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4.32 AVERAGE
4.32 AVERAGE
This is probably going to be my favorite book of the year.
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
Filled with elder millennial nostalgia, ‘Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls’ was a delicate mix of comfort and discomfort. I had to walk away for days to calm my nervous system out of fight or flight caused by the familiarity in the writing. T explores girlhood, womanhood, sexuality, identity, friendship, and family in a way that is nothing like your stereotypical coming of age novel. A must read for those left to their own devices as a child and had to figure it out on their own.
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
fast-paced
I don’t like giving ratings to memoirs but this one was so good. Hit all the feels and emotions
this book is so lush and beautiful and really quite special.
emotional
funny
medium-paced
Not sure how to put a number rating on this! Madden is an incredible writer, so much nuance, so much compassion, and very evocative!! So much of this was extremely unpleasant and uncomfortable for me to read though, which makes it hard to say how much I “liked” it. Curious and terrified about her upcoming book!
In Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, Madden illuminates what a strange and dark journey girlhood is, often with a retrospective humor, but not while dismissing the emotional weight of it. Our culture mocks and dismisses preteen interests as teeny bopper bullshit, but these times are often very vulnerable and alienating, as we tried to cope with our burgeoning sexuality and mixed messages: simultaneously being infantilized and told we need to grow the fuck up. We reacted by trying to prove how mature and adult we were in all the wrong ways. I wonder how many women my age were being sexually assaulted by older boys while supposedly at the mall. We didn’t talk about this, and it was normalized. At its best, this book reveals how young, impressionable women readily accept unhealthy friendships and relationship over the alternative of isolation and rejection, and how we spend much of our life thereafter healing from them.
Facets of Madden identity— queer, Hawaiian, Chinese, Jewish, and upperclass, with a famous shoe empire uncle, came together at an atypical intersection and further complicated the already confusing and awkward navigation to adulthood. Madden didn’t fit the “tidy American norm” that we are conditioned to believe exists, and her girlhood was without role models who were fully able to relate to her experience: no attentive parents, no people in stories and television who looked like her, no genuine friendships, no present older siblings. Despite her parents’ disappointments, carelessness, and bad habits, (having an auspicious start as a family, as her mom was her father’s mistress) she loves them fiercely. With distance and reflection Madden captures a painful conflict many adults have: realizing your parents aren’t perfect.
The memoir’s 90s nostalgia allusions— fangirling over Hansen, sparkly butterfly clips, roll over Soffee shorts— often came across as heavy handed in the beginning, but I do think they attributed to a collective and shared experience many women our age had. The book’s structure was also jarring with the random inclusion of photos just near the end, but Madden’s raw writing reigned supreme over all structural inconsistencies. Girl can write.
Maddens life was bizarre but ironically, in sharing her unique circumstances, she reveals how universal our emotional experiences are. You will find yourself emotionally invested, rooting for her, and perhaps also reconciling some demons of your own you thought you had left in the past with your Bonnie Bell lip balm and palpable insecurities.
Facets of Madden identity— queer, Hawaiian, Chinese, Jewish, and upperclass, with a famous shoe empire uncle, came together at an atypical intersection and further complicated the already confusing and awkward navigation to adulthood. Madden didn’t fit the “tidy American norm” that we are conditioned to believe exists, and her girlhood was without role models who were fully able to relate to her experience: no attentive parents, no people in stories and television who looked like her, no genuine friendships, no present older siblings. Despite her parents’ disappointments, carelessness, and bad habits, (having an auspicious start as a family, as her mom was her father’s mistress) she loves them fiercely. With distance and reflection Madden captures a painful conflict many adults have: realizing your parents aren’t perfect.
The memoir’s 90s nostalgia allusions— fangirling over Hansen, sparkly butterfly clips, roll over Soffee shorts— often came across as heavy handed in the beginning, but I do think they attributed to a collective and shared experience many women our age had. The book’s structure was also jarring with the random inclusion of photos just near the end, but Madden’s raw writing reigned supreme over all structural inconsistencies. Girl can write.
Maddens life was bizarre but ironically, in sharing her unique circumstances, she reveals how universal our emotional experiences are. You will find yourself emotionally invested, rooting for her, and perhaps also reconciling some demons of your own you thought you had left in the past with your Bonnie Bell lip balm and palpable insecurities.
4.5 stars..Pieces of this book will have staying power for me. A woman with an entirely different childhood than my own, but whom I relate to in so many ways. I love the subtlety and mystery to her essays but how she ties things together and circles back. I think every woman can see themselves in her childhood self — the uncertainty, want for belonging, wanting to feel loved and accepted but feeling different than everyone else. I love her complicated her relationship is with both of her parents.
T Kira Madden had everything a girl could want: she lived in a mansion, had access to all of the shoes from her family's empire, barely had any rules growing up, wads of cash in her hands, and her very own pony (yes, her very own pony!). So, she should have been flying high, footloose and fancy free, right?
Well, the high part, sure. But the rest, well, it just goes to show that money can't buy happiness is not just a platitude; for T Kira, it was a fact. Because when your parents are mostly failing at sobriety, you can get away with a lot more than you should. There were so many times when reading this book that I had to check back on her age. The timelines of her memories float back and forth and all around, so when she was talking about being taken advantage of by older men, hanging out with drug dealers, and drinking down half of her father's vodka and orange juice, I'd forget and assume she must have been in her late teens. Sadly, so many terrible things happened to her when she was eight. Nine. Ten. She was a prime target for so many things that should have been safely out of reach.
This is a story of a privileged childhood fraught with a hell of a lot of money and lot of danger. It's what happens when a beautiful child is left to her own devices in a world where everything comes easy, but forgetting is hard. When things happen to a soul, when innocence becomes a thing of the past even during childhood and when a girl finds her voice and tells her side of the story to the world.
Judge the cover: 3/5
Well, the high part, sure. But the rest, well, it just goes to show that money can't buy happiness is not just a platitude; for T Kira, it was a fact. Because when your parents are mostly failing at sobriety, you can get away with a lot more than you should. There were so many times when reading this book that I had to check back on her age. The timelines of her memories float back and forth and all around, so when she was talking about being taken advantage of by older men, hanging out with drug dealers, and drinking down half of her father's vodka and orange juice, I'd forget and assume she must have been in her late teens. Sadly, so many terrible things happened to her when she was eight. Nine. Ten. She was a prime target for so many things that should have been safely out of reach.
This is a story of a privileged childhood fraught with a hell of a lot of money and lot of danger. It's what happens when a beautiful child is left to her own devices in a world where everything comes easy, but forgetting is hard. When things happen to a soul, when innocence becomes a thing of the past even during childhood and when a girl finds her voice and tells her side of the story to the world.
Judge the cover: 3/5