An engaging, if slightly shapeless, autobiography.
A woman recounts stories of her hardscrabble coming-of-age in this debut memoir.
Kearse-Stockton was born in 1949, the second of seven children, to a working-class Black couple in York, Pennsylvania. The family home was on the eponymous Codorus Street, where they lived beside other Black families. “These families comprised the Codorus Street Bubble,” writes the author of the segregated neighborhood. “We had block parties and parents had house parties; there were several other bubbles where Negroes lived….Many of the areas were substandard housing. Parents worked together and children played together.” Her father was a long-haul truck driver and was gone for days at a time. When he was home, according to Kearse-Stockton, he dispensed violent beatings to the author, her siblings, and her mother, Dot. Eventually, Dot moved the children away from Codorus Street and her husband’s brutality, but unfortunately, that would not mark the end of violence in Kearse-Stockton’s life. She had three children by the age of 19, at which point her husband, Joe, was murdered in front of her and her kids by a neighbor who accused him of giving his wife gonorrhea. As a young, single mother, the author found herself figuring out how to navigate the world in much the same way that her mother had before her. Kearse-Stockton’s prose is conversational and often funny, as here where she describes her mother’s forcing her sister to help her with one of the family’s normal meals, groundhog: “One day Dot told Mary it was her turn to hold the groundhog’s foot so she could skin and gut it. Mary cried and begged, ‘Please Dot, and do not make me hold the groundhog’s foot.’ The rest of us would be laughing our butts off….Dot told her she was always the first one to want seconds when she made baked groundhog.” The book comprises anecdotes from the author’s childhood and early adulthood, some sweet and some disturbing, with little connective tissue other than a shared cast of characters. The memoir will likely be of most interest to members of her own family and her circle of friends, though readers who wish to know more about York’s Black community in the ’50s and ’60s will find this a valuable history.
An engaging, if slightly shapeless, autobiography.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982255-56-5
Page Count: 236
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.
The iconic model tells the story of her eventful life.
According to the acknowledgments, this memoir started as "a fifty-page poem and then grew into hundreds of pages of…more poetry." Readers will be glad that Anderson eventually turned to writing prose, since the well-told anecdotes and memorable character sketches are what make it a page-turner. The poetry (more accurately described as italicized notes-to-self with line breaks) remains strewn liberally through the pages, often summarizing the takeaway or the emotional impact of the events described: "I was / and still am / an exceptionally / easy target. / And, / I'm proud of that." This way of expressing herself is part of who she is, formed partly by her passion for Anaïs Nin and other writers; she is a serious maven of literature and the arts. The narrative gets off to a good start with Anderson’s nostalgic memories of her childhood in coastal Vancouver, raised by very young, very wild, and not very competent parents. Here and throughout the book, the author displays a remarkable lack of anger. She has faced abuse and mistreatment of many kinds over the decades, but she touches on the most appalling passages lightly—though not so lightly you don't feel the torment of the media attention on the events leading up to her divorce from Tommy Lee. Her trip to the pages of Playboy, which involved an escape from a violent fiance and sneaking across the border, is one of many jaw-dropping stories. In one interesting passage, Julian Assange's mother counsels Anderson to desexualize her image in order to be taken more seriously as an activist. She decided that “it was too late to turn back now”—that sexy is an inalienable part of who she is. Throughout her account of this kooky, messed-up, enviable, and often thrilling life, her humility (her sons "are true miracles, considering the gene pool") never fails her.
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2023
ISBN: 9780063226562
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
SEEN & HEARD
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