Book Review: Rust Belt Femme

By Briana Weeger

The brain often holds onto distinct and unexpected images and memories at the time of traumatic events. These memories may not make sense on their own, and they may seem disconnected from what actually happened.

For Raechel Anne Jolie, in her coming-of-age memoir Rust Belt Femme, the unlikely memory is of lightning bugs. During summertime in a rural working-class Ohio village called Valley View, neighborhood children ran barefoot through unmown front lawns to catch fireflies. It is the fireflies Jolie recalls first when she thinks about her father’s accident.

Andrea Doria

BY LESLIE ARMSTRONG

Andrea Doria (1456 to 1560) was born in Oneglia, west of Genoa. He was orphaned at a young age and became a soldier of fortune. In 1503 he served in the Genoese navy routing the French from Corsica. He spent the rest of his long life serving whoever paid well, commanding his galleys in warfare against the Turks and Barbary pirates and protecting the supremacy and independence of the principality of Genoa. He died a rich and revered man. Many Italian and US naval vessels have been named after him, the most famous of which was the passenger ship SS Andrea Doria, launched in June of 1951, maiden voyage January 1953.

Book Review: Strung Out: One Last Hit and Other Lies That Nearly Killed Me

BY COLLIN MITCHELL

Like so many of the recent stories about opiate addiction in the United States, Erin Khar’s journey toward heroin started with a pill. “I pulled The World According to Garp out from underneath my pillow and read,” she writes, remembering the first time she raided her mother’s medicine cabinet. She was eight. “After a little while, the heat in my body was replaced by the lightness of little bubbles . . . . It was the exit I desperately wanted.”

Khar’s experience as an advice columnist for Ravishly is well-suited to turn Strung Out: One Last Hit and Other Lies That Nearly Killed Me from what might otherwise be a distressing year-by-year account of addiction into a story that develops context and empathy toward mental illness and drug abuse. Khar is forthright in her opinion about our inability to understand addiction: “The stigma associated with opioids, with heroin, with “being a junkie,” prevents people from reaching out. And that stigma is killing us. Americans are stuck in a spiral of shame, and that shame drives the vicious cycle of relapse that many drug users get caught in.” In a culture that tends to conflate pity and prejudice toward adversity, this could be a helpful guide for the uninitiated in understanding the causes of drug and alcohol dependence.

Book Review: Brother & Sister

By Mary Fensholt Perera

In her new book Brother & Sister, Diane Keaton describes her brother Randy as living on “the other side of normal.”

“The other side,” a comforting phrase used by those struggling to accept the loss of a loved one, harkens back to the myth of the River Styx. In Brother & Sister, Randy’s mental illness runs like a dark river through both her brother’s life and Keaton’s story. This debilitating illness, culminating now in dementia, is the current that continues to take Randy further and further from those who love him. It is a force they are powerless to understand or to stop.

Diane Keaton and her younger brother, Randy grew up in the Los Angeles suburbs in the 1950s, with parents determined to live the American dream. Their civil engineer father, Jack Hall, worked diligently to support his family. Their homemaker mother, Dorothy Hall, documented their days with her diaries and cameras. The family grew and prospered. Yet Randy failed to thrive emotionally; his childhood was not a happy one, and his inability to cope with the world around him became more and more apparent as the years passed.

TCR Talks with Tembi Locke

By Scott Stevenson

Tembi Locke is an accomplished actor, TEDx speaker, and bestselling author. She has appeared in over 60 television shows and films including The Magicians and NCIS: LA. Her TEDx talk, What Forty Steps Taught Me About Love and Grief, traces her journey as a cancer caregiver. Her New York Times bestseller, From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home, is a Reese’s Book Club x Hello Sunshine pick.

From Scratch is a poignant and transporting cross-cultural love story set against the lush backdrop of the Sicilian countryside, where one woman discovers the healing powers of food and family and finds unexpected grace in her darkest hour.

Tembi is currently on a paperback tour for From Scratch, and will be speaking at Book Soup in West Hollywood tonight (2/4/20, 7pm), and tomorrow at the Palm Springs Cultural Center at noon (2/5/20, 12pm). Tembi will be in Los Angeles, Palm Springs, Houston, Dallas, and Seattle promoting the paperback.

Book Review: Shout by Laurie Halse Anderson

By Lindsay Jamieson

New York Times best-selling author Laurie Halse Anderson departs from her beloved YA fiction with Shout, her brilliant new memoir written in verse.

Shout, published in March, 2019, marks the twentieth anniversary of Anderson’s groundbreaking novel, Speak, which told the story of Melinda, a 13-year-old who stops speaking after she’s raped. With Shout, Anderson opens a window into the personal experiences that gave her the insight, empathy, and emotion to conjure Melinda, a protagonist who, as she reveals in Shout, has become a hero (and a moniker) for survivors—men and women—of sexual assault. Anderson, like Melinda, was also raped at 13, and she is an ardent believer that words—spoken, shouted, and written—offer a “bridge to escape” the shame. As the last line of the introduction states: “This is the story of a girl who lost her voice and wrote herself a new one.”

Book Review: T Kira Madden’s “Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls”

By: Pallavi Yetur

The debut memoir of essayist T Kira Madden has already been hailed as a gorgeous and harrowing coming-of-age story. And so it is. But the delivery of her story is nowhere near as generic as the term “coming-of age.” In this memoir Madden achieves the feat of creating universal nostalgia and relatability while crafting a world uniquely her own. Conflicts abound—between her mother and father, between her fantasies and reality, between her inner self and her outer appearance. But by its end, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls proves itself a moving ode to the family and identity Madden fiercely owns.

Book Review: Alice Anderson’s “Some Bright Morning I’ll Fly Away”

By: Kaia Gallagher

In Some Bright Morning I’ll Fly Away, Alice Anderson proves she is a survivor no matter what life throws at her. Her memoir recounts a decade-long battle to protect her three children from a vengeful, violence-prone ex-husband. The courts provide little help, encouraging family reunification rather than assuring the safety of an abused spouse.

Anderson is no stranger to hardship. Early in her writing career, she recounted her determination to overcome her father’s sexual abuse in an award-winning book of poetry. Human Nature is a harrowing description of a young girl’s fight for a future despite a childhood filled with incest and violence. It won the 1994 Elmer Holmes Bobst Award for Emerging Writers.

Despite her early success as a poet and international fashion model, Anderson is haunted by her past: “Something about [being a model] made me feel used up, consumed, like I was the little girl my father gobbled up all over again, his sexual abuse consuming in a drunken, hungry rage all the best parts of me until I was nothing, but a pretty, performing doll.” She becomes ripe for a relationship with Liam, her ex-husband whom she sees as someone trying equally hard to escape his family demons. Her spiral down into acquiescence is gradual, with an ever-tightening noose that threatens to erase not only Anderson’s very identity but also her life.