PUNCHING BAG

The author of Free Lunch (2019) continues his account of an abusive childhood into adolescence.

Reassuring readers in similar situations in the notes he places fore and aft that he survived, and they can too, Ogle focuses here on his home life. Beginning with a flashback to age 7 when he came back from a long stay with grandparents to the news that he would have had a baby sister, but she was dead and it was his fault, he chronicles in explicit detail high school years of screaming matches and vicious beat downs by both his wildly unstable Mexican American mom and alcoholic White stepfather between times when they beat on each other. The little sister he never had (stillborn, it turns out, after a typically brutal parental argument) plays a continuing role in his story, as both a source of crushing guilt, no less devastating for being undeserved, and a ghostly presence who helps him control his own tendency toward outbursts of rage. What emerges in the wake of all the bruises, blood, vomit, denial, and psychological battering is less a feeling of relief that Ogle succeeded in becoming an independent adult, than a sense that, despite the hopeful ending and his speaking of letting go and moving on, his personal journey takes a back seat here to an indictment of the irrecoverably broken grown-ups charged with raising him.

Grim reading, with reassurance just the barest glimmer in a nightmarish landscape.