A memoir of considerable elegance, built from the rubble of a
childhood, by poet Inez. In 1938, she was an eight-year-old living
in a Catholic orphanage in Brussels. Two men arrived to take her
away. The child brimmed with hope: She would meet her parents, whom
she envisioned as noble and wealthy; she would get to wear soft
underwear instead of the scratchy muslin she had always known.
While the underwear was within her grasp-the two mysterious men
actually wanted her to be happy, something she hadn't had much luck
with at the orphanage-her biological parents did not meet her on
the other side of the Atlantic. Her adoptive parents were boozers
and losers; the three grandparents who also occupied her new home
were either troubled or frosty. The little girl suffered silences
from this lot; they often lasted weeks at a time. Later, she
endured Dad's gropings and ferocious beatings at the hands of her
second mother (the first died of cirrhosis). Inez writes with
grace, suffused with unease, about being "captive to the
household's fast-shifting outbreaks of gloom and anger." She found
a few moments of childhood joy with an uncle in Cleveland who
provided her with the kinds of loopy pleasures a kid deserves. But
she was thrown out of the house while in junior high for
ludicrously picayune infractions. "I learned to sleep in unlocked
parked cars near the railroad station and stored extra clothes,
keys, papers, and toiletries, in my book bag," she recalls. Inez
was also despairing enough to throw herself in front of a speeding
car. The subsequent search for her biological parents proved
emotionally trying. An account of a life that tugs at your heart as
it wows you with its silken clarity. (Kirkus Reviews)
A search for roots and identity has rarely been captured with such
illegible], unusual insight, and surprising humor as in this memoir
of heartbreak and hope. Today a distinguished American poet;
Colette Inez first came to the United States when she was eight
years old, as an illegible] Belgian orphan illegible] by two
complete strangers. Growing up in post World War II America, a
stranger to her own past, she survived a illegible] adolescence and
an increasingly illegible] abusive adoptive family by learning to
define her single solace, a developing passion for literature.
illegible] possible illegible] in the 1950s, Inez set out to prove
her claim to U.S. citizenship. The result, as she recounts in this
eloquent, wrenching memoir, would span two illegible], a trail of
discovery, and a buried secret, one that ultimately allowed Inez to
reconcile her past and present and finally come of age as an
artist.
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