House Rules: a Memoir of Emotional Abuse

Rachel Sontag's House Rules: A Memoir is a troubling glimpse into the absolute physical and emotional control a parent can exercise over a child's life, and the way that such emotional abuse can have effects that last a lifetime. Sontag, now in her thirties, describes how as a teenager she became the focus of her father's wrath and disturbing brand of mental illness, which prompted him to awaken her in the middle of the night for hours-long diatribes about how she's a disappointment, how he wished she was never born, and how she needs to make amends for all of the imagined wrongs she's committed. Rachel's mother refused to confront her father, however, and instead asked Rachel to go along with him in the interest of keeping the peace, ultimately failing in her role as protector. Once Rachel had left home for college, she began to disentangle herself from her father's control. She also began to sort through and identify many of the personal issues she had when forming and maintaining relationships, issues which she had developed as coping mechanisms. I'm not usually a fan of the "abusive childhood memoir" genre, but I found hope in Rachel's eventual freedom from her father's delusional demands and emotional sabotage. 3 out of 4 Bananas!

Abraham Lincoln Illinois High School Book Award 2011 Nominee

Look Me in the Eye: My Life With Asperger's

John Elder Robison's younger brother is Augusten Burroughs, author of the acclaimed memoir Running With Scissors. Burroughs' memoir details his father's descent into alcoholism and his mother's increasingly debilitating mental illness. John Elder Robison, the author of Look Me in the Eye, was absent for most of Augusten's childhood, as he was older and had fled the family for a life of independence and adventure. He always had trouble relating to people, however, and was considered by others to be strange and sometimes rude, yet brilliant in electronics and automotives. Look Me in the Eye details Robison's amazing life, including stints designing custom guitars for heavy metal band KISS, electronic toys for Milton Bradley, and finally running his own luxury car repair service. Robison also describes his difficulty with people, his inability to look people in the eye (hence the memoir's title), and his habit of giving people names (he calls his wife Unit Two). Robison was finally diagnosed with Asperger's when we was forty years old, and he describes it as a lightbulb going off in his head, giving him a name for the condition he'd been struggling with his entire life. There is no cure for Asperger's, but he has learned the social skills necessary for maintaining friendships and other relationships. This makes it much easier for him to deal with people, even though he says he still comes off as a little strange. One of the most illuminating comments for me was that he emphasizes that although people on the autism spectrum seem to want to be alone all the time, when he was a child he wanted desperately to be with others: he just didn't know how. Look Me in the Eye is an invaluable addition to the repertoire of literature on Asperger's and autism because, since it is actually written by someone with the disability, it provides great insight into the hearts and minds of people who may not be able to speak out on their own. Although a bit long in parts, Look Me in the Eye is engaging and original. 3 1/2 out of 4 Bananas!

Abraham Lincoln Illinois High School Book Award 2010 Nominee

I've been wanting to read A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah for a long time, and I finally found a reason to move it to the top of my reading list now that it's been nominated for the 2010 Abraham Lincoln Illinois High School Book Award. Written as a memoir, Beah tells the story of how his childhood was destroyed by the civil war in Sierra Leone, which began in 1991 and lasted for eleven years. Beah was in a distant village participating in a hip hop dance showcase (!) when he and his friends heard that rebels had invaded their home village. The boys were forced to flee into the forest because the rebels were reportedly headed in their direction. They spent months hiding in forests and as temporary guests in villages along their way, although many villages thought that Beah and his friends were child soldiers fighting for the rebels and refused to allow them shelter. After a year or so of flight, and after seeing the village in which his family was supposedly hiding burned to the ground, Beah was conscripted by the army into military servitude. This wasn't entirely objectionable in Beah's mind, as it at least provided him with food, protection, and the chance to exact revenge for his parents' murders. While in the army, however, Beah became addicted to cocaine and numb to the killings he both witnessed and perpetrated. Beah was eventually rescued by UNICEF and rehabilitated while living in a refugee-style camp for orphans of the civil war. His story continued and ultimately had a somewhat-happy resolution when he makes his way to New York City as a United Nations representative (although his story can't have a truly "feel good ending" due to the tragic nature of his young life).

I really liked this book because it surprised me; I had anticipated a grueling, unpleasant reading experience, but instead found Beah's account to be engaging, honest, and humorous at times without compromising the serious issue of the civil war and his descriptions of child soldiers. I was also mesmerized by Beah and his friends' passion for early '90s American rap and hip hop music: at several time throughout the memoir, Beah includes references to Naughty By Nature, Heavy D and the Boyz, and Tupac Shakur. This inclusion of a world with which I am familiar (not that I claim to be an early '90s hip hop expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I do like the music) brought Beah's foreign experience with war and soldiering into sharp relief for me; it was a jarring juxtaposition of the familiar with the "unknowable-ness" of Beah's life in Sierra Leone.

Having said all that, however, after Googling "Ishmael Beah", I discovered that there has been controversy surrounding A Long Way Gone and Beah's version of the events and chronology he describes. The Slate article I read is linked here. I'm disappointed, but not entirely surprised that Beah may have taken some poetic license with his memoir, the practice of which has been cause for much argument and discussion regarding several recent memoirs (notably A Million Little Pieces by James Frey). So, read A Long Way Gone. Keep in mind that some of the events may not have happened exactly as described, but take from it Beah's voice, and his passion for his country, and the confident knowledge that children ARE having their childhoods snatched away from them, ARE being brutalized, and DO need our help. 4 out of 4 Bananas!

Abraham Lincoln Illinois High School Book Award 2010 Nominee