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BOOKS I READ: Ghostbread by Sonja Livingston (2009). A memoir of growing up poor and adrift in western New York, the bleak stories chilled by the winds coming off Lake Ontario. The daughter of a single mother managing seven children from multiple absent fathers, Livingston recalls the grit necessary to survive the shame of being indigent, a stain difficult to scrub off. We follow her family’s various moves around towns and reservations near Rochester. Eventually, the family ends up on Lamont Place, their street in a troubled neighborhood in the city. The memoir concludes at her high-school graduation. How she made it through, she is not sure.
Livingston recounts her battles, disappointments, and fast friends through 122 vignettes, some poignant, many contributing to her growing anger with the world. Father Shea, the Catholic Church, and other parishioners provide some semblance of community. Late in the book, the Rosario girls, las flacas, Puerto Rican girls who call her blanca and tiza, become a surrogate family, more stable and supportive that her own.
I don’t recall why I picked up this book. Maybe it was the cover, a white station wagon parked pitifully on an urban landscape, that pulled me in — it was similar to the ones my father owned. The book’s locale felt serendipitous after reading Dana Spiotta’s Syracuse-based Wayward (see Reading Log entry) the previous month. (That I have two nephews who live in these cities, more so.) Central to both books are flawed mothers from opposite ends of the socio-economic scale.
Previous book from the reading log (or check out a list of all my recent reads):
NB: Using Medium’s shortform posts to chain my reading log.
