Like Family: Growing Up in Other People's Houses: A Memoir - Hardcover

McLain, Paula

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0316597422 ISBN 13: 9780316597425

Publisher: Little, Brown, 2003

Synopsis

A compelling account of growing up as a foster child describes how she and her two sisters were abandoned by their parents, her next fourteen years in a series of temporary homes, and the impact of the continual dislocations, confusions, and sometimes pleasures of her unrooted life. 25,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author:

Paula McLain has worked in auto plants and hospitals and has been a cocktail waitress, a Christmas tree salesperson, a pizza maker, and an English teacher. At work on a novel, she lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Little, Brown
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0316597422
• ISBN 13: 9780316597425
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240