A terrifying and telling memoir, but one that leave unanswered questions.
A harrowing memoir of domestic violence and mental illness in 1960s and ’70s Australia.
O’Leary writes that, beginning when she was a toddler, she suffered abuse at the hands of her late father. She recalls him tossing her into the air, playful and fatherly, and then suddenly dropping his arms to his sides and letting her hit the ground. When she was 4, she writes, she first glimpsed one of her father’s multiple personalities: while playing at her paternal grandmother’s house, she saw a “grotesque figure” in black boots, a grey wig, and pink lipstick. The person, who turned out to be her father in disguise, looked like her grandmother, she says, but threatened to cut her with a razor. The following year, O’Leary writes, she watched her father brutally and inexplicably murder three people. The domestic violence then escalated, according to O’Leary, who says that her father chloroformed her, buried her, tied her up, and sexually abused her; her favorite pets died horrible deaths, and her toys were lost or destroyed. Her father, she says, killed again, several times, with her as a witness; she endured this in order to protect her mother and three brothers, she says, whom her father regularly threatened to kill. The family lived in the Australian bush with no phone and little recourse, as the police refused to get involved in domestic cases. The sections of the book portraying the abuse are powerful. In them, O’Leary shows a child who couldn’t make sense of the strange figures she saw, the handkerchief that made her black out, or a trench where she was imprisoned. The confusion, uncertainty, and sickening foreboding ring true and offer vital insights into the experience of abuse, including the fact that victims had few options, especially in the 1960s. Other sections, however, including descriptions of events well before the author’s birth, are written like a novel, providing precise details and dialogue as well as the thoughts in the characters’ heads. Although the book is billed as an autobiography, O’Leary reveals little about her adult life, such as how her childhood experience affected her relationships with her own five children or how it feels to finally disclose the perpetrator of so many unresolved murders.
A terrifying and telling memoir, but one that leave unanswered questions.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5196-9587-1
Page Count: 258
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
In this memoir Torgovnick (English/Duke Univ.) proves herself to be a rare breed: a cultural critic who writes lucidly and perceptively not only about her chosen texts, but about herself. The first half of the book consists of autobiographical essays on crossing boundaries of class, religion, education, and place, as an Italian-American woman. Torgovnick grew up in Bensonhurst, a working-class, predominantly Italian-American neighborhood in Brooklyn, N.Y. Ocean Parkway, which divides Bensonhurst from Sheepshead Bay (the middle-class, Jewish neighborhood into which she eventually married), symbolized upward mobility and the possibilities of life beyond the confines of her insular world. These essays describe her experiences as an academically successful girl in a community where intellectual expectations for girls were low; later, as a professor in a Waspy college town, she also felt herself an outsider. The book's latter half consists of essays of cultural criticism, on Italian-American icons such as The Godfather, as well as other American literary institutions—Dr. Dolittle, critic Lionel Trilling, and the canon. Torgovnick writes her critical pieces in the same intimate, personal voice she uses in the memoirs. Throughout, she is willing to revise and add complexity to her own narratives. In an epilogue on her father's death, for instance, she reflects that, although she felt that she was rebelling against him in ``crossing Ocean Parkway''—marrying Jewish, going to college, and moving out of the neighborhood—he may have been more of an ally than she had thought. He protested when she skipped grades in school, yet he also gave her books, took her into the city, and was a model of gender rebellion—pulling down the shades so the neighbors couldn't see him doing housework. Torgovnick's scholarly background and life experience inform her readings of both American culture and her own past; she has found an essayist's voice that is very much her own.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-226-80829-7
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
A well-written, matter-of-fact account about a vanished hand-to-mouth occupation.
A memoir of driving new cars and trucks from Detroit for delivery in Los Angeles over a nine-year span, 1949-58.
Born in 1928, Browning grew up in a middle-class Ohio family but found college unappealing and found little to love in the U.S. Navy. A newspaper advertisement caught his attention: "Cars delivered, drivers wanted." He showed up at the Detroit address, and immediately began working for the owner of the driveaway business, identified only as the Old Man. Browning normally found himself driving in a convoy, allowing him to become acquainted with other restless men. Their route from Detroit to Los Angeles before the completion of the interstate highway system took them mostly through small-town America. Some of the men signed up for round trips; others asked for one-way journeys only. The drivers usually punctuated their overnight stays in cheap motels with eating, drinking, shooting pool and seeking sex, finding willing women from time to time. The narrative and the dialogue are often raunchy; Browning certainly doesn't sugarcoat the raucousness or rootlessness of the life. "On paper, it looked as if no one would ever take a job like that," Browning says. "In practice, there were a dozen applicants for every position. For the wanderers and ne'er-do-wells the job was made to order: the first deal they had ever run across that actually paid them for indulging their natural bent—flitting back and forth across the country, just knocking around."
A well-written, matter-of-fact account about a vanished hand-to-mouth occupation.Pub Date: March 20, 2003
ISBN: 0-944220-15-0
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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