Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls
CBC Books | | Posted: December 17, 2019 8:22 PM | Last Updated: December 18, 2019
T Kira Madden
Acclaimed literary essayist T Kira Madden's raw and redemptive debut memoir is about coming of age and reckoning with desire as a queer, biracial teenager amidst the fierce contradictions of Boca Raton, Florida, a place where she found cult-like privilege, shocking racial disparities, rampant white-collar crime, and powerfully destructive standards of beauty hiding in plain sight.
As a child, Madden lived a life of extravagance, from her exclusive private school to her equestrian trophies and designer shoe-brand name. But under the surface was a wild instability. The only child of parents continually battling drug and alcohol addictions, Madden confronted her environment alone. Facing a culture of assault and objectification, she found lifelines in the desperately loving friendships of fatherless girls.
With unflinching honesty and lyrical prose, spanning from 1960s Hawai'i to the present-day struggle of a young woman mourning the loss of a father while unearthing truths that reframe her reality, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls is equal parts eulogy and love letter. It's a story about trauma and forgiveness, about families of blood and affinity, both lost and found, unmade and rebuilt, crooked and beautiful. (From Bloomsbury)
From the book
My mother rescued a mannequin from the J. C. Penney dump when I was two years old. He was a full-bodied jewelry mannequin: fancy, distinguished. Those were the words she used. Her father, my grandfather, worked the counter day and night, slinked antique chains and strands of jade across velvet placemats, and felt the mannequin did no work for his numbers; he's pau—done. Grandfather said this with both elbows bent, a chopping motion. The mannequin would have to go.
In this part of the story, my mother and I live alone in Coconut Grove, Florida. We're in a canary-yellow apartment damned with beanbag ashtrays, field mice, the guts of flashlights and remote controls (Where have all the batteries gone? Where do they go?), and a shag carpet that feels sharp all the way under the shag. She's single, my mother, the crimson-mouthed mistress of my father, a white man, who is back home in downtown Miami with his artist wife, his two handsome boys. Soon, my father will move my mother and me into a porn director's apartment, and then to Boca Raton—the Rat's Mouth—to start over, but none of us knows this yet.
From Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls by T Kira Madden ©2019. Published by Bloomsbury.