So when I saw Naton Leslie’s “That Might Be Useful: Exploring America’s Secondhand Culture” on the shelves of Fayetteville’s oldest used bookstore, it was kismet. I grew up with a fascination for second-hand stuff. My mom used to tell stories about how she and her dad (my Papa) would go to the dump to drop off a load of trash and come back with an even bigger load of perfectly good, gleaned stuff. Like Leslie, one of my favorite childhood activities was scavenging through old dumps, barns and houses looking for just the right piece of junk.

Much like a multi-family garage sale or crowded junk shop, “That Might Be Useful” lacks any real organization. The reader must dive in and wander around and dig beneath rambling descriptions of auctions and estate sales to find hidden treasures such as nuggets of overlooked history, sharp cultural critique, and how to date wooden furniture.

Each chapter, ostensibly, explores a specific segment of this totally alternative economy, beginning with auctions – from the high-end, just-a-step-below-Sotheby’s to the junk auctions where you bid on a boxful of stuff for a buck. He continues his survey through antique stores, junk shops, thrift stores, flea markets, swap meets and yard sales. He devotes a chapter to the art of haggling (or bartering or dickering, if you prefer), and one to pickers and picking – though his description of a “picker” sounds more like what I would call a “dumpster diver,” but that’s a matter of semantics.

What is so awesome about this book isn’t it’s piercing ethnography of a heretofore ignored American subculture. In fact, Leslie’s “studies” rarely take him out of the New York-Massachusetts-Ohio area. He spills much more ink describing the setting and the stuff than he does the people. But what this book puts out there is a philosophy – the philosophy that new is not always better.

He often refers to the second-hand trade – everything from expensive antique stores to dumpster diving – as a “vast shadow economy,” and he may be right. As he says, it is nearly impossible to quantify its dollar value or percent of GDP: “Sales tax records from antique stores and auctions might give some measure, but the many thousands of daily transactions made under the table, through yard sales, flea markets, and other less visible settings, are unquantifiable. Secondhand commerce is ungovernable and thankfully so.” He describes these “collectors, merchants, and gatherers” as a “great tribe of people who acquire things as part of an American tradition of reuse older than consumerism, one rooted in practicality, frugality, and ingenuity. This facet of American cultures pay scant attention to new retail advertising and mocks mainstream, mega-capitalism…” He points out the secondhand culture as being “refreshingly free” of the “manipulation” of consumer culture. “People in this shadow economy…are off the grid, as energy conservationists say about people who rely on solar or other alternative power sources. These people don’t fit into mainstream economic culture: They largely do not need the output of the economy. From their perspective, there is plenty of merchandise already; they need only to find it, a process they find joyful, even essential.”

Indeed, it is the hunt that we junkers love, that “intermittent gratification” that keeps gamblers laying their money down: “This kismet of thing and place, of time and desire, simply cannot be bridled or manufactured.” Kind of like how I found the book in the first place. But aside from the hunt, “Buying secondhand is a personal affair,” Leslie writes, in contrast to the faceless, impersonal experience at a giant retail store. “Buying used goods … is a gregarious enterprise. From haggling and appraising the flaws and virtues of an item for sale, used buying and selling is more akin to the traditional bazaar…”

In contrast, he describes going into a big retailer to buy batteries – something you just can’t buy used: “I feel exposed under the light as an alien to the aisles and racks. I hustle along as though late for an appointment in the electronics department. When I leave, the automatic doors are never fast enough, and I am certain I have escaped something psychologically lethal.” This is exactly how I feel every time I go to Walmart; I never knew anyone else understood.

This contrast in worldview between secondhand and mainstream culture is illustrated beautifully in Chapter 13, “They Have It All Wrong.”  In it, Leslie blasts eBay as being wildly off-target with their advertising; one features a desperate, bedraggled looking fellow combing the beach with a metal detector and another shows people lining up at a vending machine that dispenses “everything,” including a giant sword. Fail. “The advertising agency writers expose themselves as accustomed to selling mainstream culture and as completely out of touch with this target audience. Unable to think outside the mind-set that sells other goods as ‘easy, convenient, and reliable,’ they have used wholly inappropriate analogies, comparing the simplicity and surety of finding what you want on eBay with following neon signs and plunking money in a vending machine. No scavenger needs such simplicity, nor wants it.”

