BIRD OF PASSAGE

In this memoir, a woman chronicles her road to adulthood and her adventures along the way.

Hobbs’ story opens in the middle of a marital altercation between her mother and her stepfather, Chris, who was verbally and physically abusive. “It was a defining moment in my life,” the author writes, “shattering my childhood, like running head first into a concrete wall.” It is also a scene that establishes some of the central themes of the book: family, heartache, and violence. Hobbs was born in California after World War II, and as a result, she “saw the birth of rock and roll, experienced the explosion of television cover the country like a mushroom cloud, got the benefits of stay-at-home-mom attention, and the education of travel and adventure.” Her father was a pilot who, after toiling for a while in the Pentagon, moved the family to Vietnam for work. While abroad, her mother met Chris and left the author’s father. After only a short time together, Chris began to emotionally terrorize their household. While Hobbs moved a tremendous amount in her girlhood, from Vietnam to France, she met the love of her life, Mike, at Butler University in Indianapolis. They soon settled down together, married, and raised their son, Brett. But Brett’s dyslexia and bullying in school eventually led him to experiment with—and abuse—drugs and alcohol, which would have devastating, irrevocable consequences. The memoir unspools chronologically, and Hobbs’ personal narrative is deftly interwoven with historical events, such as President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. The author’s writing is more vibrant in the first half of the book when she describes her childhood. There, her curiosity about the world and her lyricism really shine through, as when she describes a TV antenna as “a giant insect” and recalls her and Mike’s wedding, noting, “Our lives lay ahead of us, beckoning like a lighthouse.” As Hobbs grows up in the narrative, the story shifts to become more informative and matter-of-fact. The language, as a result, loses some of the initial luster, tilting more to the self-help genre. Toward the end of the book, she writes: “Learn from the past, but keep playing the game.”

A vivid, if uneven, account of one woman’s extraordinary journey through life.