Friday, February 21, 2020

We Are All Shipwrecks: A Memoir


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Today’s Nonfiction post is on We Are All Shipwrecks: A Memoir by Kelly Grey Carlisle. It is 368 pages long and is published by Sourcebooks. The cover has a young girl and a small dog on a leash. The intended reader is someone interested in memoirs. There is foul language, sex, and talk of violence in this book. There Be Spoilers Ahead.
From the eblurb- Sometimes family are the strangers who love you.
When Kelly was three weeks old, her mother lay her in a dresser drawer in a motel room in Hollywood and went out into the night. She never returned. Her strangled body was found the next morning on a hillside in LA. Raised by her eccentric grandfather on a boat in LA Harbor, Kelly couldn't help wondering how her life might have been different if her mother had lived. Every day at their rundown marina was an adventure, sometimes fun, sometimes dangerous, but always profoundly strange. Kelly longed for a normal life and for answers to her questions: who was her mother, exactly, and who had killed her? Her search for answers--and for a normal life--would lead her back to that night, that motel room, and the mother she never knew.
We Are All Shipwrecks is Kelly's story of redemption from tragedy, told with a tenderness toward her family that makes it as much about preserving the strings that anchor her as it is about breaking free.
Review- At times moving, at times meandering memoir about a life dealing with what is and what could have been. Carlisle starts the book with meeting a man, the detective who worked on her mother’s murder case and she ends it with him. In between we have her childhood being raised by her grandfather and step-grandmother and many kind neighbors. Carlisle is up front about what it means to her being a child of a murder victim and how that affected her life. The writing is fine, not so detailed that the reader gets lost but enough that we understand her and what she is trying to express. Not the strongest memoir I have read but if you like memoirs or survival narratives then I would give this one a look.

I give this book a Three out of Five stars. I get nothing for my review and I borrowed this book from my library’s Hoopla account.

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