LADYBUG

A poetic memoir that explores childhood abuse and mental illness.

Inglewood, California, in 1988 was “bright and loud,” according to Chaney, “spilling brown colored kids out on the sidewalk, like butterflies or trash, their mothers screaming at them from the front door.” As a kindergartner, she mostly wanted to look at bugs in the yard and follow her older sister around; she didn’t really like going to school, where she sometimes embarrassingly wet her pants, although she did like the school library and its shelves upon shelves of books, which stirred her imagination. She also enjoyed spending time with her single mother—a rarity, as Chaney and her older sister were often left to their own devices while their mom worked as a law-firm secretary. But she didn’t like it when her mother acted strangely, telling Chaney that she’d been hearing voices and asking her daughter if she heard them, too; the author said she did even though she didn’t. Her mom would bring boyfriends home at night while Chaney and her sister were supposed to be sleeping, and the author would hear sounds through the walls: “Lots of high and low loud voices that rise and fall towards crashes of laughter. Or sounds that aren’t words, / Umm/ Hum, / Yeah, / Whoooo, / like the sounds of strings and drums tapping out a rhythm I can almost understand.” After one of these boyfriends sexually abused the author, her world turned into one of terrible hardship—one in which she was forced to learn how to keep herself afloat in a sea of chaos.

Chaney tells her story in a highly lyrical prose style that pays close attention to sound and rhythm and highlights a deep, embodied interiority. Here, for example, she describes to her absent mother a time when she and her sister fashioned their own waterslide out of trash bags and water from a garden hose: “You aren’t home so it doesn’t matter what we get wet in, but I see [my sister] frowning looking at the bags and the water running….Her head nods left and then nods right. She bites her lip. Niki, you go first.” The writing is consistently vivid and affecting throughout, replicating the wide-eyed but perceptive point of view of a child who’s desperately attuned to her mother’s moods. The author’s use of unconventional formatting is particularly engaging: For several chapters, Chaney recounts her memories as though speaking to her mother, rendering the text as standard columns, interrupted by occasional italicized asides of dialogue; then, two-thirds of the way through, the perspective switches to that of her parent, whose responses are rendered as slanted lines that effectively mimic the instability of her emotional state. Finally, Chaney speaks again, this time to herself, with the text taking an ovular form of insect wings. Although the work is often a difficult read, the journey it describes is as cathartic as it is discomfiting, and it ends up in a place of unexpected beauty.

An emotional remembrance told in controlled but expressive language.