“I dreaded it terribly because I thought he probably resented me and I didn’t know if he’d even want to know me,” Bishop said. “So it was just kind of a guilt that I had inherited from my mom that I went over to the barbershop one day.”
He was glad to see her, but the wounds from the abandonment he’d felt were clear. Bishop asked why he’d never reached out to her, when it was clear he’d kept up with her work at the newspaper.
In the book he responds, using Bishop’s childhood nickname: “I’m your bastard brother, Pie. I didn’t want to drag you down.”
Though they traversed different paths in life, there was at least one similarity between Bishop and her brother: They both made careers as listeners. She as a journalist; he as a barber. It may have come more naturally for Bishop, who believes Ronnie was less comfortable around people.
“I had an easy life, and people were very kind to me,” she said. “He distrusted people, and I trusted. I’m sort of an innocent child; he’s the sort of wounded child.”
Bishop isn’t sure how her mother would feel about the book.
“I hope that my mom would feel vindicated and understood for the first time, really, since 1934,” she said.
One of Bishop’s friends from elementary school, who knew her mother well, gave what the author calls the sweetest response she’s heard to the book yet.
“She said, ‘I just wish I could go and give your mother a hug and all the love and forgiveness that she never had in her life,’” Bishop recalled.
It’s hard for Bishop to say what readers will get from her book. Perhaps it will start conversations about how family members treat one another.
But Bishop knows what the book did for her. Uncovering the truth and writing it down, as the longtime reporter has always done, was therapeutic. It helped her to understand Adria and Ronnie, and their actions.
“I believe in truth,” Bishop said. “I think truth is redemptive.”
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Print Marked Items
Don't You Ever: My Mother and Her
Secret Son
Publishers Weekly.
265.21 (May 21, 2018): p64.
COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Don't You Ever: My Mother and Her Secret Son
Mary Carter Bishop. Harper, $27.99 (256p) ISBN 978-0-06-240073-4
Pulitzer Prize--winning journalist Bishop takes an honest and raw look at her family in this heartbreaking
memoir. While Bishop grew up in a loving home in 1950s central Virginia and never wanted for much, her
older, illegitimate half-brother, Ronnie Lee Overstreet, was sent first to a foster home and then to a mental
institution. Ronnie was originally introduced to Bishop as a cousin; she learned the truth in 1987 when she
was in her 30s after finding a notation on her birth certificate while applying for a passport. She decided to
reconnect with him and found him working at a barbershop. She learned that Ronnie had developed in
adulthood a rare pituitary disease, acromegaly, which "gradually expanded his jawbone and lengthened his
chin by inches." Bishop digs deep into her own past, exposing class structure (her parents worked as
servants on a lush Virginia estate), genteel poverty, self-loathing, and self-doubt in a deeply honest manner.
She eventually comes to realize that it was social mores of the time that forced her mother to place Ronnie
in a home. Bishop tenderly describes how she became close with her brother, helping to secure finances to
pay for his medical treatment until his death in 1991 * This powerful tale lays bare the cancer of shame and
its often devastating results. (July)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Don't You Ever: My Mother and Her Secret Son." Publishers Weekly, 21 May 2018, p. 64. General
OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A541012654/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d53cad31. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018.
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Bishop, Mary Carter: DON'T YOU
EVER
Kirkus Reviews.
(May 1, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Bishop, Mary Carter DON'T YOU EVER Harper/HarperCollins (Adult Nonfiction) $27.99 7, 3 ISBN: 978-
0-06-240073-4
In her early 30s, journalist Bishop accidentally discovered she had a half brother she had never known
about, so she tracked him down to the barbershop where he worked in a small town in Virginia.
Over the years until his death from complications of a hormonal disorder, the author got to know Ronnie.
Ten years older than her, he had been born before her mother, Adria, married her father. The teenage Adria
spent a year with Ronnie at a home for unwed mothers. When she couldn't care for him as she worked as
domestic help, he was placed in foster care. By the time Bishop was born, her parents were working on a
large estate, and the troubled Ronnie was with them. Adria told everyone, including her daughter, that the
boy was Adria's cousin and warned him, "Don't you ever call me Mama." The narrative moves fluidly, and
the author backtracks as she provides the details of her research into her family history and recounts her
increasingly frustrating meetings with Ronnie, who dwelled on the harm that had been done to him and
refused to deal with his illness despite many offers of help. For Bishop, the discovery of her brother's
existence was--and apparently still remains--a source of guilt. While compassionate, she manages to
distance herself occasionally from his suffering, making good use of her well-honed reporter's eye for detail
and ability to research and interview. While readers see Adria and Ronnie through Bishop's eyes, they also
get the perspectives of others who know or knew them, most of whom are not as emotionally involved with
their lives. Both of the author's key subjects come across as baffling, complicated individuals, deserving of
love and respect despite their flaws, shaped by a society that viewed a mother who had a child out of
wedlock as shameful.
A precise and honest depiction of a family wound that has still not entirely healed.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Bishop, Mary Carter: DON'T YOU EVER." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2018. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A536571133/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=dd6d8461.
Accessed 30 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A536571133
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Don't You Ever: My Mother and Her
Secret Son
Emily Dziuban
Booklist.
114.19-20 (June 1, 2018): p22.
COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
* Don't You Ever: My Mother and Her Secret Son. By Mary Carter Bishop. July 2018. 256p. Harper, $27.99
(9780062400734). 818.
To the extraordinary benefit of readers, Bishop turns her prize-winning journalistic skills towards her
family's history in her first book. As an adult, Bishop applied for a passport and discovered among the
required paperwork that her mother had another child; her "cousin" Ronnie, 10 years her senior, was
actually her half-brother. This newfound knowledge launched Bishop on a years-long quest to re-understand
her mother, Ronnie's father, and her own happy childhood and wealthy, class-segregated Virginia
hometown. When she sought out Ronnie after learning the truth, he was a broken man, enduring the late
stages of a treatable disease but refusing medical help. For Bishop, reconciling her compassionate mother
and the person who admitted Ronnie to a mental institution in which he received electroshock therapy
proved almost impossible. Bishop's mother structured her entire life in opposition to her deep shame,
causing her to reject her son repeatedly. While the effects were many and complicated, the truth, though
hard, was simple: the shame that attached to unwed mothers ruined a good bit of Bishop's mother's life and
nearly all of her brother's. Bishop's research and clear, heartfelt writing render her story deeply personal and
culturally essential.--Emily Dziuban
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Dziuban, Emily. "Don't You Ever: My Mother and Her Secret Son." Booklist, 1 June 2018, p. 22. General
OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A546287426/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=fd2cfdf0. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A546287426