“That Might Be Useful” was prophetic, if you know what to look for. It was written in 2005, before the Economic Crash, yet Leslie points out the great weakness of our economy: “Our national economic health demands that we spend money. High capitalism, the only game in the global village, needs such constant purchasing as fuel for expansion.” He outlines the rise of the consumer culture, that “new-is-better” ethic that infected post-WWII America and brought us the fruits of planned obsolescence – cheap, disposable crap. Following this mind-set to its logical conclusion, in the search for ever-more, ever-cheaper crap, hundreds of thousands of Americans were fired so their jobs could be done by cheaper workers in third-world countries. You don’t have to have a PhD in economics to figure out that without jobs, people don’t have money to spend on more crap – which is the entire basis of our economy.

But “That Might Be Useful” also gives me hope. As Leslie notes, “Before we were a new-consumer culture, we were a hand-me-down culture.” Since it was written, eBay is getting a run for its money from the vintage/handmade online hub Etsy (where I happen to own a little vintage shop, BTW). Antiques Roadshow is now only one of a handful of used-goods shows like American Pickers, Pawn Stars and American Restoration. It seems as though with so many people out of work and in debt, the secondhand culture is experiencing a renaissance, or at least the “new-is-better” ethic is coming into serious question. Sometimes, it seems, the old things really are what stand the test of time.

Because, obviously, only men love action movies, therefore, all women hate them, just like only women eat/drink diet “foods,” therefore, all men hate them. Yeah.

OK, now to cleanse our brains of tired, bullshit sexism, here’s a commercial that’s surprisingly progressive on gender roles, not to mention just plain sexy:

(apologies for the low quality; it was the only one I could find). For one, I  like that this is one of the few commercials where the woman in it is something more than just “female” or “mom.” She’s a tattoo artist. When’s the last time you saw a woman in a commercial where you knew what her profession was?

But what I really love about this commercial (even though the body spray smells like ass) is that it totally flips Madison Avenue’s idea of gender roles. It is rare indeed to see a commercial/ad where men are the objects of the female sexual gaze, as though women don’t really think about sex. In fact, according to Madison Ave., women probably like chocolate more than sex: see the 3 Musketeers and Axe Dark Temptation ads (and also note how these two apparently flip gender roles, with women cat-calling/harassing/molesting men, but really it’s just for chocolate).

No, in this commercial, not only is the woman blatantly looking at the man, he knows it and welcomes it. He is shown actually submitting to her gaze, by disrobing and sitting down to accept whatever painful/artistic/cool thing Tess is going to do to his body. Of course, the set-up is that he’s going to her to get a tattoo, so he’s paying her to do something to his body…but anyone who’s ever been inked knows there’s a lot of trust involved. You are going to have something drawn on your body permanently; you’ve got to trust that the artist is good and knows what she (or he) is doing.

I know there’s a lot wrong with this – and other – Bod commercials. The men are ungodly buff, hairless, and generally look like the plastic “people” Hollywood keeps showing us, as though this is how real people look. Unrealistic standards of beauty are just as damaging to men as to women. But I’ve got to give credit where credit is due: Bod is showing women as active sexual agents, and that’s something we could use a lot more of.

Ah, the season of death – my favorite time of year. I love how the days are finally cool enough to enjoy, while the leaves on the trees, facing their own death, go out in a flamboyant display of reds, golds and purples. More importantly, when else can I decorate my house with spiders, tombstones and images of the Grim Reaper?

I really get into the spirit – pun intended – of the season. I spent a whole evening putting fake spider webs all over our apartment, setting out lighted human skulls on spikes and artfully draping black lights around the windows. Throughout October, I listen to Danny Elfman’s soundtrack to “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” singing along the way “normal” people sing carols in December.

