Kerry Kletter is the author of The First Time She Drowned. She has a degree in literature and has background in theater. Kletter has been in film, on television, and onstage performances. During her free time, when not writing, likes to surf, run, and work with animals. Kletter was born in New Jersey, now lives in Santa Monica California, where she writes with her partner David Zorn. Cassie O’malley was put in a mental institution by her mother for two and a half years. At the age of 18, she is able to make her own decisions and take her life back into control. She is anxious and nervous to see how she will do out in the real world, with not being told what to do. When her mom had arrived to pick up Cassie, it had been the first time her
Cassidy's mother is left facing life without her daughter with the hope that her daughter's warning letter may save someone else from feeling the pain her daughter had forced on her.
Summary: Breathing Underwater is about an teenage boy at the age of 16 who is in love with his girlfriend, but does not really know how to treat her right. He claimed to have loved his girlfriend a lot and often did not listen to what he has to say about things and disagrees with her which causes him to get angry. One day he had gotten very angry and had slapped her, not knowing what had got into him he apologized for his behaviour and said never to do it again. But the day of the talent show he had told her not to sing because people would laugh at her and he did not want her to display herself up on stage singing to everyone. After the show had finished, anger and jealousy filled up inside of him causing to not know what he was doing, next thing he knew he was calling her names and throwing a fist at her and beating her to the floor. Caitlin was than taken away from a few friends, including Nick’s best friend. Caitlin and her parents than procured a restraining order to keep Nick away from her, and the judge had also sentenced him to Mario Ortega’s family violence class, where he sat around with other men who beat their wives or girlfriends because they are unable to keep their hands to themselves. Another sentence the court gave Nick was to write journals about his relationship with Caitlin, before the incident and what caused him to do what he had done to her. From the journals he wrote the story drifts back and froth from present to past of their relationship. It allows the reader to follow along with Nick (main character), it shows the struggles of losing all his friendships, popularity and respect he had among the school, being known as a abuser, and also the girl he loved did not no longer love him back for the actions he had done. Towards the end of the novel he realizes all the stuff he had put Caitlin from through the beginning of their relationship and how badly he had treated her feeling guilty of his actions he had no longer knew what to do, but he knew how to treat a girl with more respect in the future.
The childhood of Frances Piper consists of inadequate love, loss of innocence and lack of concern, ultimately leading to her disastrous life. As a six year old child, she encounters several traumatic events, explicitly the death of her loved ones and the loss of her innocence. Over the course of one week, there have been three deaths, two funerals and two burials in the Piper family. “Frances was crying so hard now that Mercedes got worried. ‘I want my Mumma to come ba-a-a-a-ack.’”( McDonald 174). As a young child, there is nothing more upsetting than losing a mother. A family is meant to comfort each other to fulfill the loss of a loved one; however, this is not the case in the Piper family. Mercedes, only a year older than Frances, tries to console her even though she herself is worried. The loss of motherly love and affection has a tremendous impact on her future since now her sole guardian, James, expresses no responsibility towards her. Instead, he molests Frances on the night of Kathleen’s funeral to lessen the grief of his lost daughter. As a result “These disturbing experiences plague Frances with overwhelming feelings of low self worth and guilt that haunt h...
At a young age, she could not understand her mom’s illness. When Cassie got worse, Hattie puts her in a mental institute.
Christina Mendoza learns how to escape a tight container. Mendoza learns not to worry about what others think about her and learning how to accept who she really is. Mendoza is an independent person.
As I Lay Dying by William Faulker takes place in a rural area in Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi in the time period of the 1920’s. The story is revolved around a family struggles to bury Addie Bundren who is both a mother and a wife in the story. Mainly the book focuses on the difficulties of getting dear Addie to her home town of Jefferson for it was her last wish.
Susanna Kaysen’s memoir, Girl, Interrupted (1996), documents the author’s almost two year stay in McLean Hospital, in which she was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder. Throughout this book, Kaysen offers a look into her experiences in the psychiatric ward through retellings of events in non-chronological order. Kaysen’s book begins when she is eighteen years old, and institutionalized, and continues on to her life after the institution. She recounts how she got to the hospital, her experiences in the hospital, as well as descriptions of the different people she encounters. Though the events and people that Kaysen describes are often presented out of context, Kaysen builds a memoir that communicates
This was just the beginning of it though, as Misty would go on to divulge. Cassie fell in with the “wrong” group of kids, it seemed. Her decided close friends would influence behavior from Cassie, which her parents would find less than stellar. Misty goes on later to write, “Brad remembers: ‘When Cassie got upset with us. She would cry and scream and yell, ‘I’m going to kill myself!
