Skip to main content
  Log In
Menu
Displaying 1 of 1
Stray : a memoir
Book
2020
Google Books Preview
Add to My List  
Where is it?
First Chapter or Excerpt
Long Beach, California   Men are cowards, my aunt says to me. He's not going to leave his wife. Their essence is just scared little boys. He's afraid you'll leave him someday. You think because you had the courage to leave your marriage, this guy does as well. He doesn't and it's not his fault. He's not built for it.   He's going to leave, I say quietly. He said before the holidays.   Are you really this stupid?   Countless times I've washed up on the shore of my aunt's home in Naples and taken refuge. I even lived with her earlier this year, for a month, while finishing one of the drafts of my novel. She deposits me in a massive bed with Porthault sheets and brings me a massive glass of the cheap Chardonnay my uncle favors at 5:30 p.m. on the dot.   I sit with her and my uncle in the evenings and they tell me stories about California. Corrupt politicians, money-laundering schemes on Catalina Island, gossip about Gil Garcetti, famous cases they were briefly custodians of, all the ways the cops fucked up the O.J. trial. We sometimes argue about politics, then pull back before anything becomes hurtful. My aunt does my laundry, chides me for dressing like a kid and for wearing the same four outfits for the past year. Don't you just want to burn these clothes?   This must be what people feel when they go home to their parents. I can't talk to my friends about this affair anymore. I'm defensive, self-righteous, a tone I know from when I've been part of interventions. I speak hotly with denial and I don't care. It's a state of mind that is strikingly similar to faith.   My aunt, for whatever reason, from whatever bank of life experience, is kinder about this than about most of my alternative listeners. She actually remembers the Monster. I have no idea why or how, but when I told her I was seeing him, she wasn't surprised. Oh, he was always in love with you. I could tell by the way he looked at you.   He was fourteen, I replied. She shrugged. It was plain as day.   I've never been able to see anything so clearly, I say. My life with him.   You see it clearly because you're making it up.   I'm not stupid. Do you think I would be in this if I wasn't sure?   She considers this. I see her imagining whether she's going to have to have dinners like this with the Monster, see him on the occasional holiday. Or if this is going to be another painful story in my database. The odds, I'm aware, are not with me. You're going to be broken before you begin. It will all be uphill.   It cannot be harder than what we're doing now. There will be peace. Peace is coming.   I'm staring into my Chardonnay glass. I haven't spoken to the Monster in two weeks, allowing him one last time in therapy with his wife. But I feel him out there, circling me. We often said that we would have found each other earlier if I hadn't been sent to Colorado. We often wonder why he walked into Union Square Cafe in New York City, just three weeks after I had gotten the job, with no idea I even lived in New York. These kinds of stories protected me from believing I degraded myself over absolutely nothing.   Do you ever wish you had stayed married? my aunt asks suddenly.   I guess it's strange I never think about that. I wish I was the kind of person who could have stayed married.   I flash the snake ring at her. She smiles. There's a fire in the outdoor fireplace. I can smell the sea. I recalled suddenly my first winter in New York City. I couldn't afford to buy myself a dresser so I lived in a room surrounded by suitcases. She flew out and bought me a winter coat from H&M. She often appeared in moments of believing I had no one. And now . . . she's pleased . . . She's pleased I'm with her, I can tell.   You know, I never thought you'd move back here. Never thought you should go to graduate school for that gratuitous degree. I did not think you should leave your marriage. I don't say this often, but I was really wrong about that whole thing.   What whole thing?   You. Excerpted from Stray: A Memoir by Stephanie Danler All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Fiction/Biography Profile
Genre
NonFiction
Domestic
Topics
Dysfunctional families
Family
Substance abuse
Overcoming adversity
Personal narratives
Setting
California - West (U.S.)
