SCRAP

Castle charts a legacy of neglect and domestic violence in this plangent memoir.

The author begins with a portrait of her tense childhood in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in the 1960s, a period dominated by her father, Rudy, a businessman with a hair-trigger temper that led him to physically lash out at her and her mother, Janet. She traces Rudy’s behavior to his own childhood in Chicago during the Great Depression as one of three illegitimate children of a working-class seamstress named Marie and a married doctor who rarely saw his second family, an arrangement that left permanent psychological scars. (“He’s in HELL!” Rudy shouted when the author innocently asked where her grandfather was.) Rudy meted out increasingly severe spankings to Castle over the years; things grew worse when she entered her teens and he harshly restricted her dating activities, fearing that she might wind up like Marie with an out-of-wedlock child. The pressure eventually drove the author to attempt suicide with sleeping pills. Subsequent chapters cover Castle’s reconciliation with Rudy in later years as his health declined and she dug into her grandfather’s identity and his fraught, exploitative relationship with Marie. The author reconstructs her family’s history in an episodic narrative that unfolds in short, intense sections of prose and occasional poetry. It’s a work of deep if sometimes grudging empathy—she imagines scenes from the points of view of Marie, Janet, and Rudy. (Her father befriended hungry kids during his service in the Korean War; there was a benign side to his character that belied the “wolf face” he displayed when infuriated.) Castle depicts her family’s sometimes-brutal pathologies in subtle, evocative prose that vividly plumbs a child’s claustrophobic fear of a father’s rage: “One loud voice like a launched rock. Pleading cries. Thuds, cracks, and then a slap.” The result is a powerful, painful family saga that slowly gives way to hard-won understanding.

A richly detailed, harrowing account of household mayhem and the struggle to forgive.