Posts tagged mother
December 16, 2011 · Filed under My Book: BookMark, News, Personal · Tagged abuse, alcoholism, career, healing, inspiration, Jerry Sandusky, Mike McQueary, mother, optimism, pedophilia, Penn State, physical health, positive thinking, rape, relationships, self awareness, stepfather, therapy, trauma
Brutal news week.
I used to draw down a wall between my life and the news. As I anchored the news, reading about others’ pain, I didn’t feel my own. I was inured from the intrusions of decades of sexual abuse. I could focus on WhoWhatWhenWhereWhyHow and script the stories, read my own words, tell the story. That’s over. It’s actually been over for a few years until I could finally break down that inviolate partition. I was healed. I thought.
But this was a brutal news week. Read the rest of this entry »
May 29, 2011 · Filed under Personal · Tagged abuse, alcoholism, career, dancing, diabetes, father, fearless, happiness, healing, inspiration, Marisa Russo, mother, pedophilia, rape, therapy
For years, I hid it, never spoke about it. Until finally, it pushed up out of me like a beach ball you press down in the water – it pops out. Has to.
And, one day, the gift of that childhood trauma becomes apparent.
First, the damage and danger twists synapses, neural pathways, belief systems, trust, whom you love and who you run from. What does a four-and-a-half year old girl learn from being raped by her mother’s new husband? Handsome guy, her mother head over heels in love with him, her cutting the little girl’s real father out of every photo, changing the girl’s name, and silencing her when she tries to speak it. Mother, an alcoholic, suicidal, schizophrenic. Real father, gone, after the little girl reaches age six, because the stepfather beat him up and told him to never come back. She never saw her dad again.
Little girl escapes Read the rest of this entry »
May 6, 2011 · Filed under Personal · Tagged abuse, career, father, fearless, film, healing, inspiration, mother, movie, optimism, pedophilia, positive thinking, rape, relationships, self awareness, stepfather, storytelling, The Kings Speech, therapy
It’s been awhile since I’ve blogged. And, this is, in part, an apology for not having checked in. I’ve been making my own art, and making a living. I’ve been interviewing and reading – just haven’t written here.
I decided to take tonight “off,” and not produce the 30-minute podcastor, not prep for my next appearance on KOIN-TV’s Studio 6, not rework the last two chapters of my memoir. Instead, my housemate, who is leading me into learning how to “play,” watched with me the Academy Award winning movie, The King’s Speech.
The film struck me deep. Read the rest of this entry »
October 11, 2010 · Filed under Author Interviews, Book Reviews · Tagged abuse, angels, dancing, fearless, fiction, happiness, healing, inspiration, mother, motherhood, novel, optimism, pedophilia, positive thinking, rape, relationships, self awareness, stepfather, storytelling, trauma, writing
Room
By Emma Donoghue
Published September 13, 2010 (Hardcover) Little, Brown and Company
If you have a five-year old, you know how pivotal that year is. A bridge between fantasy and reality, between playing with anything and going to school where you play with what you are given, between trusting just nearby adults and trusting an expanding world. Trust. What is really real.
Five is a touch-point. You remember being five in your own life. What happened then may have altered your direction in life. It did for me. It did for Jack, in this bestselling novel by Emma Donoghue. Read the rest of this entry »
September 19, 2010 · Filed under Book Reviews · Tagged abuse, career, fiction, mental health institutions, mentally ill, mother, motherhood, novel, self awareness, storytelling, thriller, trauma, writing
My Lost Daughter
By Nancy Taylor Rosenberg
Published September 14, 2010 (Hardcover) Forge
How do you know if your kid is on drugs, clinically depressed or just bummed out by life’s hairpin turns?