In fact, our whole family actually enjoys Halloween much more than Christmas, that over-commercialized, stress-inducing orgy of consumerism. For Halloween (or Samhain, the original Celtic holiday All Hallow’s Eve was based on), we have a full day of family fun planned, from picnicking at my grandparent’s gravesite to making popcorn balls and watching Tim Burton movies. And of course, trick-or-treating.

Of all the aspects of Halloween, I think I like the costuming the best. It’s a chance to get really creative and scary, to be someone – or something – completely different for a day.

But, every year, while searching through the costume aisles at the local stores, I’m struck by how all the women’s costumes look like stripper outfits. There aren’t any women’s costumes that aren’t at least some version of a male sexual fantasy. Even a mummy costume – yes, a mummy – was composed of strips of cloth arranged to barely cover the R-rated body parts and dubbed “Yummy Mummy.”

I don’t have any issue with women dressing sexy for Halloween, or every day for that matter. Some writers have even defended the practice of dressing up as a sexy version of a fairy-tale character as a way of riffing on society’s idea of femininity.

That’s all great; the problem is it’s really hard to tell the difference between ironic satire and collusion in a sexist tradition: i.e., you can be sexy for just this one night, but it’s for everyone else’s consumption. This seems especially true when the sexy costumes are so ubiquitous, yet regular old non-sexy costumes are rare to non-existent.

I get that a lot of women use Halloween as a sort of safe space to explore and play with sexuality. However, if Halloween really is about a safe space to explore sexual roles, where are the sexy male costumes – the “Hunky Pool Boy,” the “Sexy Fireman,” the “Dirty Mechanic”? By offering a wide variety of costumes for men – from beer keg to pirate – but no sexy ones, it reinforces the idea that it is women who must dress to capture the male sexual gaze and not the other way around. And by marketing only caricatures of male sexual fantasies to women, it reinforces the idea that women are sexual objects, first and foremost.

Really, though, I’m just upset that my favorite holiday has been turned into the Victoria’s Secret of holidays.

My partner, bless him, is the most unimaginative person I know; he won’t even dress up. Me, I like to use my creativity and try new things. Some years I might be a punk fairy, or a sorceress, or a ghost. Some years I might wear fishnets, corsets and push-up bras. Other years I might be covered from head to toe. I think it’s because I feel free to dress how I want the other 364 days of the year, so there’s no mandate for me to put so much emphasis on the “trick” in trick or treating.

Viva la revolucion!

Thanks to our forefathers’ and -mothers’ struggle – marching, striking, being beaten and shot – we  have the right to an eight-hour work day (and overtime if we work more than that), the weekend, child labor laws, safer working conditions and a minimum wage.

Reading over this list, it’s apparent that even those basic guarantees are under serious erosion and attack. We, the working people of this country, are not done. We need stronger enforcement of those basic rights, and we need a new Bill of Economic Rights, much like the late, great FDR laid out in this speech:

To this end, for all American workers – public and private, part-time and full-time – we must have:

1. A living wage

2. The right to a reasonable number of paid sick days, to be used for oneself or a member of one’s family (i.e., spouse, child, elderly parent, etc.). The current Family and Medical Leave Act only guarantees unpaid leave, which most workers cannot afford to take.

3. The right to a reasonable number of paid parental leave days for the birth of a child. The Federal Employee Paid Parental Leave Act of 2009 only covers federal employees, and again, the FMLA doesn’t provide paid leave. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a national campaign to link to; the fight is apparently state-by-state. California was the first state to implement a paid family leave act; other states have similar proposals. You can read more at the Progressive States Network.

4. Health care should be the right of every American, regardless of employment status or income.

5. The right to a reasonably stable schedule, with two days off in a row each week, so that swing-shift workers can plan and enjoy time off with their families, friends and interests. Unfortunately, I don’t know of any organized campaign for this. Maybe it’s time for cooks, waitstaff and convenience-store clerks to start one!

6. Stricter enforcement of the right to discuss all aspects of their working conditions, including wages, with anyone at any time. This is a pretty straightforward First Amendment issue, and company “nondisclosure” policies are illegal under the National Labor Relations Act, but I can’t tell you how many employers forbid discussing wages on the job.

