HINDSIGHT

A writer recounts her experiences of adolescent homelessness in this coming-of-age memoir.

At the age of 5, Recinos (Haiku, 2019, etc.) already knew she wanted new parents. Her father’s frequent rages and her mother’s erratic behavior stemming from bipolar disorder had already driven three of her older siblings from the house. When she was 8, her mother took her and her remaining brother to a trailer to hide out from their father. A few weeks later, after the heater broke, her mother left the two children alone on the side of a mountain road. Her parents divorced; her mother was in and out of hospitals; and her father soon remarried. Her father had the author hospitalized at 11, where she met other troubled youth in group therapy: “I’d quizzed the older kids on foster care, group homes, running away. I was learning about alcohol, marijuana, and harder drugs. I didn’t want to try drugs, but alcohol sounded like it might be a nice change from feeling trapped. I wanted to feel free.” As her life became increasingly unbearable, Recinos began routinely running away from home. At 13, while hitchhiking to California, she was raped by an ex-convict. She was soon placed in the care of the state, bouncing between juvenile detention, foster parents, and group residences before becoming homeless at 16. Drifting across the country and developing a drinking problem, she befriended other girls with similar lives and backgrounds as her own, one of whom was later brutally murdered by her boyfriend. At 17, the author found herself pregnant with few options. She needed to figure out a way to get sober and off the street, if not for her, then for her unborn child. Recinos’ prose is haunting and oftentimes surreal, as in this account of her pet rat and an attempted rape by a truck driver: “I woke up in the early morning hours to find the truck driver trying to unbutton my pants. My eyes flew open, and my knee kicked him hard in the groin. My rat was standing up on top of me, staring at him. He mumbled those unforgettable words; ‘I was going to rape you, but then I saw your rat.’ ” The volume gives a highly detailed picture of the experience of homelessness among teenage girls in all its horrid complexities. It also demonstrates the ways that youthful traumas, when unaddressed, can fester and cause increasingly severe problems as children age. The author’s portraits of her family, friends, and the many people she met along the way are rich and often heart-rending, as is the frankness with which she discusses their misfortunes. It’s a long book (over 370 pages), but it is never boring, and readers will leave it feeling that they have lived every year right along with Recinos. The fact that her story has a surprisingly happy ending (as the initials “MD” after her name on the memoir’s cover attest) does little to blunt the sting that this gritty narrative of homelessness and young womanhood leaves in its wake.

A perceptive and moving account of growing up fast in harsh conditions.