Product Description

In the tradition of Jo Ann Beard's "Boys of My Youth" and Mary Karr's "The Liar's Club," Paula McLain has written a powerful and haunting memoir about the years she and her two sisters spent as foster children. In the early '70s, after being abandoned by both parents, the girls were made wards of the Fresno County, California, court and spent the next 14 years in a series of adoptive homes. The dislocations, confusions, and odd pleasures of an unrooted life form the basis of one of the freshest memoirs to be published in recent years.

McLain's beautiful writing and limber voice capture the intense loneliness, sadness, and determination of a young girl both on her own and responsible, with her siblings, for staying together as a family.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1164335 in Books
• Published on: 2003-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 240 pages

From Publishers Weekly
The teenage years are trying for many, but they're downright hellish for those abandoned by their parents and shuffled from foster home to foster home. Such is the painfully obvious message of McLain's memoir. Sparing no harsh details, McLain recounts the 15-year span during the 1970s and early '80s when she and her sisters endured all sorts of hardships at the hand of so-called parents, even including sexual and physical abuse. The girls never felt accepted by or connected to anyone, and these identity conflicts only amplified their normal teenage insecurities. McLain has won recognition for her poetry from the NEA and with a grant from the Academy of American Poets for her first book, Less of Her. She displays her poetic inclinations with florid descriptions of every person and place she encountered and concrete illustrations of her feelings. Recalling the first uncomfortable moment upon entering the first strange house as an eight-year-old, she writes, "the distance between the door and the couch seemed vast and unnavigable, like the distance between Baretta and dinner, evening and morning, tomorrow and next week. We sat down." Although McLain's constant embellishments and fixation on superfluous character development detract from a consistent narrative thread, this is a brave account, evidently cathartic for the author and occasionally difficult for the reader.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
A real-life White Oleander: McLain's 14 years in foster care.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
McLain was only four when her mother left to go to the movies with her boyfriend and never came back. McLarin and her two sisters, Theresa and Penny, moved from their grandmother's house to their father's sister's and then to foster care until their father could get the means together to raise them. They lived with two families before their father came to claim them. He took them home to live with his new wife, Donna, and their children, but when he landed in jail for the second time, the girls were sent back to foster care. They finally ended up with the Linberghs--Bub, Hilde, and their daughter, Tina. The endless shuttling from family to family ended, but the girls still felt alone. Hilde was cold and distant; Bub was affectionate until the girls hit puberty, and then a little too affectionate; and Tina was spoiled and bossy. When McLain was 20, something unexpected and startling happened: her mother resurfaced. Observant and yet somewhat guarded, McLain has written a straightforward and moving memoir. Kristine Huntley
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Growing Up Scared
A couple of months after their feckless, volatile father lands in jail, Mom drops the three girls off at Granny's one evening and doesn't come back for 16 years. Paula, age 4, and her sisters, Teresa, 6, and Penny, 3, prove too much for the old lady and enter into a long and rocky relationship with the Fresno, CA, foster care system.

Paula McLain's harrowing memoir of growing up among strangers who may or may not become family teems with complex, shifting emotions. Chief among them, especially in the early years, is fear, and the yearning to belong to a family, any family. But that was not to be. Not quite anyway. McLain's fluid prose captures the reader with its immediacy; its sense of urgency and its intimacy. This is a page-turner with real orphan children to root for.

It never seems to occur to the girls, as it does to the reader, that they could be separated. But they never are, which is the saving grace of stability that runs through their Dickensian childhood. Their first brief placement ends with a charge of thievery, but their second is a mystery. The Clapps are wealthy and their children are grown. Mrs. Clapp has no humor and no affection. Her rules and routines are rigid and she is fanatically house proud.

One rainy day after school, the girls slosh through puddles to the car. "Just as we got to the Cadillac, the sky started to drop hail like frozen BBs. Mrs. Clapp sat behind the wheel in her lavender rabbit-fur coat, her dry fingers toying with the door lock as though it were a chess piece, deciding whether she would let us into the car. We'd ruin it, we would."

So what does she want with three little girls? This is not McLain's question; it's the reader's, and McLain never comes out with the horrifying answer, either. She simply takes you there and lets you see for yourself how things are. The third placement, also brief, is the most heartbreaking. These people want children, delight in their new girls, and yet suddenly, mysteriously, it's over and the sisters find themselves with their fourth family in three years.

"If we felt any hope that this new situation would be different, then it was the stowaway version, small and pinching as pea gravel in a shoe." The Lindberghs make no secret of their reason for taking in three foster girls. Their daughter, Tina, is an only child and wants siblings. It's that simple. Bub Lindbergh is a big bear of a man, "easy to love," who teaches the girls to ride and gets each of them a pony, while his wife, Hilde, a German immigrant, is prickly and unpredictable. She spoils her "real" daughter and delights in telling perfect strangers the sad history of her foster daughters.

McLain's anger comes through in shock waves of description - hilarious bizarre incidents perpetrated by blotchy, oversize, cartoon character Lindberghs. Interspersed with moments of tenderness, even joy. McLain (her first book of poems, "Less of Her" was published in 1999) is a visual, visceral writer unafraid to mix brutal honesty and laughter. She and her sisters are not easy children and never lose sight of the fact that, unlike other children, they can be cast off at any time, their worldly possessions lumped in a trash bag in the back of the social worker's car. It's a scary way for a child to live.

McLain's memoir is many things: a gut-wrenching portrayal of growing up insecure and longing for love, a celebration of sibling solidarity, a catharsis and a satisfying revenge on people who once had the power, and will recognize themselves as they read. Funny, bleak, angry and winsome, McLain's debut is beautifully written and compulsively readable.

Moving, compelling, happy and sad.
Paula McLain has a way with words. And a way with sentences, paragraphs, ideas and pictures. She tells the story of her and her sisters' foster childhood with fantastic descriptions, but at the same time there is a surprising matter-of-factness that parallels what, sadly enough, a child feels as she lives through these kinds of experiences. A lovely, touching book.

American foster care nightmare with a bittersweet ending
Poet Paula McLain's memoir of growing up among foster families because of her ex-con unreliable father, and a mother who took off for the movies for sixteen years, is an American tragedy with a bittersweet ending.

McLain's characters, the people she meets during her harrowing journey through a foster-care system increasingly gone mad, are both abusive and pitiable, criminally unfit to be their own children's parents, and yet as adrift as Paula and her two sisters, Penny and Teresa. McLain's prose is a long-overdue love letter to her wry, spunky, strong personality, the children and families rebelliously proud of their differences in mainstream America, the love coming from real parenting such as McLain's father's ex-wife Donna, McLain's churchgoing Granny, and the kindly Fredericksons, a foster family for the McLain girls, the forgotten Americana of the 1960's and 1970's, the heartbreak of teenage girls looking for love in sexual embraces, and most of all, the unbreakable bond between McLain and her sisters, Penny and Teresa, who are as fascinating as she is.

Even McLain's absent mother, who returns miraculously out of the blue, as often happens in real life, gets sympathetic treatment. A brilliant, complex memoir.