I urge you to visit the links and sign the petitions. And after you’re done grilling the burgers and hot dogs, sit down and watch The Grapes of Wrath for a good idea of what it was like before we had labor laws. Or listen to some Utah Phillips and get inspired to join the cause.

This is a book about Fragoso’s 14-year relationship with a pedophile named Peter, beginning at age 7 (he’s 51) until his suicide when she’s 22 – so the majority of her childhood and adolescence. The subject matter alone makes this book difficult to read.

It doesn’t help that Fragoso’s writing style is in that overdone, purple prose that’s textbook bad writing. She doesn’t use dialog so much as chew-the-scenery monologues, especially from her parents. Here’s just one example:

“As he pulled into traffic, Poppa looked around. ‘This is a bad section of town, Keesy. Look at that man spitting in the street. I would not spit in the street even if I were choking to death! This is why I carry a handkerchief at all times; I never spit, and I never curse on the street like a lowlife savage, and I do not throw trash on the ground. Look over there, Keesy, at those two pigeons pecking at cigarette butts; they think it is food! It is a depressing sight. This whole place is depressing to me. ..’” and it goes on and on, one long, flourid paragraph after another.

But I stuck with it, hacking my way through the forest of verbiage, because I just couldn’t put it down. It is morbidly fascinating, this Lolita-as-told-from-her-POV. It starts innocently enough, for Fragoso, meeting a charming man at a pool, being invited to his crazy petting-zoo house for dinner. He charms her. As adults, we can see how he’s manipulating her from the beginning, winning her trust, convincing her how much he “loves” her. Of course, the 7-year-old Fragoso can’t see this. She just feels the way Peter wants her to: as though she is his whole world.

Fragoso pulls no punches – she graphically describes exactly what he does to her, along with her feelings. This is definitely R, or even X, rated content.

Yet even as I was reading, there were several unanswered questions. First, how could all the other people living in Peter’s house not know, or even suspect, what was going on? He lives with a wife (who later divorces him because he won’t or can’t have sex with her), two step-sons, and later, his ex-wife’s boyfriend, one of his step-son’s girlfriends, and a family living in the downstairs apartment. Did noone think a forty-to-fifty-year-old man and a young girl spending so much time in the basement and his bedroom – with the door locked – was a little suspicious? When Fragoso is a teenager, someone does call DHS, but by then, she’s so brainwashed by him she actively covers for him, lying about their relationship.

I’m sure after reading this, many would condemn the mother for not seeing what was going on – after all, she was in Peter’s house most of the time. But she was mentally ill, and probably desperately lonely as well. Her husband (Margaux’s father) insults and infantilizes her at every turn, and even admits to having mistresses. The mother is doped up on prescription meds all the time, oblivious to the world around her. Later, we learn she and her sister were violently raped when they were girls. Their parents swept it under the rug, insisting they just keep it quiet and forget about it. I strongly suspect her “mental illness” is probably the result of improper psychiatric care and side-effects from the meds she’s on. And naturally, because of that, she simply doesn’t have the tools to protect her daughter.

But perhaps the biggest unanswered question, to me, was “why did she stay so long?” Even after she gets “too old” for him (around age 14), and he gets steadily more controlling and violent with her, she never realizes what he really is. Once in college, she does try dating and making friends her own age, but she keeps going back to Peter every week. He continues controlling her with guilt, causing her to ruin other, more healthy, relationships. As she puts it, “I couldn’t imagine starting a new life with him always in the background, getting older, even more dependent and desperate…”

So why does she stay entangled with him? Why not tell him to fuck off, and just go live her life? The only possible answer I can fathom is that her upbringing made her feel she had to stay with him. For one, her father repeatedly states his belief that if a woman has pre-marital sex, even if she’s raped, then she’s “ruined.” Plus, being raised Catholic, she probably believed that marriage means forever – and when she was in the eighth grade, Peter “married” her in a church.

Maybe. Or maybe not. She never tells us.

