Driving with Dead People: A Memoir

I just finished reading Monica Holloway’s first memoir, Driving with Dead People, and I’ve been sitting here for fifteen minutes trying to figure out how to write about the book without including any spoilers.

Not an easy task with this book since the last chapters hit me hard.

Near the end of the book, I wondered how I missed it all. On reflection, I guess it’s because the book is that well-written.

You’re going to love this one as the narrator’s voice is engaging, but if you don’t like to read dark memoirs, then it might take a frightening turn for you. If you venture on, you find that your journey has value, and that Holloway is courageous.

Holloway tells the story of her childhood, growing up in the midwest. Her father is show more cruel, and at first her mother seems as much a victim as the four children. Then Holloway’s mother goes to college and gets the courage to leave her husband. Emotionally, she turns her back on her children as surely as if she had completely abandoned them.

Her obsession with death and dead people keeps Holloway going throughout these years. Her best friend’s father owns a funeral parlor, and she gets a job driving dead bodies for him. She haunts the graveyard.

Additionally, the passion (different from obsession) that gets Holloway through it all is her love of and talent for acting. She eventually earns an MFA in theatre from the University of California, San Diego. She builds a life far from her Ohio roots.

But the path is not without great difficulty. The family has been destroyed by the behavior of the parents. Her closest sibling, the oldest sister, has been particularly damaged. But so has Holloway herself, and it’s only at the very end of the book that she discovers just how much. show less

When I first picked up Driving with Dead People: A Memoir, I was expecting a comedic tale about two friends working at a funeral home. Man, that is so not what this book is all about. This memoir covers Monica Holloway’s life beginning when she was about four years old until she was 43. She writes about what happened in her daily life, growing up with a father who was violent and a mother who was in denial. With parents like that, it’s no wonder Ms. Holloway and her siblings grew up with a certain amount of dysfunction. Oh, and did I mention that she was totally obsessed with the death of a nine year old local girl?

One of the reasons I like memoirs is because it’s the truth as the writer knows it. Is it what really happened? I show more don’t know. What I do know is it’s what Ms. Holloway believes. She was very inspiring to me from the beginning. I’m amazed at how a person has the strength to overcome something as debilitating as abuse, be it mental, physical or sexual. I don’t know how they get up each and every day and deal with it. How they resist the urge to crawl up in a little ball, buried under the cover and actually get out of bed and face whatever comes to them that day. And that’s exactly what she does. She finds ways to escape, to cope. The most awe-inspiring thing about her is that in spite of how insignificant her parents make her feel, she doesn’t believe it. She may have her doubts, but she’s a fighter.

There are many good quotes in the memoir. Here are some of my favorites:

“The outside now matched the inside – damaged beyond all repair.” Without getting too much into my past, this line affected me the most. It’s one thing to have physical signs of abuse, but it’s quite another to carry it all on the inside where no one knows about it but you and your abuser. I think she explains it best with the following quote:

“I wish there had been obvious signs of destruction on all of us kids: bruises or burn marks, something that indicated how violent our house was, but words and neglect don’t leave visible marks. And that confuses even the person who knows better.”

She had her struggles too, as you can see from this brutally honest quote:

“My whole life, I wanted to be dead, but I didn’t actually do anything about it. I guess I didn’t want to be dead: I wanted relief. I wanted to be happy and peaceful.”

Finally, I think she sums it up nicely with this:

“I would work on trying to forgive myself, and I would ask others for forgiveness too.”

I recommend this book to anyone as a study of resiliency. It doesn’t matter if you were personally touched by abuse in your past. Everyone can learn a little something from this, even if it’s just how to forgive and find your peace. show less

Very nicely written, but a bit too long for my taste. I think the same story could have been told as poignantly in fewer pages.

This book is, at its heart, about the horrors of childhood with an abusive father and emotionally absent mother. The tales of growing up are difficult to read and the fact that this is a memoir make the words, actions and denial even more bone-crushing. The aftermath of living in this environment proves to be a difficult one to rise above, only two siblings facing the issues head-on to try to move past the hurt and betrayal.

This is a raw, painful and real story that will make you want to protect the children and beat the hell out of the adults.

Recommended.

I loved this book! It seems that a lot of the memoirs I've read lately have had main characters who did nothing but whine and complain about their terrible childhood and how it wrecked their lives. This was not the case in Driving with Dead People.

Monica Holloway was brutally honest in telling her recollections of growing up, but she was also fair. Her story was told with a matter of factness that was refreshing and often funny. Holloway never pointed a finger at any of her family, nor did she adopt a "you ruined by life" type attitude. Her changing perceptions of her family member's were wonderfully portrayed, and I found my own opinions of her parents, for example, changing over the course of the book.

This memoir was beautifully show more written and I would recommend it to fiction and non-fiction readers alike, especially those who enjoyed The Glass Castle show less

A memoir by Monica Holloway, who as a child is fascinated by the local funeral home, and with her best friend loves to take turns lying in their favorite coffins in the casket showroom. Hers is a dysfunctional family, with a violent, abusive father and a mother who denies and covers it all up. Monica grows up with a shattered self-image, to say the least, but also a strong survival instinct and a sardonic humor that protects her. She will need this later in life, when she finds out the true extent of her parents' abuse. This is a memoir of family abuse, emotional destruction and the long journey into the light, and I've read many, but this is a good one.

it took way too long for this to hold my attention but once it did i blew through it. i think that the funeral home/dead people connection with the family situation and abuse she was writing about didn't quite come together for me, and maybe that was my hesitation for so long. i'm not entirely sure but i wasn't drawn in by the writing or the story until well past halfway through the book. it definitely became more interesting and propulsive for me once she was an adult coming to terms with her childhood.

Even though I thought at first that Driving with Dead People was about someone who worked in a funeral home (and Monica did for a while), I was not disappointed at all. Monica Holloway's memoir was a well written joy to read, even though the subject matter was at times depressing and even horrifying. I bounced between laughter at and sorrow for what she and her siblings went through and at the same time was so thankful that my own life while growing up was so uneventful and safe.