Bastards: A Memoir

by Mary Anna King Narrated by Christina Delaine

Overview

In the early 1980s, Mary Hall is a little girl growing up in poverty in Camden, New Jersey, with her older brother Jacob and parents who, in her words, were great at making babies, but not so great at holding on to them. After her father leaves the family, she is raised among a commune of mothers in a low-income housing complex. Then, no longer able to care for the only daughter she has left at home, Mary's mother sends Mary away to a small town in Oklahoma to live with her maternal grandparents, who have also been raising her older sister, Rebecca. When Mary is legally adopted by her grandparents, the result is a family story like no other. Because Mary was adopted by her grandparents, Mary's mother, Patty, is legally her sister, while her brother, Jacob, is legally her nephew.



Living in Oklahoma with her maternal grandfather, Mary gets a new name and a new life. But she's haunted by the past: by the baby girls she's sure will come looking for her someday, by the mother she left behind, by the father who left her. Mary is a college student when her sisters start to get back in touch. With each subsequent reunion, her family becomes closer to whole again.



Moving, haunting, and at times wickedly funny, Bastards is about finding ones family and oneself.

Editorial Reviews

Boston Globe

"Sheer gorgeousness."

Steve Almond author of Against Football: One Man's Reluctant Manifesto and Bad Poetry

"A wise and indispensable meditation on the true nature of family, the dislocations of adoption, and all the vital species of love. She brings light to them all."

Elle

"Gregarious, soul-baring."

Peter Balakian

"An impressive debut. . . . [Mary Anna King’s] prose moves with lyrical wit and cultural texture as she persists with all of her protean self to figure out the nature of family and the deepest human connections amid trauma and confusion."

Blake Bailey

"Funny and wise and very entertaining. If you think you had a weird childhood, well, King’s book will put that right into perspective. At the same time even readers who are cynical on the subject of Family will be persuaded, somewhat, that in the last analysis it’s a good thing."

New York Times Book Review

"Fearlessly untangles the complicated story of a family plagued by abundant loss who nevertheless redefine what it means to love and forgive."

Minneapolis Star Tribune

"Painful and heartfelt."

Franz Wisner

"Is it OK to repeatedly burst out laughing in the middle of a crowded coffeehouse before explaining to fellow customers, ‘It’s this hilarious new book about a crazy family that gave away their children the way other families send out Christmas cards?’ If not, I apologize for all the interrupted coffee breaks and lift my cup to Mary King and her glorious Bastards, a rib-tickling yet deeply moving debut memoir. Only a writer with King’s keen eye, expert storytelling skills, and from-the-heart honesty can turn a childhood this deficient into a book so rich."

Ann Hood

"As I read Mary King’s extraordinary memoir, Bastards, I couldn’t help but be reminded of Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club. King has the same unflinching eye, the same ability to inhabit her child self while trying to make sense of her world. At turns funny and heartbreaking, Bastards never fails to surprise, impress, and dazzle"

Jennifer Vanderbes author of Strangers at the Feast and The Secret of Raven Point

"At turns hilarious, at turns heartbreaking, Bastards is the story a young girl who bears painful witness as each piece of her large family is chipped away. King emerges as a keen observer and a phenomenal storyteller. Bastards is a stellar memoir to be savored by fans of the The Glass Castle and The Liar’s Club."

Nick Flynn

"A moving portrait of the struggle to create a family out of little more than the imagination. In scene by finely wrought scene, punctuated by bursts of lyric intensity and hard-won humor, King reminds us that a good story is not in the ending but in the questions, that in this life the only resolution we get, sometimes, is acceptance, and that this can be enough."

Kirkus Reviews

2015-03-02
A young woman's account of how a dysfunctional family situation caused her to become separated from her six siblings but how all seven still managed to reconnect.New Jersey native King was the second-oldest child of working-class parents "whose passions burned like an incinerator and swung wildly from love to hate and back again." By the time her fourth sibling was born, her father began actively disappearing. Strapped for cash, the author's mother put her third child, Becky Jo, in the care of her parents in Oklahoma. From that moment on, life in the King household followed a predictable pattern: the father would return temporarily, then leave his wife pregnant with another child who would get adopted as soon as it was born. When King's parents finally divorced, they decided to send both King and her elder brother to join Becky Jo in Oklahoma. A Yankee girl in a place where it seemed the natives thought "the Civil War [was] still going on," King gradually—though uneasily—settled into the life thrust upon her. She eventually accepted a name change and became the family golden child. Yet she never forgot the brother whom her grandfather, in a fit of rage, sent back to New Jersey for misbehavior, nor could she forget about the siblings she had never met. King returned to New York for college, preparing for the day she would meet the siblings she knew would come looking for her. She desired to be "a person worth finding, worth keeping." As King made peace with her parents, each of the children, all girls, who had been adopted found her. Working together, the author and her siblings then began the difficult task of reclaiming the familial ties that had been denied them. King not only explores the impact of disrupted relationships; she also eloquently probes the meaning of both love and human connectedness. A poignant memoir that thoughtfully examines a set of difficult and unique family relationships.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170069101
Publisher:	HighBridge Company
Publication date:	06/22/2015
Edition description:	Unabridged

Videos