Scrap: Salvaging a Family
A Memoir in Flash by Luanne Castle
The hybrid flash memoir Scrap: Salvaging a Family explores the stain of childhood fear and anxiety on the adult spirit and the experience of reconciling with an aging or dying parent.
A daughter has grown up in a household with an angry and abusive father. He keeps the secret of his biological father’s identity from his daughter for decades.
When the elderly man faces his mortality, he finally names his father. The more the daughter learns about her father’s early life and origins, the more she understands him which leads to forgiveness for the past.
My thoughts: The author’s immigrant grandmother gave birth to three children, all illegitimate. Their birth father, a respected man by the community, had another legitimate family. One of the sons was the father of the author, an unpredictable, frightening, and sometimes violent man who often took out his rage on Luanne, his only daughter. What a complicated childhood, one without answers.
Those answers finally seeped out later in life, with both father and daughter attempting to make sense of the complicated scraps of their shared past. The author bravely gives glimpses of early years, therapy years, and later years with candor and compassion, and amazing resilience.
Luanne Castle
On her website, you may notice one book of hers that I’ve shared before. Her Kintypes was an early inspiration for Meadowlark Songs.
Scrap: Salvaging a Family may be ordered from Amazon.com
Also Amazon.uk