The end is also anti-climactic. At age 66, when Fragoso is in college, Peter kills himself, leaving her a car that she actually paid for with her savings. There is a little bit of a “waking up” feeling from Fragoso after he dies, but still no real awakening as to what he was, what he did to her. Then we jump ahead to Fragoso enjoying a seemingly happy relationship with her daughter. Huh??? So now he’s dead, and it’s all magically better? I needed a little more closure than that. I needed to see her heal, or at least open her eyes and realize what really happened.

I am still not sure if I like this book. As you can see, it has a host of problems, but I couldn’t put it down, and I still can’t stop thinking about it. And maybe that’s all that really matters anyway.

First, my homegirl Rachel Maddow’s interview with Sirota here:

I’m just about Sirota’s age, maybe a couple of years older. I remember the 80s, and as the kid of a poor single mother, for me and others like me, the decade was not the fabulous, happy time it has been mythologized into. It seemed every time we turned on the TV, some rich white man in Washington was talking shit about “welfare queens,” like we were driving around in Cadillacs and eating foie gras (for the record, we went through one 20-year-old clunker after another, counting our food stamp change for a dollar in gas here and there). Reagan, who has been turned into some kind of right-wing messiah, slashed money for school lunches, meaning we poor kids who had to eat free lunches got ever crappier (and greasier, saltier) food. He also slashed funding for anything and everything for the poor; when mental health facilities saw their funding cut, they had to turn people out on the street in record numbers, creating so many mentally unstable homeless it’s become a modern archetype.

As a kid and a teenager, I was savvy enough to see even then that the new culture that was being created was not good – not good for working and poor people, not good for peace, not good for democracy. But I didn’t have either the hindsight or extensive research Sirota lays out in this book.

BTOF lays out all the ways the 1980s laid the psychological foundation for the hyper-consumerist, warmongering culture we live in now – and it does it with the kind of whip-smart humor only a Gen Xer would understand.

In a nutshell, us Gen Xers were the first generation of Americans to be so heavily propagandized on so many fronts. As he states in the introduction, the 80s was the first decade “in which the majority of American households possessed a television, a VCR, and cable service … Everything from consumer products manufacturers to fast-food chains to retail outlets were vertically integrating themselves – as was the all-important telecom industry. By 1983, just fifty conglomerates controlled the vast majority of the newspaper, broadcast, magazine, movie, and publishing firms. Such a consolidated megaphone … was perfectly constructed to reinforce narrow cultural memes, and in the eighties those were the ones emanating from an ultra-conservative Reagan Revolution, a growing Me Generation, a racist reaction to the civil rights movement, and a bitterly nationalistic backlash to the Vietnam disaster.” As Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi states in his review, “I went into Back to Our Future thinking that I had grown up in an era of endearingly mindless pop-culture entertainments, and came out of it convinced that from my childhood on I had been fed an almost endless stream of ruthless mind-bending propaganda of a sort that would have made the Soviets sick with jealousy.”

First, he lays out how the first task of this mammoth propaganda machine was to erase recent history, namely, the 1960s. In Part I, “Die, Hippie, Die!” he dissects that insidious meme that infected the 80s: that the 1960s was the cause of everything bad and evil, that flower children were just deluded and naive, and the 1950s was a paradise of wholesome, safe, family-friendly whiteness. Later, he comes down with both feet on what I thought was the dirtiest, most despicable idea to come out of the 80s: that the reason we lost Vietnam was because of the protesters, that somehow domestic opinion against the war “tied the generals’ hands,” making it impossible to win. I grew up around Vietnam vets. To a man, they all knew, looking back, that it was an unwinnable war, that they were asked to do things no human being should ever do. I saw this blatant revisionism at the time, and it angered me on a very deep level.

The book is a sweeping survey of 80s pop culture and its effects; he shows how sports, and Nike in particular, laid the foundation for the celebration of Ayn-Rand-style hyper-individualism and explains how “The Cosby Show” polarized the mainstream perception of blacks into “good” or “transcendent” vs. “bad,” criminal, violent blacks.

