Product Description

A heartbreaking true story of three small girls who find the imaginative strength to survive their mother's slow spiral into schizophrenia.

When Laura Flynn was a little girl her beautiful, dynamic mother was the center of her imagination--Sally Flynn engaged her three girls in rounds of elaborate games and felt great maternal joy at their smallest accomplishments. It wasn't long, however, before Sally's fun-loving side became slowly but methodically absorbed by bits of madness. Whether it was accusing Laura's father of trying to win her over to the side of Satan, or buying only certain products that were evil-free, glimmers of her mother's future paranoia grew brighter as Laura's early years passed. But once her father left the family and filed for divorce, these symptoms bloomed in earnest, and the three girls united in flights of fancy of the sort their mother taught them in order to shut out the dangerous goings on in their house.

Set in 1970s San Francisco, Swallow the Ocean is redolent with place. Drawn with luminous prose, this memoir paints a most intimate portrait of what might have been a catastrophic childhood had Laura and her sisters not been resilient and determined enough to survive their environment even as they yearned to escape it.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #297182 in Books
• Published on: 2008-01-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 304 pages

From Publishers Weekly
It was 1975, and nine-year-old Flynn was sitting with her mother on the floor of their San Francisco apartment with a pile of money as her mother explained that the faces of these men on the coins and bills in front of us... had impact on people and events. Flynn's father had moved out a year earlier; her two sisters were at school, where she, too, should have been; instead, her mother needed to talk with her about all those faces on the money. This is how Flynn, a writing instructor at the University of Minnesota, begins her elegantly written story of how her mother had been an adventurous bohemian in the 1950s and '60s, before she became unhinged by what was later diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenia. Family life became bizarrely unpredictable as her mother became attached to stranger and stranger notions. After her father moved out, mother laid out the new terms of our lives... staying inside, and cutting all our ties to other people... careful about what we ate, and what we wore. Readers begin to share Flynn's sense of dread about what her mother might do next, heightened by the disturbingly controlled calm of her narration. (Feb.)
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From Booklist
*Starred Review* What is a child to do when the parent who’s the center of her universe becomes desperately ill? That’s the wrenching reality Flynn faces when she learns that her mother is a paranoid schizophrenic. The words were “long and strange and frankly, ugly,” writes Flynn, who was 10 at the time her father gave her mother’s frazzled frame of mind a name. “Even so, I had a feeling it was something I could hang onto, something I could rebuild my world around.” For years, Flynn and her two sisters, one older, one younger, played along as characters in their mother’s fantasy world. But when her seemingly innocuous antics (forbidding certain foods and making lists of good and evil things) turned violent, the girls’ father filed for divorce, then custody. Flynn’s haunting memoir vividly recaptures the San Francisco of the 1970s, an emotionally fraught era in which quirky behaviors were more likely to be sanctioned than scorned. Flynn’s ability to render the perspective of a child elevates this memoir from ordinary to extraordinary. From the start, readers see inside her impressionable young mind as she lives from one breathless moment to the next, grappling with scenarios that would level the most well-adjusted adults. --Allison Block

About the Author
A native of San Francisco, Laura Flynn currently teaches writing at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, where she lives with her husband. This is her first book.

Customer Reviews

Amazing book, and I don't like memoirs
I am not a big memoir reader- even acclaimed ones are usually too self-indulgent for my tastes. But a friend pressed Swallow the Ocean on me, and once I got started I couldn't put it down. It lights up many parts of your brain as you are reading it, and for some time afterwards too.

Stunning
Swallow the Ocean is one of the most tremendous memoirs I have ever read. I could feel the build of events, though they were never once written about in an overly dramatic fashion. The book seems to be crafted with the opposite in mind- a quiet, brooding, mounting pressure, all given to the reader as if on the sly, as if sharing a whispered secret. So that by the time I read one of the final scenes, I was in part stunned that there was this kind of action after so much surviving of the incremental steps. Simply, it does everything a powerful memoir should do, but is even more beautiful because it's done thoughtfully, quietly, elegantly.

Before you start reading, carve out some time in your day
Once you begin reading "Swallow the Ocean," you won't be able to put it down. I read it until 3 am, and I would have kept on reading it if I hadn't gotten to the end. This is just one of those books. I don't want to give too much away, but I will say that the story will break your heart and then help you put it back together again.

This is a marvelous, beautiful book. The writing is stunning!