Wow! Great book. It started out a little slow....but then took off! It's touching...sad...and so real. So many people live lives like this and we don't even realize it. IT really opened my eyes to how blessed I am...but at the same time....have so much in common with Monica. It gives me courage to pull through tough times and embrace the good times. This is a must read! I think it would be a great book for a teenage girl to read. It might help open her eyes to the realities of life. So many children are protected from "life" and when it hits them smack in the face it's too much to handle.
Driving with Dead People:
Death lurks everywhere in Holloway's childhood. A neighbor boy accidentally shoots and kills a train conductor; a little girl is mowed down by a motorist. Her father's main hobby is filming grisly car wrecks and natural disasters, and her best friend's family runs the town mortuary. Observing the dead in their coffins, Monica wonders: would she be better off in a casket than alive in her parents' home? In this memoir, Holloway (an actress turned writer) tackles the horrifyingly familiar story of father/daughter incest: the secrecy that surrounds it and the ways it corrodes families from the inside out. Even though her memories of the abuse were repressed, evidence cropped up everywhere, from her chronic bed-wetting and compulsive lying as a girl to her adult attraction to abusive men; when her older sister, JoAnn, comes forward with her recollections, Holloway begins to remember her own trauma. As a writer, Holloway might not be in Mary Karr's league, but her blunt sentences deliver the unvarnished truth. In coming to terms with her tragedy, Holloway writes, "Knowing there is no cavalry is much better than hoping for a cavalry that never comes." Her memoir sings with the power of a disenfranchised woman finally finding her own voice, and her brutal memoir is hard to forget. (Mar.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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