Finding Fish : A Memoir - Softcover

Antwone Quenton Fisher

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1852428325 ISBN 13: 9781852428327

Publisher: Serpents Tail, 2003

Synopsis

Now a major motion picture starring and directed by Denzel Washington, "Finding Fish" is an amazing autobiography of Antwone Quenton Fisher who at the age of two was placed in a foster home in Cleveland, Ohio where he was treated with brutality and cruelty. His response to this treatment was to retreat into his own private world of paintings, poems and stories. At the age of eighteen, Antwone Fisher enlisted in the Navy where he found empathy and friendship. Antwone's story takes us from the Navy to his job as a prison officer and, later, as a security guard at Sony Pictures in Hollywood. In a moving conclusion, the mystery of his identity is revealed as Antwone returns to Cleveland to locate his mother and father's surviving family members.

About this title

Review:

Thank goodness Antwone Fisher's story has a happy ending--otherwise, his searing memoir would be nearly unbearable to read. His father was killed by a gunshot blast shortly before he was born in 1959; his 17-year-old mother gave him up for foster care. Unfortunately for Antwone, his foster mother was as successful at browbeating and demeaning her many wards as she was at lying to the Child Welfare authorities. His working-class African American neighborhood in Cleveland became purgatory for a sensitive, intelligent boy who quickly turned into a withdrawn underperformer at school. In Fisher's blow-by-blow account of his childhood, his sexual abuse at the hands of a female neighbor is hardly more horrifying than his foster mother's relentless cruelty--especially because respectable, churchgoing Mrs. Pickett justifies it all as due to the boy's wicked faults. Readers will be relieved when she dumps 15-year-old Antwone back at the Child Welfare office, even though he will endure homelessness and a scary spell of criminal employment, before an 11-year stint in the Navy provides him with a way forward. Grim though his tale is, Fisher displays throughout it the grit and stubborn integrity that kept him sane. He musters up some understanding (not forgiveness) for the dreadful Mrs. Pickett, and his eventual meeting with his burned-out mother is painfully poignant. He certainly deserves the beautiful wife and cute two-year-old daughter, cooking pancakes for him in the book's closing and redemptive scene. --Wendy Smith

About the Author:

Antwone Quenton Fisher is a leading Hollywood screenwriter. In 1993, he was working as a security guard at Sony Pictures Entertainment when by chance he met Todd Black, a young film producer. When Antwone Fisher told Black his life story, Black was so bowled over with what he heard that he paid Fisher a salary to write his autobiography. The book, Finding Fish, went on to be a bestseller in the States: film rights were bought by Denzel Washington who has directed the film and acted in it. Antwone Fisher lives in Los Angeles.

About this edition

• Publisher: Serpents Tail
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 1852428325
• ISBN 13: 9781852428327
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352