Perhaps most relevant to our situation now, he exposes how toys and movies aimed at a younger audience created a mindset that every Muslim is a terrorist and the best way to solve any problem is with force (preferably firepower). He calls this the “Top-Gun-ifcation” of society. I was surprised that Sirota picks out professional wresting as the perfect, strongest example of this – I say I’m surprised because I’m from the South; “wrasslin’” was practically a religion here – people would get into fights over whatever drama was unfolding in the ring. I called it “soap opera for rednecks,” and just assumed people outside the South were smart enough to see through it!

But he correctly points out how our international relationships and crises got played out in the world of the WWF. Every match was essentially Hulk Hogan vs. the Iron Shiek; the bad guy is always from “over there,” and the good guy is always white.

Sometimes the text does get a little dense, and starts to feel like I’m reading a history textbook, but even that is a good thing. I teach at a community college; most of my students were not even born in the 1980s. They need to know this history, which is just as important and relevant – maybe more so – than the battle of Bunker Hill or the Stamp Act. As Sirota so perfectly puts it in his final chapter, “The End of History?”, “Today, the quandaries we face are so massive and so global that we need to excavate the values the 1980s tried to bury, and that requires us to face up to the destructive shortcomings of the 1980s mind-set which created and perpetuated those crises in the first place. That doesn’t mean we can’t still laugh at eighties TV reruns and flock to remakes of eighties movies and rock out (as I do) to eighties music during the workday … It does, however, mean questioning what that decade was telling us, and understanding why the 1980s outlook is now so outdated and inappropriate for the challenges at hand.” Amen, brother.

“Stacy Pershall grew up as an overly intelligent, depressed, deeply strange girl in Prairie Grove, Arkansas…”

Holy shit! Prairie Grove is literally spitting distance from my hometown, Fayetteville. She grew up there in the 1970s, which is the same time I was growing up here in Fayetteville (and other small towns around it, including, I suspect, Prairie Grove). And it goes without saying I was overly intelligent, depressed, and deeply strange. Just the fact that this woman, who was practically my neighbor, was able to publish her memoir gives me hope that I may get mine in print as well.

But enough about me…LITHOM is a fascinating book. Pershall creates, I believe, a strong sense of place with perfect details, such as her dad driving truck for Willis Shaw and picking up freight from Zero Mountain, that the ony real hang-out place for teens in the 1970s and ’80s was the Mall, the fact that nearly everything everyone owns comes from Wal-Mart. Because I lived here and remember all these things she references, I might be biased. I got a kick out of reading, in a real live book, about the places I knew as a kid and teenager. I only hope her details give the other 99.9% of her readers a sense of this place as well: not quite so rural we were slopping the hogs before school; but also just rural enough to be isolated from the rest of the world, longing to escape to somewhere where we might fit in, find excitement, or just make a better life than getting married, having kids, and working for Wal-Mart.

From the beginning, Pershall is clear this book is about her struggle with “a multitude of disorders.” Her struggle is especially difficult because being in the Bible Belt, the culture teaches us that psychiatrists (“shrinks”) aren’t to be trusted and that any mental disorder can be overcome with enough willpower and prayer.

Pershall spirals into some strange territory of marking on herself, getting on her hands and knees and lapping up broth, and eating diet pills (aka speed). She writes about being in this surreal place with such frankness, and even humor, that you find yourself right there with her.

Luckily, her parents finally take her to see a therapist when her mom sees her emaciated, skeletal body naked. Throughout her various bouts with therapy, she’s diagnosed with anorexia, major depression, ADD, bulimia, biopolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, and prescribed a dictionary’s worth of psychiatric medications.

Her story continues through high school and college and her move to New York, where she becomes a “CamGirl,” maxing out her boyfriend’s credit cards to install webcams in every room in her house. In what is probably the nadir of her story, she tries to commit suicide in her bathroom, and it’s all on camera, all over the Net. Luckily one of her viewers called the paramedics to save her.

