A Southerner by heritage and by inclination, author Marie Etienne shares the story of her fractured family, a story filled with vivid scenes of an unforgettably cruel mother and her family's struggle to survive each other and their grim world.
With unflinching humor and honesty, Etienne paints a powerful picture of her wealthy, Southern family--a mother, who bounces from sobriety to drunkeness, kindness to vicious cruelty, and a father who tries to protect his sons from death and his daughters from danger. Murder, insanity, suicide, and alcoholism overshadow Mardi Gras balls, family fishing trips, and daughter's cotillions. Rising stakes threaten to topple Marie as she struggles to escape, yet understand, her mother's abusive madness.
Thirty years later, Marie takes readers on a harrowing trek past the point of survival, yearning for the love she knows she cannot get from her mother or her husban, but can only hope to give to her own children.
Review: “This is a complicated portrait of a family that seemed from the outside to have everything—and then you open the door, and are swept into a family no child should have to grow up in—and yet many do. The writing is vivid and honest, and shows that only through understanding what has happened to you can you keep it from happening to your own children.”
—Adair Lara, San Francisco Chronicle, author of Hold Me Close, Let Me Go
“Storkbites reveals the dark side of Southern eccentricities. It’s a harrowing tale of cruelty and survival that reminds us what a dangerous place family can be.”
—Janis Cooke Newman, author of The Russian Word for Snow
In documenting her childhood, Marie Etienne seeks to understand the antecedents of her own adult attacks of rage and violence, making a vow not to perpetuate the legacy of Storkbites into the next generation of her own two sons.”
—Peggy Vincent, author of Baby Catcher: Chronicles of a Modern Midwife
“Ya-Yas move over! Here comes more pandemonium, Southern-style, complete with a dotty mom, midnight abuse, Mardi Gras revelry and a daughter’s clear-eyed recollection of a childhood gone wrong.”
—Cathy Luchetti, author of Women of the West, Medicine Women, and The Hot Flash Cookbook
