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
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
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
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