FRUIT PUNCH

A Black woman’s unflinching look at her childhood and adolescence in Texas in the 1990s.

Allen, the author of the acclaimed essay collection, When You Learn the Alphabet, grew up in the Dallas area with her father, Doll, and her mother, L.A., who broke up and got back together several times throughout her childhood and adolescence. “Men are jealous” is one of the first lessons her mother taught her, although her parents’ split was catalyzed by Doll’s infidelity. One night, long after her father moved to Houston, Allen woke up to L.A. and Doll having sex in the bed where she was sleeping. Most children, she writes, “don’t expect to see their married parents who live in two different cities and in two different residences having sex in the middle of a school night in the bed the child shares with their single mother.” However, the reconciliation didn’t last. As Allen and her mother felt increasingly alone, the author tried to “help L.A. raise me by growing up and entering into some typa sister-wives union.” Later, she asked L.A. if they could attend therapy sessions because they were “too codependent.” Throughout, the author uses prose inventively, employing vernacular language, nontraditional line breaks, nonlinear chronology, and deliberate obfuscation about her age. In a key moment in the book, Allen writes about how she was sexually assaulted by a family member and describes herself as “nine, but probably seven.” Later, the author describes relating memories of her childhood to an unnamed male therapist, who prompted her to share her childhood trauma with her mother (whose response was underwhelming). Allen’s rendering of the material is visceral and unique, and her insights are powerful. Sometimes, however, the framing device of the therapy sessions has the unintended effect of highlighting how certain passages are more confessional than narratively compelling.

A piercing coming-of-age narrative from an original voice.