Philomena

A Mother, Her Son, and a Fifty-Year Search

By: Martin Sixsmith

Narrated by: John Curless

Length: 15 hrs and 33 mins

Publisher's summary

Now a major motion picture directed by Stephen Frears (The Queen, High Fidelity) and starring Judi Dench (Skyfall, Notes on a Scandal) and Steve Coogan (The Trip, Hamlet 2): the heartbreaking true story of an Irishwoman and the secret she kept for 50 years. When she became pregnant as a teenager in Ireland in 1952, Philomena Lee was sent to a convent to be looked after as a "fallen woman". Then the nuns took her baby from her and sold him, like thousands of others, to America for adoption. Fifty years later, Philomena decided to find him.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, Philomena's son was trying to find her. Renamed Michael Hess, he had become a leading lawyer in the first Bush administration, and he struggled to hide secrets that would jeopardize his career in the Republican Party and endanger his quest to find his mother.

A gripping exposé told with novelistic intrigue, Philomena pulls back the curtain on the role of the Catholic Church in forced adoptions and on the love between a mother and son who endured a lifelong separation.

©2009 Martin Sixsmith (P)2013 Recorded Books

Critic reviews

“A searingly poignant account of forced adoption and its consequences.” ( Kirkus Reviews, starred review)

“Heartbreaking . . . a story that needed to be told.” ( The Independent)

“Emotionally compelling.” ( Library Journal)

Great Example of the Depravity of The Caholic Church

I gave, Philomena a five star rating for the author's ability to convey a lifetime of pain by mother and son, due to the church's greed and lack of empathy. From entry into an Abbey where the church and nuns turned young, pregnant teen's lives into both a huge profit center and enslavement of the teens', for years of free work. All the while, the nuns inculcated a sense of shame that followed both the mother's and their stolen children by calculated lies, meant to hide their inherent evil.

Fantastic

This true story reads. like a fictional one. The reader was great. He made the words live. I highly recommend this audio book.

Fascinating insights

If you could sum up Philomena in three words, what would they be?

Catholic, Gay, Loss

Any additional comments?

The insights into the Catholic Church in Ireland, the Gay Community in DC and the Republican Party administration were all fascinating.
The book deals with some very tough subject areas and was written with balance and tenderness yet did not shrink from harsh reality

Book better than movie.

Where does Philomena rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

In the middle of the pack

Who was your favorite character and why?

Philomena

Which scene was your favorite?

When kids let the abbey

Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?

No really extreme answer

Any additional comments?

This happened all to often in earlier decades

Poignantly Honest

I wanted to read this before I saw the movie and am very glad I did. This story brought home the injustice of a system which heartlessly categorized young women of the early half of the decade as "Sinners" for falling prey to love and trust.

I empathized with Philomena and my heart was torn for her loss of her son, and his subsequent belief that he was somehow unworthy of her love. It is a sad tragedy that they were kept apart by a system whose misguided processes of systematically separating an unwed mother from her natural child, and compounded it by keeping the child from his mother.

Having been born in 1951, the backdrop of these events (many of which I can actively recall as news editorials) was poignantly brought home by this story. It was, in many ways, a history of how Government, Religion, and any institution is fallible.

My thanks to all involved for bringing this story out in the open.

NOT the story you think it is,where was Philomena?

This is not the story I was expecting or that was advertised.
There are a few chapters about Philomena's experience as a young woman and then a chapter at the end about her wanting to find her son.
All missing are: The way she felt when the baby was taken away, what she did to find him, how she told her family 50 years later, how she dealt with the church, with her father who didn't help her keep the son, with society as she reentered the world, etc etc etc.

This was described to be a journalistic investigation and account of the search of a mother for her son, it even starts that way, with the journalist being approached to find a long lost person.
Yet that story ends in the first 3 chapters. Instead this book is an account of a man and his feelings growing up an adopted orphan in America. An American man fighting his demons and narrating them with a British voice, with British expressions etc. The author didn't even manage to get that across well because even though there are very deep feelings here, the narration is very superficial ...

The story was sad but not compelling. Very disappointed.

Bad fiction disguised as memoir

I only give this book one star, because I can't give it zero stars.

This book is filled with thoughts and imaginings that the author cannot possibly know occurred. He cannot possibly know what happened in the final conversation Michael had with his uncle. He cannot possibly know how Michael or Mary felt when they were three years old. He has invented his version of Michael for his story. When I began to wonder how he could possibly know these and other things, I went to the internet and found that a number of Michael's friends have objected to the invented darkness that the author created to foreshadow his later life and death.

The author should have stuck to Philomena's story.

As a memoir, this is fake. As fiction, it is melodrama. I do not recommend this book to anyone.

Misleading. All about her son.

What disappointed you about Philomena?

The title of this book and description made it seem as though it would be more about Philomena and the irish laundries/ mother and baby homes. Instead, it was all about her son and the gay community in Washington D.C. Very misleading. For the first time, I think the movie was better.

Would you recommend Philomena to your friends? Why or why not?

No. It is quite long, not as much about the subject it purports to be about, and is sorely in need of editing.

Which character – as performed by John Curless – was your favorite?

Philomena

If you could play editor, what scene or scenes would you have cut from Philomena?

Most of the scenes about Mike/ Anthony's life. He was not interesting enough to carry the book.

Any additional comments?

Very disappointing book.

BAIT AND SWITCH! Definitely not as advertised!

I purchased this book according to the publisher's comments, and discovered it to be a horse of an entirely different color! This is NOT the poignant tale of some poor illiterate Irish lady who spends fifty years looking for her son! This is a novel (I cannot even be sure whether it is truth or fiction) about a gay man's rise in Washington politics during the Carter/Reagan administrations.

What can I say? It's like that line, "Where's the beef?" I am two hours away from the end of this story, and while the storyline itself is okay, my whole conception of this book is tainted by the fact that I WAS LIED TO by the publishers. I just wish that a more accurate synopsis of the piece were given in the first place. I would NOT have purchased this book as I don't care for political intrigue enough to spend fifteen hours listening to it.

I gather now, after reading other listener reviews of this book, that there is currently a movie in the works that tells the story from the mother's point of view. This makes me very suspicious of the publisher's motives in presenting the story as "apples" when in reality it is "oranges". If, after a twelve-year very satisfactory history with Audible, I now have to do a background check on every single book I contemplate purchasing, it is, indeed, a sad state of affairs.

Wrong Title. Book is About the Son.

I am so glad I bought this book on sale. I didn't care for it. Only the very beginning and some of the end of the book are about Philomena. Most of the book is about her "lost" son and follows him year by year by year. He was very self destructive and because of that, I found the book dark and depressing. I rushed to watch the movie after finishing the book because I knew that followed Judi Dench's character. First time where I enjoyed the movie more than the book.