An inspiration for those attempting to come to terms with abuse.
An Appalachian memoir from a woman who escaped a cycle of violence, substance abuse, and self-loathing in order to find her voice.
Debut author Conn grew up in a Kentucky holler in the 1980s. As a child, she endured a life marked by poverty and abuse, both of which were common in the region. Her father was an alcoholic drug dealer who often beat her and her mother and brother. In order to survive, she silently endured the pain as her distrust for others grew. Soon, Conn fell into her own cycle of drug abuse as well as physical and sexual abuse from her circle of companions. “By the time I became a young adult,” she writes, “I had grown suspicious of my intuition, my judgment, even my own feelings.” She continues later, “I never felt safe to defend myself or to claim any right to be treated differently.” The author discovered that the only way she could stop hating herself, her life, and everyone around her was to become a different person. Fortunately, she was a good student, and she managed to escape to college and then graduate school. However, her past still haunted her. On the encouragement of a mentor, she decided to share her story. At times, the narrative is fragmented and disconnected, perhaps due to Conn’s struggle to make sense of it all, but the author is to be commended for her courage and determination to change her life circumstances. “I wrote it and rewrote it over the years to come,” she writes, “each time seeing more clearly that I had become the storyteller, that it was my story and that I had to tell it. With each revision, I understood that although many people had quieted me, even whipped me into silence, I still had words they could not take away from me.”
An inspiration for those attempting to come to terms with abuse.Pub Date: May 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5420-0416-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Little A
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
