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    Swallow the Ocean: A Memoir
    Unavailable
    Swallow the Ocean: A Memoir
    Unavailable
    Swallow the Ocean: A Memoir
    Ebook278 pages3 hours

    Swallow the Ocean: A Memoir

    By Laura M. Flynn

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    An “extraordinary” memoir of growing up in 1970s San Francisco with a paranoid schizophrenic mother (Booklist, starred review).
     
    When Laura Flynn was a little girl, her beautiful, dynamic mother, Sally, was the center of her imagination. It wasn’t long, however, before Sally’s fun-loving side slowly and methodically became absorbed by madness.
     
    As Laura’s parents divorced and her father struggled to gain custody, Sally’s symptoms bloomed in earnest while Laura and her sisters united in flights of fancy of the sort their mother taught them, so that they might deflect the danger threatening their fragile family. Swallow the Ocean is a luminous memoir that paints a most intimate portrait of what might have been a catastrophic childhood, had Laura and her sisters not been resilient and determined enough to survive their environment even as they yearned to escape it.
     
    “Flynn’s haunting memoir vividly recaptures the San Francisco of the 1970s, an emotionally fraught era in which quirky behaviors were more likely to be sanctioned than scorned. Flynn’s ability to render the perspective of a child elevates this memoir from ordinary to extraordinary. From the start, readers see inside her impressionable young mind as she lives from one breathless moment to the next, grappling with scenarios that would level the most well-adjusted adults.” —Booklist (starred review)
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateMar 1, 2009
    ISBN9781582439518
    Unavailable
    Swallow the Ocean: A Memoir

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    Reviews for Swallow the Ocean

    3.5/5

    3 ratings2 reviews

    What did you think?

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    • 5/5
      I couldn't stop reading this memoir about a girl growing up with a schizophrenic mother. I have 3 big final projects due in the next week and I just couldn't stop reading. very, very good.
    • 2/5
      So-so memoir of growing up with a paranoid schizophrenic mother after her father left. She does a good job of describing daily life with her mom and sisters, and the girls' ambivalence about wanting to get away and live with their dad, but a running theme about a story the girls make up about their dolls who are captives and the dolls' schemes to escape became a bit tiresome.I had a lot of questions that didn't get answered: How did they learn to live "normal" lives where people have clean houses and don't have arbitrary restrictions on what they can eat? How has her childhood affected her life now - was she able to cast off much of the abuse, or does it haunt her? When her mother rammed her father's car after he got custody, did anyone press charges? (It didn't sound like it - why wasn't she prosecuted?) And finally, why do the girls still maintain contact with their mother? People I know who have relatives with this kind of intractable mental disease seem happy to have them out of their lives. I know it's complicated, but...