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Preston Browning Jr. entered the world in 1929, a few months before the Crash and the onset of the Great Depression. In Culpeper, Virginia, Browning grew up amid the pervasive poverty of the times where he recalls being labeled by his father as the worlds worst grouch, led in song by Miss Lizzy Lovellwho banged on the piano at the local Episcopal church, and seated astride a cow who needed a lot of convincing to take him for a ride around the pasture beyond his house. With humor and exceptional detail, Browning shares a lively memoir that focuses on his coming-of-age journey and subsequent experiences in the rural South during the 1930s and 1940s, providing a compelling glimpse into how his family and others helped shape his emerging sense of self, his convictions, and his character. While providing snippets about the era and sketches of more than twenty relatives and ancestors that include an amusing retelling about his Uncle Sweets experiences at a hoochie-coochie show, Browning details the fascinating legacy of his Southern upbringing during a time when a struggle for racial, economic, and social justice prevailed in America. In this inspiring memoir, a Southerner reminisces about small-town Virginia before, during, and after the Great Depression through entertaining stories about his unconventional ancestors, his immediate family, and his own experiences.
Focusing on race, religion, and class, author Preston M. Browning Jr. discusses life in the rural South as he experienced it in the 1930s and 1940s. With humorous touches and an eye for detail, this memoir provides not only snippets about the era but also the history of some of Virginia's oldest families. Born in 1929, Browning's childhood coincided with the Great Depression, and much of what he tells about his Culpeper, Virginia home communicates the ubiquitous poverty of the time. In addition, Affection and Estrangement: A Southern Family Memoir includes stories about relatives Browning remembers some quite eccentric, as well as ancestors from two distinguished Virginia families, the Cockes and the Cabells. He also examines the impact of the oftentimes harsh and punitive Calvinist piety of the time, with its emphasis on human depravity. Including sketches of more than twenty relatives and ancestors, Affection and Estrangement: A Southern Family Memoir shows how Browning's family shaped his emerging sense of self from his mother's aristocratic heritage to his father's business-oriented, middle-class background. This memoir pays tribute to those people ancestors, parents, relatives, teachers, clergymen, siblings, and friends who contributed so much to the formation of Browning and his character.
"To outsiders, Jessica Berger Gross's childhood--growing up in a 'nice' Jewish family in middle class Long Island--seemed as wholesomely American as any other. But behind closed doors, Jessica suffered years of physical and emotional abuse at the hands of her father, whose mood would veer unexpectedly from loving to violent. At the age of twenty-eight, still reeling from the trauma but emotionally dependent on her dysfunctional family, Jessica made the anguished decision to cut ties with them entirely. Years later, living in Maine with a loving husband and young son, having finally found happiness, Jessica is convinced the decision saved her life. Jessica breaks through common social taboos and bravely recounts the painful, self-defeating ways in which she internalized her abusive childhood, how she came to the monumental decision to break free from her family, and how she endured the difficult road that followed. Ultimately, by extracting herself from the damaging patterns and relationships of the past, Jessica has managed to carve an inspiring path to happiness--one she has created on her own terms. Her story, told here in a careful, unflinching, and forthright way, completely reframes how we think about family and the past."--
A daughter returns home to the Navajo reservation to retrace her mother’s life in a memoir that is both a narrative and an archive of one family’s troubled history. “A candid and achingly fractured memoir of [Geller’s] mother, her family, her Navajo heritage and her own journey to self-discovery and acceptance.”—Ms. SHORTLISTED FOR: The Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize, The Jim Deva Prize for Writing That Provokes • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Esquire, She Reads When Danielle Geller’s mother dies of alcohol withdrawal during an attempt to get sober, Geller returns to Florida and finds her mother’s life packed into eight suitcases. Most were filled with clothes, except for the last one, which contained diaries, photos, and letters, a few undeveloped disposable cameras, dried sage, jewelry, and the bandana her mother wore on days she skipped a hair wash. Geller, an archivist and a writer, uses these pieces of her mother’s life to try and understand her mother’s relationship to home, and their shared need to leave it. Geller embarks on a journey where she confronts her family's history and the decisions that she herself had been forced to make while growing up, a journey that will end at her mother's home: the Navajo reservation. Dog Flowers is an arresting, photo-lingual memoir that masterfully weaves together images and text to examine mothers and mothering, sisters and caretaking, and colonized bodies. Exploring loss and inheritance, beauty and balance, Danielle Geller pays homage to our pasts, traditions, and heritage, to the families we are given and the families we choose.
