A young Englishwoman’s tactile memoir of growing up amid economic hardship and violent dysfunction. Ashworth’s Maltese father drowned in the 1970s when the author was five years old. On the playground, as a dark-skinned girl with her father’s Mediterranean blood, Ashworth (currently a fellow at Oxford) was called a foreigner, a “Bloody Paki.” This self-portrait is stylistically fresh, written in short, cinematic bursts of memory, its strengths in its physical detail: images of her mother stewing her little sister’s dirty nappies in the kitchen, her evening-arriving stepfather’s key rattle and boot brush and scrape on the front doormat. But the story of abuse she tells is an ancient one. Even when the author was a child, through the family’s move to Canada and then, later, back to England and eventually Manchester, her mother was wearing sunglasses to hide the bruises Ashworth’s stepfather gave her. While Ashworth’s mother was conflicted over her tormentor, her daughter wondered why she continued to see the man and to live her life for him. Ashworth’s tame descriptions of adolescent rituals that include experimenting with boys seem mundane compared to her volcanic home life, where her stepfather is always ready to go off and throttle her or her mother. He eventually leaves and is replaced in her mother’s affections by Terry, or “Tez,” a small-time criminal who brings in lots of money until he’s hauled off to prison. Returned, he too displays a pugilistic streak, until eventually her mother is hospitalized by her injuries and they separate as the author prepares for her liberating “flight” to Oxford and a university education. At one point Ashworth, who excels in school and learns to appreciate Austen, Hardy, Larkin, and Plath, imagines how she might use the words she reads to defend herself from Tez, how she might carry a “beautiful sting.” Her literary debut carries both—the beauty and the sting.
Pub Date: May 7, 1998
ISBN: 0-8050-5762-5
Page Count: 329
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1998
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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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