Reviews tagging 'Alcoholism'

Between Two Trailers by J. Dana Trent

5 reviews

alisharose's review

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3.0

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nickel_books's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective sad tense medium-paced

4.0

"Preschool dropout" is not a phrase you typically hear, in fact, much of Trent's story wouldn't be considered typical. With themes of mental illness, substance use, violence, and poverty, Between Two Trailers is as powerful memoir about growing up with parents rarely equipped to provide what you need both physically and emotionally. 
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courtney_scott1025's review against another edition

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hopeful reflective fast-paced

4.75

Found this book because I also grew up in Indiana. This was a debut book for J. Dana Trent, and I loved her take on home and belonging. We had very different upbringings, but dealt with similar issues of abandonment and neglect. I was able to relate a lot and it kept me interested in her story. I feel she kind of excused her parents at the end, and I don't know why, but as someone working through trauma with her parents, for her to say "They did the best with what they had". Judging from the outside, they absolutely did not, and I hope that people reading this book see that too.
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bookedbymadeline's review against another edition

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dark emotional hopeful sad medium-paced

4.5

Thank you to Netgalley and Convergent books for the eARC!

Once or twice the stories got repetitive in the beginning. Chapters were a little too long for my taste.

This is very dark and depressing, you just want to hug the author for all the shit her parents put her through and how they treated her. Trent is a better person than me because I wouldn’t have been as forgiving if these were my parents.

I appreciated the author’s honesty and vulnerability in sharing her struggles! The writing was atmospheric and reminded me of my midwestern childhood in Michigan. I don’t love rating memoirs because this is someone’s personal story so my rating reflects the writing style not the content. 


TW/CW: drug use, mental illness (schizophrenia, depression, and personality disorder), neglect, child abuse, violence, animal cruelty, animal death, anxiety, suicide attempts, suicide, toxic parents, eating disorder, addiction, alcoholism
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porshainielsen's review

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reflective slow-paced

4.0

I don't typically rate memoirs, but as this is an ARC, I have provided a rating.

"Old baggage was hard to let go of, no matter where we found ourselves living, no matter how new our paths looked. King had his new place on an old coal pile; I had my new master's degree from an old university. But we were still us: Vermillion County drug-running trailer trash one meth hit away from the carny caste."

This memoir follows Dana, beginning with her earliest memories of her father making her separate marijuana seeds and stems and cutting cocaine with razor blades at four years old, to dealing with her childhood trauma in college, and eventually, in her forties, learning to understand her parents behavior and mental health. This novel was really interesting for someone studying psychopathology as Dana's parents both had some very complex diagnoses. Dana's experience makes me think a lot about attachment theory and how at some point, we will either have to work through childhood trauma, or the burden will only become heavier to carry. I would recommend this to all my social work friends. I only removed a star because it did feel a little unorganized and there were some meaningless tangents. I still read them because I was invested in Dana's story and felt she deserved to tell it just how she observed it.

Thank you NetGalley for this digital ARC
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