AS SEEN ON DR. OZ "Moving and complex, this is an exquisitely written tale of perseverance and unconditional love. A worthwhile addition to any collection."—Library Journal, STARRED Review A mother's murder. Her daughter's redemption. And the complicated past that belongs to them both. Kelly always knew her family was different. She knew that most children didn't live with their grandparents and that their grandparents didn't own porn stores. Her classmates didn't sleep on a boat in the L.A. harbor, and she knew their next-door neighbors probably weren't drug addicts and johns. She knew that most of her classmates knew more about their moms than their cause of death. What Kelly didn't know was if she would become part of the dysfunction that surrounded her. Would she end up selling adult videos and sinking into the depths of harbor life, or would she escape to live her own story somewhere else? As an adult, Kelly decides to discover how the place where she came from defined the person she ultimately became. To do this, she goes back to the beginning—to a mother she never knew, a thirty-year-old cold case, and two of Los Angeles's most notorious murderers. We Are All Shipwrecks is Kelly's story of redemption from tragedy, told with a tenderness toward her family that makes it as much about preserving the strings that anchor her as it is about breaking free.
From an award-winning author comes a wise and tender coming-of-age story about a nine-year-old girl who runs away from her Mississippi home in 1963, befriends a lonely woman suffering loss and abuse, and embarks on a life-changing road trip. Whistling past the graveyard. That’s what Daddy called it when you did something to keep your mind off your most worstest fear... In the summer of 1963, nine-year-old Starla Claudelle runs away from her strict grandmother’s Mississippi home. Starla’s destination is Nashville, where her mother went to become a famous singer, abandoning Starla when she was three. Walking a lonely country road, Starla accepts a ride from Eula, a black woman traveling alone with a white baby. Now, on the road trip that will change her life forever, Starla sees for the first time life as it really is—as she reaches for a dream of how it could one day be.
In this encouraging book, Sheri McGregor helps parents of estranged adult children break free from emotional pain and move forward in their lives. With the latest research, her own experience, and insight from more than 9,000 parents, McGregor covers the growing trend of estranged adults from loving families. Devastated parents can be happy again.
During the worst years of official racism in South Africa, the story of one young girl gripped the nation and came to symbolize the injustice, corruption, and arbitrary nature of apartheid. Born in 1955 to a pro-apartheid Afrikaner couple, Sandra Laing was officially registered and raised as a white child. But when she was sent to a boarding school for whites, she was mercilessly persecuted because of her dark skin and frizzy hair. Her parents attributed Sandra's appearance to an interracial union far back in history; they swore Sandra was their child. Their neighbors, however, thought Mrs. Laing had committed adultery with a black man. The family was shunned. And when Sandra was ten, she was removed from school by the police and reclassified as "coloured." As a teenager, Sandra eloped with a black man, and her parents disowned her. The young woman, who had only known the privileged world of the whites, chose to begin again in a poor, rural, all-black township, where life was a desperate, day-to-day struggle against poverty, illness, and a legal system designed to enslave. In this remarkable narrative, veteran journalist and author Judith Stone takes us on her own eye-opening journey as she and Sandra explore the mysteries of Sandra's past and piece together the fractured life of one of apartheid's many victims. As the devastating circumstances of Sandra's life are revealed, Stone comes to understand and admire her for the flawed -- yet enduring -- survivor she is.
“We Were Brothers, Barry Moser's beautiful--and beautifully illustrated--new book, tells the wrenching and redeeming story of brothers who take different paths and yet ultimately find their ways back to each other . . . Their careful reconciliation after decades of strife and avoidance is sad, moving, and joyful all at the same time." —Andrew Hudgins, author ofThe Joker Preeminent illustrator Barry Moser and his brother, Tommy, were born of the same parents, were raised in the same small Tennessee community, and were poisoned by their family's deep racism and anti-Semitism. But as they grew older, their perspectives and their paths grew further and further apart. From attitudes about race, to food, politics, and money, the brothers began to think so differently that they could no longer find common ground, no longer knew how to talk to each other, and for years there was more strife between them than affection. When Barry was in his late fifties and Tommy in his early sixties, their fragile brotherhood reached a tipping point and blew apart. From that day forward they did not speak. But fortunately, their story does not end there. With the raw emotions that so often surface when we talk of our siblings, Barry recalls why and how they were finally able to traverse that great divide and reconcile their kinship before it was too late. Including fifteen of Moser's stunning drawings, this powerful true story captures the essence of sibling relationships--their complexities, contradictions, and mixed blessings.
The "New York Times" bestseller called "quietly gripping" by "USA Today" demonstrates how impulses can fracture even the most stable family. Despite her loving family and beautiful home, Jo Becker is restless. Then an old roommate reappears, bringing back Jo's memories of her early 20s. Jo's obsession with that period in her life--and the crime that ended it--draws her back to a horrible secret.