Items related to The Girl Factory: A Memoir
It's 1985 in a small factory town near Pittsburgh. Eight-year-old Karen's parents are lifelong workers at the Anchor Glass plant, where one Saturday, an employee goes on a shooting spree, killing four supervisors, then himself. This event splits the young girl's life open, and like her mother, she begins to seek comfort in obsessive rituals and superstitions.
This beautifully evocative memoir chronicles the next fourteen years, as Karen moves through girlhood, adolescence, and young adulthood. It illuminates small-town factory life; explores a complicated mother-daughter bond; thoughtfully unfolds a smart but insecure girl's coming of age; achingly recounts her attempts to use sex to fit in; and ultimately uncovers the buried secret from her childhood-a medical file with an unbearable report.
The Girl Factory deftly travels the intersections of memory and origin. Karen's body remembers details her mind has tried to control. As the young woman mines her interior landscape for answers, certain questions persist. Where does memory live-in the body or the mind? And can you rewrite the story of your past?
This beautifully evocative memoir chronicles the next fourteen years, as Karen moves through girlhood, adolescence, and young adulthood. It illuminates small-town factory life; explores a complicated mother-daughter bond; thoughtfully unfolds a smart but insecure girl's coming of age; achingly recounts her attempts to use sex to fit in; and ultimately uncovers the buried secret from her childhood-a medical file with an unbearable report.
The Girl Factory deftly travels the intersections of memory and origin. Karen's body remembers details her mind has tried to control. As the young woman mines her interior landscape for answers, certain questions persist. Where does memory live-in the body or the mind? And can you rewrite the story of your past?
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
Karen Dietrich is an adjunct English instructor at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg and Westmoreland County Community College. Her poems and essays have appeared in the Pittsburgh City Paper, Nerve, the Bellingham Review, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, PANK Magazine, and elsewhere.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
I imagine a place where girls are made. Some roll off the assembly line shiny and wet, wheat colored hair sewn into their beautiful heads like dolls. Other girls are assembled from spare parts, pieces the shiny girls refuse—a leg here, an elbow there—our maker scavenging for anything to use. Building girls like me is lonely work, no reward for the journeyman, no bright fame. Inside the girl factory, it is dark as midnight, the workers toiling away, unable to see their hands. There are so many mistakes to be made, which is why I know there must be girls like me out there somewhere. I’m the glass thrown onto the cullet belt with a smash. I break into a hundred sharp pieces. The belt leads underground, where girls like me are melted, poured into molds so the maker can try again, try to get it right this time. But I keep coming out flawed—cold crizz, chip finish, bird swing. I look whole, yet crumble with a touch. I’m thrown back to the cullet, back to the melting pot, where I keep trying to come out right.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherTantor Audio
- Publication date2013
- ISBN 10 1452645787
- ISBN 13 9781452645780
- BindingAudio CD
- Rating
(No Available Copies)
Search Books: Create a WantIf you know the book but cannot find it on AbeBooks, we can automatically search for it on your behalf as new inventory is added. If it is added to AbeBooks by one of our member booksellers, we will notify you!
Create a Want