A disturbing, poignant, informative, and ultimately triumphant remembrance.
Scott offers a memoir that explores the dynamics and repercussions of suicide and reflects on a history of trauma and troublesome choices.
The author was born in 1958, in the Inland Empire area of California at the edge of the Mojave Desert. She says that her hometown “smelled like exhaust and chorizo. The steel mill and freight trains belched black smoke into the sky.” She was her mother’s fourth child; the first three were almost two decades older than her and lived elsewhere. When Scott was born, her mother returned to work 10 days later and left her with her maternal grandparents. She was a lonely kid, she says, who was teased at school and always felt like she didn’t belong. Years later, she would discover that her family kept many secrets. Inspired by the rigid religious devotion of her Christian grandmother and Aunt Jane, she found comfort in an assortment of churches: At 13, she writes, “[She] regularly attended three different churches each week: a charismatic church on Saturday nights….the youth group at [her] childhood Baptist church on Wednesday evenings; and Sunday mornings at the Pentecostal Assembly of God.” It was at one of the latter gatherings that she met her first husband, who was 10 years older than she was. He told her that God intended for them to marry, and one year later, they tied the knot. Within five weeks, she was pregnant with their first child; they would go on to have two more. Her spouse was the breadwinner, and she settled into their home, determined to be a perfect wife and mother and to create the warm home environment she never had. Eventually, they moved to the lush Central Coast of California. However, her marriage to a cold, controlling, and judgmental man took its toll.
Scott effectively reveals how years of religious indoctrination—which taught her that God sees every sin and that Satan is always lurking—helped to push her into a depression. However, she also shows how she made major changes in her life. The author, who later became a psychotherapist and drug and domestic abuse counselor, begins her memoir with the most dramatically chilling section of the narrative: the moment in 2004 when she entered her house to find her second husband in the dining room, hanging by his neck. He died by suicide, which she saw as a final instance of his ongoing psychological abuse, and she writes of how it left her consumed with guilt. Overall, Scott is a tough and compelling storyteller, with plenty of engaging stories that she shares with sadness, self-effacing humor, and honesty. When she jumps back to her childhood and works her way forward to the opening climactic episode, she effectively draws connections between her early upbringing, her religious traumas, her feelings of unworthiness, and her endurance of her second husband’s behavior—and how her work with survivors of abuse and addiction gave her a close-up view of red flags that she was unable to identify in her own relationships.
A disturbing, poignant, informative, and ultimately triumphant remembrance.Pub Date: April 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781965784112
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Pierian Springs Press
Review Posted Online: May 29, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.
The iconic model tells the story of her eventful life.
According to the acknowledgments, this memoir started as "a fifty-page poem and then grew into hundreds of pages of…more poetry." Readers will be glad that Anderson eventually turned to writing prose, since the well-told anecdotes and memorable character sketches are what make it a page-turner. The poetry (more accurately described as italicized notes-to-self with line breaks) remains strewn liberally through the pages, often summarizing the takeaway or the emotional impact of the events described: "I was / and still am / an exceptionally / easy target. / And, / I'm proud of that." This way of expressing herself is part of who she is, formed partly by her passion for Anaïs Nin and other writers; she is a serious maven of literature and the arts. The narrative gets off to a good start with Anderson’s nostalgic memories of her childhood in coastal Vancouver, raised by very young, very wild, and not very competent parents. Here and throughout the book, the author displays a remarkable lack of anger. She has faced abuse and mistreatment of many kinds over the decades, but she touches on the most appalling passages lightly—though not so lightly you don't feel the torment of the media attention on the events leading up to her divorce from Tommy Lee. Her trip to the pages of Playboy, which involved an escape from a violent fiance and sneaking across the border, is one of many jaw-dropping stories. In one interesting passage, Julian Assange's mother counsels Anderson to desexualize her image in order to be taken more seriously as an activist. She decided that “it was too late to turn back now”—that sexy is an inalienable part of who she is. Throughout her account of this kooky, messed-up, enviable, and often thrilling life, her humility (her sons "are true miracles, considering the gene pool") never fails her.
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2023
ISBN: 9780063226562
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
SEEN & HEARD
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