Two things become her lifelines: Dialectical Behavioral Therapy and tattoos. She tells us about DBT in the prologue, about the skills she learns from it that most people learn as children. As for the tattoos, she begins each chapter with a vignette about a tattoo, her own or others’. And yet, I don’t feel like she really explains how and why tattoos are so important for her. She writes in chapter 14 about getting her first tattoo, but never really gives us the full measure of why she has gotten so many, what makes tattooing so vital to her identity and healing. I wanted more, but I suppose that’s a good thing.

It’s a crazy story…it’s exciting and touching and sometimes funny, but translating such profoundly confusing states of mind would be beyond the ability of most writers. Not Pershall; I close the book feeling like I’ve really walked a mile in her shoes. And not just because we both bought our shoes at the Fayetteville Wal-Mart on Sixth Street.

So when a friend in my writer’s group gave me her copy of The Glass Castle, it might as well have been new to me. Like so many well-written books, I tore through it in one night, staying up until the wee hours to finish it.

The nutshell: it’s about Jeannette Walls‘ childhood being raised by an alcoholic father and an insane mother. Their father entertains the kids with wild tales of derring-do, always featuring himself as the hero, saving those who aren’t as smart or strong as he is. Their mother is an artist and writer who doesn’t understand why, as a grown woman, she can’t do what she wants (as opposed to being tied down to providing for a family).

Walls begins with childhood nievete, believing her parents’ fantasies that their life is just one grand adventure after another as they pick up stakes and “skedaddle” from one deserted mining town to another across the desert West in search of gold and a fresh start. Usually they pull what we call “ghetto moves,” where you grab only what can fit in the car and get out in the middle of the night, leaving behind most of your possessions – including, sometimes, pets. At one point they rent a moving truck and pack the four kids – including an infant – in the back for the 14-hour ride to their new home. In transit, the doors fly open, and the terrified Walls kids have no way to communicate with their parents for hours until a passing motorist signals their dad.

As the book progresses, Walls gradually begins to realize that her parents, though intellegent freethinkers, aren’t providing even the basic necessities for their kids. Their father drinks up all the money; their mother, though a certified teacher, refuses to work. She reluctantly agrees to get a job only under the most dire circumstances, and even then, skips school frequently and quits soon after. Even with resources at her disposal (a two-carat diamond ring, Texas oil fields worth $1 million and a house inherited from her mother), their mother regularly chooses “self-esteem” over food. A fine and noble sentiment for an individual; criminally neglectful for a parent. As a result, the kids often go hungry, digging in school trash cans for leftovers because there isn’t any food at home.

Food isn’t the only thing her parents don’t provide; Jeannette (and, once, her brother) is twice sexually assaulted by, once, a stranger who wandered into their house, and once, her uncle; not only do her parents act like it’s not a big deal, they won’t even take the most basic steps necessary to protect her, like locking the doors at night or leaving the uncle’s house. At one point, her father even lets some guy at a bar take her up to his room unsupervised. Unsurprisingly, the creepy dude attacks her, but she manages to cool him off by showing him her large scar.

Fed up, Jeannette and her sister hatch a plan to escape. They save all their earnings and have almost enough to send the eldest, Lori, to New York City after graduation, where she’ll set things up for Jeannette to follow later. But just weeks before she’s to leave, their father breaks into their piggy bank and steals all their money.

Like most (maybe all?) memoirs, this one ends on a positive note. I suppose it’s partly because readers, or publishers at least, like a Horatio Alger, up-by-the-bootstraps tale. Or, maybe it’s because only people who overcome, at least to some degree, a terrible upbringing are capable of writing about it later.

Though I never had an alcoholic parent, I can relate to the lifestyle she describes. My mother was, in many ways, like Walls’: a frustrated artist who couldn’t stand punching a timeclock, didn’t like to cook and didn’t see why she should have to do either. As a result, we, like the Walls, moved around constantly and lived in some pretty “substandard” houses. I never shared Jeannette’s wide-eyed excitement over picking up stakes and moving to who-knows-where, but as a literary device, it hooked me and didn’t let go. I know how this story will end, but does she?

Either way, this is an exciting, sad, hopeful, touching story. Read it.