Large Cover Image
Trade Reviews
New York Times Review
most picture books could just as well be shelved under self-help. If so many books for children tend toward the didactic (well, maybe not the ones about beasts consuming tacos), that may be because you're never too young to have problems. But if you're lucky, you'll have an adult who reads to you, an adult who knows that answers to all manner of problems can be found in books. The young protagonist of Shinsuke Yoshitake's "Still Stuck" isn't named and is indeed barely seen, his (though it could just as well be her) little face obscured by the T-shirt in which he finds himself trapped while undressing for a bath. It's a reiatable predicament, and his response is instructive: He learns to cope. Life won't be so bad inside his cotton confines; he can drink from a straw, and learn how to keep the cat from tickling his tummy. The story's moral is elusive - keep a stiff upper lip, look on the bright side or just hope mom will arrive, deus ex machina, to help you. Yoshitake's illustrations are so charming they obviate the need for an obvious lesson - my kids laughed throughout, though never harder than at the poor hero's bare bottom as mom bathes him. Each child is unique, but all children think butts are hilarious. As problems go, getting stuck in a shirt isn't so terrible. But childhood (adulthood, too, but don't tell the kids that) does involve a reckoning with fear. Dan Santat, whose "The Adventures of Beekle: The Unimaginary Friend" won a Caldecott Medal, makes fear the subject of "After the Fall (How Humpty Dumpty Got Back Up Again)." So does the stupefyingly prolific Mo Willems, in "Sam, the Most ScaredyCat Kid in the Whole World," a sequel to his "Leonardo, the Terrible Monster." Willems plays it for laughs and does it well; any child familiar with the author-illustrator's oeuvre - and few, it seems, haven't yet met his Pigeon, Knuffle Bunny, Gerald the elephant and his pal, a pig named Piggie - would expect no less. Sam, the titular character, is afraid of everything (spiders, a jack in the box, the daily paper) though not his friend Leonardo, who as a bona fide monster might be expected to instill fear. Boy and monster meet girl and monster - Kerry and her pal Frankenthaler. The monsters leave it up to the kids to stop screaming and figure out how not to be afraid of one another. They find a way. You'll forgive me for reading into it something deeper: Sam, a boy with pinkish skin, Kerry, a bespectacled brown girl, not just making peace but joining forces.I'm with Sam in that I fear most of these days' news cycles; what a pleasure to be reminded that people working together can vanquish fear. Willems works in a cartoony vernacular, while Santat's aesthetic is darker, near realist, so his Humpty Dumpty is an uncanny fellow, clearly an egg but one decked out in jeans and a skinny tie. The book's illustrations are suffused with fear - scary, in fact. Humpty is quite alone on most of the pages; the urban landscape in which he dwells is one of shadows, plus that looming wall from which he famously tumbles. As the subtitle promises, the story begins postfall, Humpty so afraid now of heights he can't sleep in his loft bed. I was so genuinely surprised by the book's conclusion that I won't spoil it. It's always gratifying to see how an artist can turn even the most familiar tale into something new. The heroines of Barbara McClintock's "The Five Forms" and Liz Garton Scanlon's "Another Way to Climb a Tree" are both adventurers, but even daring souls have their troubles. Scanlon's Lulu - drawn by Hadley Hooper in a beautiful throwback style - has never met a tree she didn't want to climb. So what to do when confined to her room on a sick day? McClintock's unnamed protagonist is similarly game for anything, certain she can master the forms of traditional Chinese martial arts. She ends up in over her head, her body's contortions conjuring an actual crane, leopard, snake and dragon who wreak havoc in her house. "Another Way to Climb a Tree" contains the ineffable thing that makes the picture book so special a form. Over repeat visits, the reader - of any age - will find and savor new details in Hooper's pictures. And the way that Lulu solves her problem and climbs a tree, illness or not, is quite magical. If story is less of interest in "The Five Forms," it hardly matters; There is something irresistible about McClintock's painterly illustrations, which are a departure from the beautiful realist style of her previous books (like last year's "Emma and Julia Love Ballet," an all-time favorite in my family). The new story has a comic strip's construction, and a young reader will naturally find joy in the utter destruction the forms of the title release, as well as in how sensibly the story's heroine deals with that mess. One problem all kids, and people who are no longer kids, can understand is the vicissitude of mood - the way human happiness is fleeting, sadness inevitable. It takes a special writer to grapple with this and still come up with an interesting book, and Lemony Snicket is a special writer. He writes with clarity as well as complexity, and can bounce from silly to serious quickly and easily. Snicket's wit is never at the expense of adult or child, and somehow accessible to both. Yes, Snicket has his shtick: ponderous character names, an air of the old-fashioned, unlikely plot twists. But these are deployed to winning effect in "The Bad Mood and the Stick," which is about a bad mood that is stuck to a girl named Curly, who picks up a stick that falls from a tree. The illustrator, Matthew Forsythe, isn't reinventing the wheel by depicting the bad mood as a cloud, but of course, that particular wheel is perfect as it is; it's remarkable, really, how with only a squiggly outline and a wash of color the artist creates so vivid an antihero. Self-help books (all sorts of books, come to think of it) can almost all be distilled down to one takeaway, a few words of wisdom. To explain the inexplicable (the fickleness of mood) Snicket tells us "You never know what is going to happen." This turn of phrase transcends being a simple moral - the closing coda of his odd story - to become something more like a mantra. Some of us are struggling with getting dressed, some yearning to climb a tree, some stuck with a bad mood, and the truest thing for all of us is that no matter what, we can't know what's coming. We've all got prob- are. If adults lems, no matter how old we can't step in and solve all of a child's troubles, we can at least give them that particular reassurance. You never know what's going to happen; life's joy is in seeing what comes next. RUMAAN alam is the author of "Rich and Pretty." His second novel, "That Kind of Mother," will be published next year.
