Swallow the Ocean: A Memoir - Hardcover

Flynn, Laura M.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1582433852 ISBN 13: 9781582433851

Publisher: Counterpoint, 2008

Synopsis

Charismatic, beautiful Sally Flynn was the center of her daughters' imaginations, particularly Laura's. Without warning, life as they knew it changed as paranoid schizophrenia overtook Sally. 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. Once her husband left the family and filed for divorce, Sally’s symptoms bloomed in earnest, and the three girls united in flights of fancy of the sort their mother had taught them in order to deflect danger. Set in 1970s San Francisco, Swallow the Ocean is a searing, beautifully written memoir of a childhood under siege and three young girls determined to survive. In luminous prose, this memoir paints a most intimate portrait of what might have been a catastrophic childhood.

About this title

About the Author

Laura M. Flynn currently teaches writing at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.

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 this edition

• Publisher: Counterpoint
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 1582433852
• ISBN 13: 9781582433851
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304