Book Review: Body Leaping Backward by Maureen Stanton

Today I am reviewing Body Leaping Backward: Memoir of a Delinquent Girlhood  by Maureen Stanton for TLC Book Tours. Thank you to TLC Book Tours and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for an advanced copy of the book. As always, I am provided with a copy of the book in exchange for my honest review.

About the book (from the publisher): For Maureen Stanton’s proper Catholic mother, the town’s maximum security prison was a way to keep her seven children in line (“If you don’t behave, I’ll put you in Walpole Prison!”).  But as the 1970s brought upheaval to America, and the lines between good and bad blurred, Stanton’s once-solid family lost its way. A promising young girl with a smart mouth, Stanton turns watchful as her parents separate and her now-single mother descends into shoplifting, then grand larceny, anything to keep a toehold in the middle class for her children. No longer scared by threats of Walpole Prison, Stanton too slips into delinquency—vandalism, breaking and entering—all while nearly erasing herself through addiction to angel dust, a homemade form of PCP that swept through her hometown in the wake of Nixon’s “total war” on drugs.

Body Leaping Backward is the haunting and beautifully drawn story of a self-destructive girlhood, of a town and a nation overwhelmed in a time of change, and of how life-altering a glimpse of a world bigger than the one we come from can be.

My review: This book is riveting. Stanton’s unsparing examination of her girlhood, of the community in which she grew up, and of the choices she made makes for a compelling read.

For Stanton, the impact of her parents’ divorce reverberated throughout her teenage years. Her mother, trying to take care of 7 kids, drifted into shoplifting. Into larceny. At some point, Stanton, dropped out – not of school – out of caring. She hung around fellow drug users. She drank. She took crazy risks. Once an athlete and a very bright student, she skipped class more often than not, and when she was in attendance, was apathetic. She was on a downward spiral, breathtaking in its speed.

I didn’t do drugs when I was a kid, so learning about their impact on the town of Walpole in the seventies was an education in itself. They were everywhere. PCP or angel dust was Stanton’s drug of choice and large numbers of young people were ‘dusting.’ PCP, a drug that ‘incapacitated thought and speech; your brain no longer functioned, and sometimes you couldn’t form basic words” ends up erasing Stanton’s sense of self. It’s a dissociative anesthetic. That she survived is a miracle. That she found a reason to stop using drugs, to change her life and move forward is another miracle.

One of the things I loved about this book was Stanton’s exploration not just of her downward spiral but of Walpole Prison and the effect it had on the town, her attention to the statistics as to incarceration and recidivism, as well as the drug culture of the 1970s.. Along the way, while telling her story, Stanton tells a bigger story; that of a town and a prison and a climate where drugs were allowed to proliferate, where so many people slipped through the cracks either to drugs or crime or both. She honestly speaks of her parents and her siblings and a family that struggled mightily but somehow managed to keep loving each other and still do.

The story Stanton shares is one of ultimate triumph, but the path to that triumph is harrowing. I applaud her willingness to look at her young life and her actions. Distance gives us a chance to see the bigger picture.

She seems to have compassion for that younger Maureen. She should.

The book is beautifully written. I recommend it highly.

About the author: Maureen Stanton is an award-winning nonfiction writer, and author of “Body Leaping Backward: Memoir of a Delinquent Girlhood,” a People Magazine “Best New Books” pick, and “Killer Stuff and Tons of Money,” winner of the 2012 Massachusetts Book Award in nonfiction. Her essays and memoirs have been published in many literary journals, including Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, The Florida Review, New England Review, and River Teeth, among others. She has received the Iowa Review Prize, the American Literary Review Prize, Pushcart Prizes, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and Maine Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowships. She has an M.F.A. from Ohio State University, and teaches at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.

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Good news! I can give away one copy of this book to one of you. (Confined to readers in the United States.) Leave a comment on this post – not in an email – and I will draw a winner on Saturday evening. Good luck!

Happy Wednesday.