Tale of a Sky-Blue Dress [Paperback]

Thylias Moss (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1, 1999

Within my life's present unified theory of being, splendor divests itself of its own integrity, splitting to belong to everything that notices it, each part as effective as the whole splendid thing. It belongs to whatever wants it and is inexhaustible even as someone lays dying, even as someone else cries thinking there is none, their tears becoming prisms. . .

With these words, the acclaimed poet Thylias Moss proclaims a hymn to the power of light over darkness, both in her own life, and in the wider world. In this, her first prose work, the author of six books of poetry and winner of the most distinguished honors--including a MacArthur Fellowship Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship and a Writing Award--delivers a brilliant, passionate, and utterly moving memoir.

It is the story of the only child of a maid and factory worker who moved to Ohio from the segregated South of the fifties. Raised with much love, she flourished until the age of five, when disaster struck, in the form of a girl in sky-blue dress. Her childhood was shattered by this girl, her babysitter, who took pleasure from infliction pain, and whose reign of terror, even after its abrupt end, would send poisonous tendril further into her life.

Yet ultimately, TALE OF A SKY-BLUE DRESS is about how a young woman retrieved her life from the grasp of darkness. It is about refusing to accept tyranny. It is about feasting on splendor. How can there not be pain in a world spinning madly, in the lovely calculable chaos. . .? asks Thylias. But, she says, I am saying that joy is too necessary to abandon.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Tale of a Sky-Blue Dress is enough to convince loving parents never to leave their children in the tender care of a baby sitter again. Thylias Moss's memoir begins when she is 5 and a family with an older girl moves into the apartment downstairs. The girl, Lytta, becomes Thylias's baby sitter, and over the course of several years her propensity for cruelty blossoms into a full-fledged reign of terror culminating in young Thylias's rape. Though she never tells anyone of the abuse, its effects have already begun to poison her life: "Evil, presumably the only product of hell, perhaps it is like a virus, but given what certain strains of virus can do, given the way these viruses can completely possess (and usually ravage) their hosts ... then a virus actually becomes a possible model of God." She goes on to add, "From what appears evil emerges the best established symbol of goodness." And indeed, though Thylias Moss recognizes the terrible evil that was visited upon her and its destructive aftermath, she also realizes that she wouldn't be who she is now--an award-winning poet, a wife, a mother--if not for what she experienced then. Moss's memoir is often grim yet through it all runs a steady undercurrent of hope. "Joy is too necessary to abandon," she writes, and in this story of a difficult life overcome, the author is as good as her word. --Margaret Prior --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

"Splendor is not defined by tyranny, for I knew joy before I knew anything else," writes award-winning poet Moss (Last Chance for the Tarzan Holler; Forecasts, Feb. 23), whose gift for language permeates her memoir. She explores what she calls the opposing forces of good and evil that dominated her early years. Her mother, who was employed as a maid, and her father, a factory worker, lavished love and attention on their only child. But after the family moved to Ohio from the South when Moss was five, she was subjected, over a four-year period, to brutalization from Lytta, her 13-year-old baby-sitter. Moss, who never revealed Lytta's sadistic behavior to her parents, coped by surrendering to this victimization and keeping it emotionally distant from the rest of her family life. According to her, this initial surrender was followed by her later willingness to submit to cruel treatment from a girlfriend and from her first boyfriend, who forced her into a sexual relationship that resulted in an abortion. Moss credits her emergence into a happy marriage and a productive writing life to the capacity for joy that was also nurtured in her childhood. Author tour.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial (July 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0380793628
• ISBN-13: 978-0380793624
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,076,711 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars conflicting impressions, July 16, 2003

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KeeptheGhost "rpnzl24" (Pittsburgh, Pa United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Tale of a Sky-Blue Dress (Paperback)

I'm not sure if this book deserves two stars or three. Its strong points are definitely in the language as well as the fact that the author did triumph over her past--and I wanted to be happier for the author than I ultimately was. However, after a while I really couldn't feel much sympathy/empathy for the author. The idea of a likable character may not apply in nonfiction/memoir, but still--I felt that by trying so hard to show that she was above what happened to her, she seemed to imply that she was above most other people as well. Her diction shows her intelligence, and it seems that she is trusting the reader will understand the language, but then she condescends with useless parenthetical definitions of relatively obvious words--"presenting" and "genetics", for example, and that "negro" is Spanish for "black"--as if the reader, lacking her superior intelligence, cannot figure them out. I don't have the author's education, but I winced when I encountered this. Perhaps I read too sensitively, but I felt mocked. Her condescension spoiled the effect for me, making beautiful phrases such as "denigration of crown" look merely pompous. If writers want readers to feel for them & where they're from, they should not alienate themselves by letting bitterness or gloating get in the way.