O Street [Paperback]

Corrina Wycoff (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 2, 2007

Powerful stories of a woman caught in the long shadow cast by the love of her mother

The tightly linked stories of Corrina Wycoff's gripping debut collection follow the life of Elizabeth Dinard. Raised in poverty by a schizophrenic single mother who self-medicates with heroin, Elizabeth experiences a childhood fraught with emotional and financial insecurity, as well as darker exploitations.

Now living a fragmented and desperate adulthood, she continually attempts to outrun her brutal past but proves unable to let go of her love for the charismatic, lawless mother who continues to haunt her. In her struggles as she ages, leaves home, moves through lovers, loses her mother to suicide, and eventually becomes a single mother herself, Elizabeth's gritty determination to simply survive--to exist--is an enormous, if bittersweet, victory.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Wycoff works over an idée fixe in her debut collection, 10 stories about a young woman's difficult transition to adulthood after an abusive childhood. Most of the stories catch fragile protagonist Beth at a precarious moment in her unlucky life: from the fatherless childhood spent in Jersey City tenements and ramshackle motels ("Where We're Going This Time") to graduating from high school and fleeing at 17 to Chicago. She returns five years later, in "The Wrong Place in the World," upon receiving (bogus, she later learns) news of her mother's terminal illness. Beth is poised in each story for monstrous disappointment orchestrated by her manipulative and mentally ill mother, Angela, who blames Beth for ruining her life. "September 1981" chronicles Angela's downward trajectory, and the eerily parallel "Afterbirth" delineates Beth's own struggle with single motherhood after having gotten pregnant while prostituting herself at a Days Inn. Other stories develop Beth's failed lesbian relationships, and the title story exposes Beth's damage: a gang rape as a teenager at the hands of her mother's stoned boyfriends. Over and over these degradations and disappointments are sounded like elements in therapy, and the result is a straightforward look at pain and renewal. (Apr.)
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Review

"In O Street, Corrina Wycoff paints a harrowing portrait of familial pain, mental illness, and the sometimes cruel tenacity of love. Hers is a world undone, through which mothers and daughters falter and fall, yet Wycoff never lets us forget the redemptive power these women hold for each other."
--Aimee Liu, author of Cloud Mountain and Flash House

"A deeply moving, deftly told, and keenly insightful tale of a daughter's love, by turns helpless and heroic, for a mother who has forgotten how to love." --Alex Shakar, author of The Savage Girl

Product Details

• Paperback: 184 pages
• Publisher: OV Books (April 2, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0976717727
• ISBN-13: 978-0976717720
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,996,643 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars strange and powerful, October 5, 2007

By 

A Reader (Lawrence, KS USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: O Street (Paperback)

This is an astonishing book. The prose is so good and the characters are so vulnerable--that may be what I like best about it. I feel a deep honesty here, a lack of artifical construction. It feels as though this book needed to be written, and that quality is rare and makes the book feel urgent. One of the most touching elements is the way the narrator is always imagining salvation, she daydreams salvation, wow. Sad. Beautiful.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars O Street, October 26, 2011

By 

Camille - See all my reviews

This review is from: O Street (Paperback)

Through Beth, Corrina Wycoff gives us one of the truest depictions of reality. On top of that, she does this in a fashion that does not feel calculated, theatrical, or melodramatic; through its inconsistencies, flaws in character, and ugliness, the story feels real. Hence, the reader cares. Moments like the rape scene and the birth are like bloody accidents on a highway; one may desperately wish she could turn her head, close her eyes, and erase the horrors before her; however, Wycoff pushes her readers just enough to keep their eyes on the scenes before them without pushing them so far that they close the book and try to forget.

Wycoff, through these vivid horrors, forces her readers to witness many commonly forgotten--or ignored--struggles of the female state. Poor mothers who give birth to poor daughters who become poor mothers... There is stagnancy in this piece that burrows itself into its readers. The vulnerability of these characters is displayed in such beauty, despite the horrid circumstances that bloom around them. Beth is trapped in this limbo of an existence as she tries to escape her past, yet cannot survive in her new life until it accepts her old one. She is the bridge between the two. Even Beth's perspectives of the world, especially considering love, are skewed by everything the reader knows about her past. For example, does she love women because she is looking for a motherly acceptance and tenderness that she was never able to receive from her own mother? Or, could it more of a revulsion to males because she was raped? Readers must wonder if Beth even knows what love is. It seems that love is what she is desperately seeking, but her relationship with her own daughter forces readers to question if love is something she really wants and/or if it is something she can ever attain.

While all of her stories can stand independently, the cohesiveness of the piece as a hole was a little disconnected. While the different perspectives added richness to the story, it was a little disorienting having so many voices paving the way of the piece. While I can appreciate the way that Wycoff explores the complex relationships between mothers and daughters through this medium, I found the number of different voices was a little too much; it almost stretches the story a little so that some of the meat of it begins to drain, and it consequently losses some of its power. It does, however, show the readers Beth through other eyes. Reading is a voyeuristic activity, and Wycoff's choice to place her readers as voyeurs to voyeurs places them not in Beth for the entirety of the piece, which could make the reader feel like somewhat of a therapist for Beth, but allows readers to simply look at Beth and try to understand her. While the art of that choice is interesting, it still does still feel like too many perspectives.

On the whole, however, the piece is beautifully crafted and painfully real. As a warning to the faint of heart and the emotionally sensitive, this is not an easy read. However, if willing to board the emotional rollercoaster that is Corrina Wycoff's piece, you will be satisfied.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars wonderful...., March 7, 2007

By 

Janet Maravilla (Literate, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: O Street (Paperback)

...harrowing, disturbing, and carefully-wrought. A plea for more equity
between haves and have-nots, but you will lose yourself in the mother and daughter characters of this story.