Library Journal Review
All memoirs are inherently self-regarding, and we must examine our own lives and actions to grow as people. However, Danler's (Sweetbitter) memoir crosses the line into narcissism. It is full of laments about the two men she is simultaneously involved with; references to all the decadent meals she will never eat again (we are not told why); and stories about her charming but crumbling Laurel Canyon home, which is somehow connected to Fleetwood Mac. Because of these supposed burdens, and because of her parents' divorce, her strained relationship with her parents, and because of her own divorce, she would like readers to feel as sorry for her as she feels for herself. She would like us to believe that her life has been tragic when really it has been one of relative privilege, with none of its setbacks being out of the ordinary. VERDICT Though there may be interest owing to the author's high-profile first book, this too often self-indulgent memoir does not serve to enlighten readers about Danler's experience or life in general. [See Prepub Alert, 11/25/19.]--Derek Sanderson, Mount Saint Mary Coll. Lib., Newburgh, NY
Publishers Weekly Review
Novelist Danler (Sweetbitter) returns to her hometown of Los Angeles and comes to a reckoning in this forceful, eviscerating memoir. Her three-part narrative--Mother, Father, Monster--creates a domino effect of abandonment and humiliation as those she loves topple her. "People often act against common sense when they've fallen in love with a fantasy," she writes, describing both the tumbledown Laurel Canyon cottage she rents with the advance on her first novel and her disillusionment with her parents and the married lover she calls the Monster. Danler, writing in precise, elegant prose, outlines her family's disintegration: her father left his wife, Danler, and her sister as young girls; her mother worked and raised the children as she slid into alcoholism and began to physically abuse her daughters. Sent to live with her disinterested father in Colorado, Danler quickly realized "he couldn't love anyone" yet "was charmed by his cruelty." Self-destructive relationships followed, including the unavailable Monster, "a colonizer... who declares ownership without concrete investment in the country." As the publication date of her debut novel drew near, a friend's comment--"You fought so hard for this life and now you won't let yourself have it"--propelled her to sever connections with all three and instead establish "tiny building blocks of trust" in loving, enduring relationships. The result is a penetrating and unforgettable tale of family dysfunction. (May)
Booklist Review
Early in this memoir, Danler (Sweetbitter, 2016) establishes, "I made up stories from the minute I could speak." This skill for storytelling, readers learn, would help her survive and make sense of challenging experiences, and gifts her writing with an exhilarating readability and sense of plot. She divides the memoir into three parts: Mother, Father, and Monster. With each short chapter labeled with its location, most in the Southern California homeland she's just returned to following her divorce, Danler knits together the stories of her long-divorced parents and the effects of their addictions on her self-formation. She keeps a strong tie to the present throughout, and to the Monster, as she calls the married man she loves, as she anticipates the publication of her first novel, passes her days writing in her Laurel Canyon cottage, and gets to know the puzzlingly sweet Love Interest. Acknowledging both the tribute of memory and the mercy of forgetting with one distinctive voice, this is a rare and skillfully structured view of an artist's love, grief, and growth.
Kirkus Review
A writer's memoir of familial dysfunction and addiction. Despite the breakthrough success of her debut novel, Sweetbitter (2016), Danler's life remained very much up in the air in her early 30s. Her mother was an alcoholic and never quite recovered from a brain aneurysm that nearly killed her. The author's father was a drug addict, frequently relapsing and largely unemployable. He had left the household when she was a toddler, and she had lived with her increasingly alcoholic and abusive mother until she was 16, when she was shipped to the father, who provided no supervision. In college and early adulthood, Danler did all she could to sever ties with both of them and entered a marriage that seemed doomed from the start. She cheated on him, and when the marriage ended, she explained to her friend Carly, "I just want more....Once Carly figured out that I was self-destructing with no plan, nerves frayed by lust, she was concerned." Will this "stray" ever find some sort of stability? "There is nothing falser to me than a story that ends with catharsis," she writes. "Loving liars, addicts, or people who abuse your love is a common affliction....No one taught us how to trust the world, or that we could, so we trust no one. We've never developed a sense of self." Danler's first memoir is as well-written as her novel was, but it can be as frustrating for readers as it was for her friends and family--indeed, as it was for the author herself--to watch her going back and forth with the married lover she calls the "Monster," with whom she ended things for good countless times. She seems to have a more stable, somewhat tepid relationship with another man, referred to as "the Love Interest." Toward the end, she tells herself, "You have to make a change," and perhaps she will. A mostly moving text in which writing is therapeutic and family trauma is useful material. Most readers will root for Danler. (first printing of 100,000) Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Summary
From the bestselling author of Sweetbitter , a memoir of growing up in a family shattered by lies and addiction, and of one woman's attempts to find a life beyond the limits of her past. Stray is a moving, sometimes devastating, brilliantly written and ultimately inspiring exploration of the landscapes of damage and survival.

After selling her first novel--a dream she'd worked long and hard for--Stephanie Danler knew she should be happy. Instead, she found herself driven to face the difficult past she'd left behind a decade ago: a mother disabled by years of alcoholism, further handicapped by a tragic brain aneurysm; a father who abandoned the family when she was three, now a meth addict in and out of recovery. After years in New York City she's pulled home to Southern California by forces she doesn't totally understand, haunted by questions of legacy and trauma. Here, she works toward answers, uncovering hard truths about her parents and herself as she explores whether it's possible to change the course of her history.

Lucid and honest, heart-breaking and full of hope, Stray is an examination of what we inherit and what we don't have to, of what we have to face in ourselves to move forward, and what it's like to let go of one's parents in order to find peace--and a family--of one's own.
Librarian's View
Displaying 1 of 1