SLEEPING UNDER THE BRIDGE

After being traumatized as a child, a woman describes her descent into homelessness in this memoir.

“My life deteriorated the day Becky died,” remarks Baker, commenting on the death of her childhood dog, her only confidant. The author recounts that she was abused by her father from the age of 4 and was passed among his friends at 6. Consequently, Baker was taught to hide the truth. Her silent pain led to misbehavior in school, property damage, and brushes with the Australian police. By 16, a friend, concerned that she was slipping into alcoholism, convinced the author to start counseling. The sessions began to help, but being fired from her first job—instigated by a co-worker who, she asserts, sexually abused her—compounded her feelings of mistrust. In this first installment of a trilogy, Baker recalls how she grew addicted to drugs and alcohol and became homeless for two years, finding shelter under the Sydney Harbour Bridge. In her darkest moment on the street, the author aimed a knife at her own stomach. Baker’s writing courageously and lucidly excavates deep emotional recesses: “If you asked me then or today where my safe place was, it was in my mind. I had no other place that I could call safe.” Stylistically explosive at times, as when the book relates her response to disapproving passersby—“I would always yell back at the cowardly judges, ‘You give me a fuckin’ shower then!’ I stuck my middle finger in the air”—the memoir is meditative as well. At one point, the author ruminates about the Harbour Bridge: “To me, it was a connection in time, a fortification that holds secrets. It has history, though worlds apart, from the sixteen men who died building the Sydney Harbour Bridge to sixty years later, a place that gave me refuge.” But the work has a few flaws. Baker’s use of a nonlinear timeline can prove confusing, although the revisiting of her past accentuates how her childhood trauma lived on in adulthood. This approach also leads to the repetition of details (“Bridge builders left scraps of metal, chemical waste”; “metal scraps, empty beer cans, chemical waste”). Still, Baker is a talented, versatile writer whose frank book will resonate strongly with those facing similar issues.

An intelligent, harrowing, and boldly confessional account of a survivor.