That’s Judge Lily Forrester’s situation when her 28-year old daughter Shana – just weeks from graduating with a law degree from Stanford – gets dumped by her boyfriend, and seems dangerously messed-up. In Nancy Taylor Rosenberg’s novel My Lost Daughter, Lily makes an unbelievably foolish choice for Shana. Read the rest of this entry »
September 12, 2010 · Filed under Book Reviews · Tagged adoption, cruelty, divorce, father, fiction, happiness, healing, marriage, mother, pedophilia, rape, relationships, self awareness, storytelling, writing
Chosen: A Novel
By Chandra Hoffman
Published August 24, 2010 (Hardcover) Harper
Seems I’ve been attracted lately to novels that, in some way, address babies and children. In a word – family! Chandra Hoffman’s novel, Chosen, seduced me instantly with the topic.
There’s a sweet tone to the book – Chloe’s mostly – even though Hoffman also tells the story in the voices of Penny, Paul, and Jason. A pregnant woman, the husband whose wife finally gives birth, and Penny’s difficult boyfriend. We also see Francie’s posts on the adoption site – Francie, a woman who has not been able to have a child of her own.
Chloe is an adoption worker who handles both the desperate parents wanting a child, willing to do anything to have a child, and the frantic parents-to-be, who are not sure whether to (1) end it, (2) have it and adopt it out, and (3) have it and keep it. The waters keep getting muddied. A lot. Especially when you blend in meth mothers and the violent cons who get them pregnant. Especially when one baby goes missing. Read the rest of this entry »
September 5, 2010 · Filed under Author Interviews · Tagged abuse, angels, Church, damnation, father, fearless, God, happiness, healing, heaven, hell, inspiration, love, mother, passion, pedophilia, rape, relationships, religion, self awareness, spirituality, stepfather, trauma, writing
Time for Truth: A New Beginning
By Nick Bunick
Published September 1, 2010 (Paperback) Hay House
Angels abound! If you’re reading this, the odds are extremely high that you, too, believe in angels. Most of us do. I’ve seen angels most of my life. After a couple of years in the same writing group where I worked on my memoir, New York Times bestselling author Chelsea Cain signed one of her books to me: For Diana, who (almost) makes me believe in angels.
There are angels, but there is no hell. Nick Bunick told me in an interview recorded a few days ago Read the rest of this entry »
August 30, 2010 · Filed under Book Reviews · Tagged career, father, fearless, fiction, friendship, happiness, healing, inspiration, love, mother, motherhood, novel, optimism, passion, relationships, self awareness, storytelling, writing
The Atlas of Love
By Laurie Frankel
Published August 17, 2010 (Hardcover) St. Martin’s Press
Maybe I loved The Atlas of Love because it felt like a friend’s journal I’d picked up and accidentally opened to the first page. And couldn’t stop reading it until page 35 or so, still standing, and then it was too late. So I read the whole thing, feeling guilty, as if I’d eaten a carton of Ben and Jerry’s at one sitting. Not that I’ve ever done that. But I also felt pleased, because of the light humor laced in with the literary configurations.
Maybe I loved The Atlas of Love because Read the rest of this entry »
July 20, 2010 · Filed under Book Reviews · Tagged fashion, fashionable, grandmother, mother, retail therapy, shopping, therapy
Never Pay Retail Again
By Daisy Lewellyn
Published May 4, 2010 (Paperback) Gallery Books
Shopping is one of those hand-me-down things between mothers and daughters. Daisy Lewellyn paints a lovely portrait of her mother and grandmother – total fashion-lovers. They could whip up a couple of dresses on the sewing machine – dressing to the nines on a dime. Never Pay Retail Again is a natural off-shoot.
I’m not one of those women who Read the rest of this entry »
July 14, 2010 · Filed under Book Reviews · Tagged abuse, father, fearless, mother, optimism, self awareness, stepfather, storytelling, trauma, writing
Sh*t My Dad Says
By Justin Halpern
Published May 4, 2010 (Hardcover) It Books
I didn’t laugh as a kid. My daddy had been divorced out of the family, and he was replaced by a sadistic stepfather. I always wondered what it would have been like to have a fun father. And now Justin Halpern’s father comes along to show me. Sh*t My Dad Says is a short book that’s long on laughs. And there’s sh*t on every page. Funny funny sh*t. Read the rest of this entry »
