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BOOKS I READ: Not For Nothing: Glimpses Into a Jersey Girlhood (2018) by Kathy Curto. In this memoir, a series of vignettes, Kathy, the youngest of four by ten years, becomes the chronicler of the idiosyncratic lives of her Italian American blue-collar parents. Her father, Freddy, works hard at his Texaco station, but expects to be treated like a pasha at home. He’s demanding and tyrannical, all to be excused because he puts food on the table. Her brother, Jack, turns to drugs to escape the dysfunction. But it’s her mom whom she follows around, buying panties for the grandma they aren’t allowed to visit.
As I read the closing vignettes, I couldn’t help but recall Springsteen’s New Jersey. One song, Backstreets, with the relentless Roy Bittan piano intro, kept coming to mind as the perfect background tune for the cycles of exasperation, longing, and hope.
Laying here in the dark
You’re like an angel on my chest
Just another tramp of hearts
Crying tears of faithlessness
Remember all the movies, Terry
We’d go see
Trying to learn to walk like the heroes
We thought we had to be
Well after all this time
To find we’re just like all the rest
Stranded in the park
And forced to confess
Kathy is senior class president and the gas station bathroom cleaner. She’s the family fixer with enough moxie to survive. Somehow she finds a big enough moppina to clean up the mess.
NB: using Medium’s shortform posts to chain my recent reads. Go to previous book:
