A raw, cathartic read that unflinchingly tackles issues of rape, shame, and, ultimately, forgiveness.
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
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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