From Publishers Weekly
While memoirs by foster parents and adopted children crowd bookshelves, we haven't heard as much from the women who've given up those children for adoption. McElmurray may seem a typical birth mother—a working-class teen unprepared to raise a child—until she describes her own upbringing. When McElmurray was 12 or 13, her mother, gripped by a cleanliness fetish, still insisted on supervising her on the toilet, wiping her bottom. Both daughter and father had to shower in the garage before coming inside. Meals, too, could be messy, so they ate only processed, packaged foods. When McElmurray started dating, her mother's vigilance heightened, and before long, her compulsions resulted in divorce. McElmurray moved in with her father, but thanks to his lax supervision and lack of contraceptive coaching, she was pregnant at 15. In Kentucky in 1971, a girl could run away and do drugs for a while—which McElmurray did—before coming home and marrying. Ignoring her father's pleas, the author still signed the baby over for adoption. That McElmurray made it out of her trailer-park marriage, out of secretarial and fast food jobs, through college and on to teaching creative writing courses is admirable. That she reached the self-awareness to birth this remarkable memoir is a gift both to her son and to readers. 22 photos.
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Review
"This is a very moving and pungent narrative, which quickly engages the reader's imagination, as its gorgeously remembered details spill onto the page, not necessarily in chronological order but by patchwork design and as if on their own."--Beverly Lowry, author of Crossed Over: A Murder, a Memoir
"Graceful, shocking, sensuous, and gritty, this book questions consequences. It ends at the beginning and begins at the end. A wonderful, almost unbearably honest book.”--Sheri Reynolds, The Rapture of Canaan
"Riveting and disturbing, McElmurray's poetic language and utter honesty lift this story into the realm of grace—finally, this dark memoir is an enlightening and redemptive work of art."--Lee Smith
"This book bears powerful testimony to the saving grace of imagination."--Tennessean
"Courageous in its honesty, stunning in its vision. McElmurray is a writer of enormous talent who explores the consequences of loss and grace and recovery in this hauntingly beautiful story of her life."--Gwyn Hyman Rubio, author of Icy Sparks
"McElmurray transforms some of her life's more difficult experiences into pure poetry; where there once was pain, she creates beauty."--Rosemary Daniell, author of Fatal Flowers
"Not only a deeply moving personal story that takes great courage to tell, but also a beautiful and haunting exploration of the nature and the meaning of motherhood and love. McElmurray's lyrical, incantatory voice casts a magic spell."--Janice Eidus, author of The Celibacy Club
"In this fresh, painfully honest, but very wise and beautifully written book, Karen McElmurray tells us how deeply some decisions affect us, ever afterwards."--Reeve Lindburgh
