Customer Reviews

Lost and Found: A Daughter's Tale of Violence and Redemption

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Hughes has written a compelling book that explores how family history influences us throughout our lives. In her book she not only tells the particular story of her own family, she evokes a time & place in this country when the sons & daughters of immigrants tried to find their place in America. The book tells a colorful story of a small time crook & dandy - one of the foot soldiers in the Cleveland bootlegging rackets. His violent life & death continues to affect the wife & 2 small children he left behind throughout their lives. Hughes manages to convey a child's sense of bewilderment as she tries to piece together just who this father was & what his legacy to her will be.

The book is also the story of Hughes relationship with her mother, a difficult & complex woman who emotionally victimizes her young daughter throughout her childhood. How she is able to break the bonds that tie her to her mother & learns to live a productive & happy life is the real story of this memoir.

This is an interesting read for anyone who's taken the journey through their own family history. Although it's filled with the pain of a lonely & emotionally abandoned child, the woman Hughes becomes is able to triumph in the end.

The reconstruction of an evidently miserable childhood and equally miserable marriage results in a rather tedious memoir, Lost and Found: A Daughter's Tale of Violence and Redemption.

Adding to the current spate of dysfunctional family tell-alls, Ms. Hughes weaves the story of her life to date by alternating imagination enhanced childhood scenes with psychiatric sessions.

We learn that her father, Lou Rosen, a bootlegger was murdered by the Cleveland Mafia when the author was two. Her mother told her that he had died of pneumonia, but to Ms. Hughes's child's mind he had simply disappeared.

A young widow, 27-years-of-age, her mother "has been a bootlegger's wife long enough to understand the code": no one will harm her if she does not speak. She retreats behind a wall of silence, emerging only in fits and starts - fits of uninhibited vituperation and starts of moving from job to job and apartment to apartment.

A negligent mother at best, she had been so misused by her own mother that she had spent 12 years of her young life in an orphanage. For Ms. Hughes and her older brother Kenny home becomes a series of rooms where they subsisted on Chinese take-out in cardboard boxes and feared that their mother would suffer another asthma attack.

Ms. Hughes pretty much went wherever she pleased and to school whenever she pleased before dropping out of high school to model in local department stores. Eventually she visits the public library and consults old newspapers where she learns the truth about her father's death.

Kenny does not return home after college but for Ms. Hughes there is only one escape from her mother's diatribes and unrelenting possession - marriage. At the age of 18 she weds Nate, "a well known prosperous businessman, a catch.......Nate was Prince Charming in a red convertible come to save me."

Despite a lavish home, servants, travel, a 55 foot yacht, and all the accouterment of wealth that Nate showers upon her, this is still not a Cinderella story. Ms. Hughes has no kind words for her husband, instead finding him boorish and cruel.

Finally, she is driven to despair and begins the lengthy ritual of analysis. She seems to have had a love-hate relationship with her psychiatrist, Dr. Herman, yet credits him with helping her find the courage to continue her education and divorce Nate.

She buys her doctor a gift, writing, "I wanted to give Dr. Herman something for helping me stop the steam roller that my father had started, my mother had fueled, and Nate had damn near driven over me."

There's that "me" again which is what Lost and Found is all about. What about the three children she had? They do not even emerge as stick figures in this biography. Do they feel as neglected as she once did or did she reverse the family pattern and nurture them with maternal affection? We hope so.

There are few insights to be gleaned from Ms. Hughes's story. Indeed, many may sympathize with the troubles she endured simply because of the family into which she was born. While others may echo what that famed psychiatrist Lucy once said, "Get over it!"

- Gail Cooke

This is a book I couldn't put down. Babette Hughes' story is tragic and devastating, yet redemptive and triumphant. The dichotomy of her relationship with her mother is eloquently depicted; I could just hear and feel her saying, "yes, I love her--no, I don't." It must have taken great courage to overcome her fear and then lay it open for all of us to share. It is the kind of life that should make all of our marginally disfunctional lives seem perfect in comparison. I'm recommending this book for my book group and anyone else I know who reads.