LOVE WARS: Clash of the Parents is one of the saddest memoirs this reviewer has read in years, despite the fact that author Matthew A. Tower plainly didn’t envisage it that way. As a six-year-old in 1980, Tower found himself caught in the middle of an extremely acrimonious divorce. His mother—who he discovered later in life was suffering from borderline personality disorder—and his father argued bitterly, finally settling their differences through a long and divisive court case.

Neither parent was equipped to cope with the divorce. Tower describes physical altercations, as well as his mother’s regular, hours-long ruminations on “The Contract” (in other words, the complicated custody arrangements relating to Matthew and his older brother)—which she would force him, sometimes literally, to listen to. Witnessing screaming matches and outpourings of his parents’ vitriol for one another left Tower fighting a losing battle with his own amygdala. He responded by beating down on his younger brother—a response of his six-year-old self that Tower bitterly regretted years later—and retreating into a fantasy world populated by characters from Star Wars. Stability was easier to come by in his father’s household, where his stepmother, whom Tower came to love as a mother, doted on him.

Reading Tower’s memoir is an absolutely wrenching experience. There is something indescribably dreadful about the suffering of a child, not least because (especially at Tower’s tender age when the divorce occurred) they have no way of comprehending adult motivations or what’s happening to them. Episodes such as grandparents taking sides in the most revolting way—Tower’s maternal grandfather threatened to have Tower’s father killed; an idle threat, but still an inexcusable gambit—are difficult enough to read, but what transpires to be mental illness overshadows Tower’s childhood relationship with his mother. As she prioritizes a new squeeze over her sons, serves him (a nine-year-old!) with a lawsuit to compel him to take Hebrew lessons, or verbally abuses him, his younger self’s enraged exclamation—“every piece of me…wanted my childhood back”—becomes utterly heartbreaking.

There is a redemption of sorts at the book’s conclusion, but ultimately the lesson of LOVE WARS is how trauma becomes generational—either collectively, or through parent-child dyads. Tower’s purpose is not only to break that cycle, but to provide the sort of book he wishes he had for middle-grade readers finding themselves in the same position. If LOVE WARS is anything to go by, he has succeeded spectacularly on both counts.

~ Craig Jones for IndieReader