Abused as a young girl by a Catholic priest, debut memoirist Dispenza sets out to reassemble her life’s “invisible pieces of spirituality and sexuality.”
Beneath scenes of a mostly happy childhood—lessons from her aunt in buying fine china, choosing the best seats on the school bus her mother drove—Dispenza harbored a terrible secret: from the age of 7, she was repeatedly raped by her priest, Father George Neville Rucker. After her first harrowing encounter, Dispenza studied her reflection in the school bathroom only to find that the “little girl at the sink and the little girl in the mirror were no longer connected.” Over the next 40 years, Dispenza wrestled with the repercussions of this split from “Little Mary.” As an adolescent, anything involving sex or the body—menstruation, masturbation, making out—filled her with unbearable shame. In September 1958, after ignoring her parents’ pleas to marry or attend college, 18-year-old Dispenza became a nun. Prayer, manual work, and silence dominated her next 15 years until she once more felt “split and broken in pieces.” From the convent, she went on to serve as principal at several Catholic schools in Washington state, all while struggling to be sexually intimate with the men and women she dated. Her life might have proceeded in this painful, repressed fashion had she not attended a 1989 workshop for the Catholic Archdiocese of Seattle called “Sexual Misconduct on the Part of the Clergy.” Here and at a subsequent meeting of women molested by the clergy, Dispenza’s memories came flooding back. Soon thereafter, with the help of therapy, she embraced two crucial facts of her life—“Father Rucker had raped me, and I loved women”—that set her on a path of confrontation, retribution, and the reconciliation of her committed Catholicism with her true self. Like the life it depicts, Dispenza’s memoir consists of one courageous act after another. After coming out, Dispenza recounts scrambling the letters of “depression” to spell “I pressed on.” Her stirring narrative embodies just that: overcoming trauma to bravely take a stand against injustice.
A raw, cathartic read that unflinchingly tackles issues of rape, shame, and, ultimately, forgiveness.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-9896563-2-0
Page Count: 242
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 22, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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Possibly inspired by the letters Cleary has received as a children's author, this begins with second-grader Leigh Botts' misspelled fan letter to Mr. Henshaw, whose fictitious book itself derives from the old take-off title Forty Ways W. Amuse a Dog. Soon Leigh is in sixth grade and bombarding his still-favorite author with a list of questions to be answered and returned by "next Friday," the day his author report is due. Leigh is disgruntled when Mr. Henshaw's answer comes late, and accompanied by a set of questions for Leigh to answer. He threatens not to, but as "Mom keeps nagging me about your dumb old questions" he finally gets the job done—and through his answers Mr. Henshaw and readers learn that Leigh considers himself "the mediumest boy in school," that his parents have split up, and that he dreams of his truck-driver dad driving him to school "hauling a forty-foot reefer, which would make his outfit add up to eighteen wheels altogether. . . . I guess I wouldn't seem so medium then." Soon Mr. Henshaw recommends keeping a diary (at least partly to get Leigh off his own back) and so the real letters to Mr. Henshaw taper off, with "pretend," unmailed letters (the diary) taking over. . . until Leigh can write "I don't have to pretend to write to Mr. Henshaw anymore. I have learned to say what I think on a piece of paper." Meanwhile Mr. Henshaw offers writing tips, and Leigh, struggling with a story for a school contest, concludes "I think you're right. Maybe I am not ready to write a story." Instead he writes a "true story" about a truck haul with his father in Leigh's real past, and this wins praise from "a real live author" Leigh meets through the school program. Mr. Henshaw has also advised that "a character in a story should solve a problem or change in some way," a standard juvenile-fiction dictum which Cleary herself applies modestly by having Leigh solve his disappearing lunch problem with a burglar-alarmed lunch box—and, more seriously, come to recognize and accept that his father can't be counted on. All of this, in Leigh's simple words, is capably and unobtrusively structured as well as valid and realistic. From the writing tips to the divorced-kid blues, however, it tends to substitute prevailing wisdom for the little jolts of recognition that made the Ramona books so rewarding.
Pub Date: Aug. 22, 1983
ISBN: 143511096X
Page Count: 133
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1983
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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