Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.
Loading... Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls: A Memoir (2019)by T Kira Madden
Loading...
Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. I frequently find myself compelled by trauma/troubled childhood memoirs. This one revealed itself as something far different in its final third, which made it more of a mysterious, gorgeous piece than I initially perceived it as. ( ) The prose itself is five stars. I don't really know how to describe it other than beautiful, immersive, and beautiful again. The seemingly tiny details stuck with me and gut-punched me when they came up again. I'm amazed. As beautiful as the writing was, I did feel that there were some inconsistencies in the characters that confused me, particularly with the parents. I don't mean the duality of their respective characters, I mean their core characteristics seemed to drastically differ in what I interpreted as the same point of time. I also thought that although the choice to intersperse timelines definitely added some intrigue to the book, it also interrupted the natural flow of the narrative, and so I don't have a good sense of the timeline of the author's life and it made certain plot points confusing. T Kira Madden has lived a lot of life. A weird, beautiful, haunting, queer coming of age story set mostly Florida, Fatherless Girls unfolds through short stories that jump forward and backward in time before transforming into a longer meditation on family in the last third. Picture Eighth Grade on vodka Red Bulls. Finished reading it on 7/11, which is the most uncanny shit ever. I don't often read memoirs and I usually take a longer time to get through them but this was an exception for sure. I really enjoyed Madden's writing style throughout the entire book. I can't exactly pinpoint what I like about it exactly but I did. The book felt incredibly honest and I found my eyes watering at the ending of the memoir. I don't think I've actually felt this way about any other memoirs I've read. Reading about her parents' life, her family and how her journey to discovering herself allowed me to reflect on my own life too. I hope the author would continue writing more and I would probably read anything she puts out! This was just gorgeous and lovely. Madden writes about women with a tenderness and affection that makes me love women even more, in all of their flaw and rage. The atmosphere alternates between almost ethereal and then these just blood-chilling moments of that being shattered, a return to harsher reality. Her writing about her father is of course amazing, but I keep returning to the way she write about women and how much I love it; just a care and affection that we see so rarely in writing, and it's so so good. Definitely recommend it for that reason. no reviews | add a review
AwardsDistinctions
The acclaimed literary essayist T Kira Madden's raw and redemptive debut is a memoir about coming of age as a queer, biracial teenager within the fierce contradictions of Boca Raton, Florida, a place where cult-like privilege, shocking social and racial disparities, rampant white-collar crime, and powerfully destructive standards of beauty hide in plain sight. As a child in Florida, T Kira Madden lived a life of extravagance; from her exclusive private school to her equestrian trophies and designer shoes, she had plenty to envy. But beneath the surface, life in "the rat's mouth" of Boca Raton was dangerous. Left to her own devices as both parents battled drug addiction, Kira navigated the perils of coming of age too quickly, and without guidance; oblivious parents and misguided babysitters at home, tormentors at school, sexual predators at the mall, and the confused, often destructive, desperately loving friendship of fatherless girls. With unflinching honesty and moving, lyrical prose, and spanning from 1960's Hawai'i to the nip and tuck rooms of 1990s Florida to the present-day struggle of a young woman in a culture of harassment, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls is the story of families both lost and found, unmade and rebuilt, crooked and beautiful. No library descriptions found. |
Current DiscussionsNonePopular covers
Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)814.6Literature English (North America) American essays 21st CenturyLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
Is this you?Become a LibraryThing Author. |