With or Without You: A Memoir Paperback Author: Visit Amazon's Domenica Ruta Page | Language: English | ISBN:
0812983408 | Format: PDF, EPUB
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Amazon.com Review
Q&A with Domenica Ruta
Q. With or Without You has been compared to The Glass Castle and The Liar's Club. What do you feel sets your story apart from other memoirs?
A. I intentionally avoided memoirs as a genre during my drinking years because I didn't want anyone to ruin my pity party or kill my buzz. While writing the first few drafts of my memoir I continued this abstention, but this time to protect myself from being influenced. I didn't know what a memoir was supposed to look like structurally or sound like tonally, and this ignorance felt to me like a precious state, the ideal place to start. After a couple of drafts, when I felt like I knew the basic shape and texture of this thing I was writing and was secure in that at least, I went on a memoir spree with an intentionally innocent curiosity. How does So-and-So do it? It was a great experience. I remember the day I read that Mary Karr's mother had the same gun my mum did, and I was so happy. It felt like an omen, or a blessing from the queen. I think all of the mother-daughter stories, the addiction stories, the traumatic childhood stories, speak for themselves. I consider myself lucky to be another voice in this chorus. What we have in common as memoirists is a subjective observation of a common humanity. It's what everyone has in common, whether they write their life stories or not.
Q. Your book is intensely personal. How did you decide to tell such intimate stories to the world?
A. I tried not to think about that aspect for the first draft. I wrote as if no one in the world would ever read a word of it, and told myself, if the issue of personal revelation becomes relevant, I will be more grateful to have this problem than I will be worried. But this approach is critical to writing anything. There are too many voices telling you that everything is a bad idea from the start. I'd never get anywhere if I considered these things in the beginning stages of development. It's a good thing writing is 90 percent rewriting, because with every new draft, I was growing as a person and a craftsman. I was getting stronger and more confident in my decisions--what to tell, what not to tell.
Q. What do you hope readers will learn or take away with them from your book?
A. The point of almost all memoirs, especially the sub-genre of trauma and recovery, is the simple promise that there is hope. I hope my book expands on this--that like hope, there is also beauty, everywhere and always, as long as you are willing to search for it. Ultimately I want readers to feel they've been given a good story, something worth retelling.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
From Booklist
In the tradition of such tragic family memoirs as The Liars’ Club (1995) and Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (2012), Ruta details her struggle to rise above a childhood with a drug-addicted mother. Unexpectedly, her memories are not about shooting up but rather about the dizzying journey down and up the economic ladder as her mother sporadically succeeded at business but utterly failed at parenting. Ruta juxtaposes the hallmarks of abject poverty with visits to her father’s nearby middle-class suburban life, and the schizophrenic shift brought by her mother’s sudden financial boons that were never enough, however, to mitigate the hoarding, filth, or endless pills that led Ruta down her own journey into addiction. She admits when her memories are fuzzy and is bracingly honest about her own failures and never wavers from the emotional truth of what it was like to build a life in such circumstances. The intensity of the clear-eyed manner in which Ruta conveys her abiding frustration with the parents who failed their child so casually and monumentally is exceedingly powerful stuff. --Colleen Mondor
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
See all Editorial Reviews
Direct download links available for With or Without You: A Memoir Paperback Epub Free
- Paperback: 240 pages
- Publisher: Spiegel & Grau (March 11, 2014)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0812983408
- ISBN-13: 978-0812983401
- Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.1 x 0.8 inches
- Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Domenica (Nicki) Ruta has written a brutal memoir of life with her mother, Kathi. Kathi is a drug addict and sometimes dealer who likes to share her drugs with Nicki. They live in a dilapidated house filled with garbage in Danvers, a suburb of Boston. Kathi's life goes up and down mercurially from rags to riches and back again. Despite her lack of education, she is a good businesswoman who can make money easily. She also has her drug business to fall back on.
Despite her own lack of education, she has high goals for Nicki. She wants Nicki to succeed in school and goes all out to see that this happens. She sends Nicki to Parochial school and later to high school in a better district than Danvers. She takes Nicki to visit ten boarding schools on the east coast and Nicki wins a scholarship to Phillips Andover Academy. She later goes on to Oberlin.
Nicki and her mother are like oil and water though they are very enmeshed and Nicki feels like she needs her mother's approval and support. Kathi is either stoned most of the time or coming down. She uses oxycontin, heroin, cocaine and alcohol. Gradually, Nicki gets into drugs herself with alcohol being her drug of choice. For many years she is a hardcore drunk with hangovers every day, blackouts, and shakes in the morning. Despite this, she manages to study at the University of Texas Michener Writing Center on a full scholarship with stipend. She can't maintain relationships with men as her drinking creates scenarios where she cheats and lies.
This is a memoir of climbing out from the depths of despair and pain. It is an elegy to persistence, strength, repetition, and trying over and over again to get it right.
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