In "Elegy for Jane", a poem by Theodore Roethke, the speaker communicates his intimate attitude towards his former student in an elegy. The speaker shows these emotions and feelings through the use of the figurative language and the use and repetition of “my.”
Seventeen-year-old Juliette Ferrars can unexplainably kill others with a single touch. Juliette has been cast off from society and placed in an insane asylum after an incident in which she embraced a child, resulting in the child’s death. After spending 264 days in isolation, Juliette is clearly losing her grasp on reality, and struggling to prove to herself that she is not the monster that society believes she is, but she uses numbers and the written word to keep herself sane. In a hidden
As if Kristina’s troubling relationship with her father is not enough for her to deal with, she must also cope with the disconnectedness between her and her mother, who is too self-absorbed to bother with her daughter. Kristina recalls, “I’ve been alone since my mom met Scott. He sucked the nectar from her heart like a famished butterfly. No nurture, no nourishment left for Kristina” (Hopkins 13). This horrific confession makes it blatantly obvious why Kristina eventually turned to drugs to deal with the stress of her everyday life. Kristina feels neglected and unimportant not only in the eyes of her father, but her mother, too, which is a difficult realization at any age, but especially difficult as a teenage girl. When Kristina gets off her returning flight, Marie knows “she caught sight of something not quite right,” but she ignores her motherly intuition and the fact that Kristina is still high on meth (Hopkins 186).
This Memoir discusses the hard life Cupcake Brown lived. Brown was thrown into foster care at age 11, after her mother’s death (Brown). That same year she started getting raped by the the foster owner’s nephew (Brown). After multiple attempts of running away, She was brutally beat by all the foster children and the foster home owner’s daughter, which caused her to lose her baby at age 13 (Brown). When she turned 14 she ran away to her great aunt and 4 male cousins in South Central, Los Angeles (Brown). While in Los Angeles, she joined a gang which provided her with the love and protections she lack as a child (Brown). On her 16, birthday she was shot and was nearly paralyzed (Brown). Shortly after this she used the same motivation she had to run away to turn her life around and become the successful author she is today. Through all of her struggle she still found the strength from within to make something out of herself and become successful. This just proves that teens can motivate themselves by wanting to be better than their past
“I stood, unmoving, stunned… Tears filled my eyes. I want my mother, I thought. My mother is dead. I thought this every hour of every day for a very long time: I want my mother. My mother is dead.” In Cheryl Strayed memoir “Wild”, the death of her mother demolished her mental stability and consumed her each moment of her life. Not knowing how to handle her grief, Cheryl ended up doing things in her life that many people would consider regretful. She ended up losing her marriage, family, friends, became addicted to drugs, and lost her own state of being. Although Cheryl is sullen, her mistakes and setbacks was her destiny to create a better life.
who wanted to enter her life, she is left alone after her father’s death. Her attitude
Pat and Cindy watched. We find that television becomes more of a persuasive force in people’s lives and how society gets their news. Going to school became a challenge for the children. Constantly being bullied, both were scared to go to school. Even teachers were asking question after question. Maggie was raised that hard work, determination, and perseverance always worked, but after the death of a daughter, she pushed her remaining children that having a good education and knowing the difference between right and wrong were more important than working with your hands and following traditional gender roles. She did not want them to become like their father. Education became a priority. But still, the openness and open dialogue ceased to exist. There was not an opportunity for my mom to expel her feelings about the entire situation, nor was there one for Pat. In fact, Pat was even more subdued because he was told the cliché, “You are the man of the house now.” There was still not an outlet for feelings nor was there a way to discuss the events in an open forum. There was still a feeling that children were meant to be seen and not heard from. Things became so challenging for the family, that for two months from April to June when my mom was ten, the family of four lived out of a van at the family homestead because Maggie could not pay for everything alone. They finally found an apartment and Maggie found another man. But not before Butch was sentenced to 5 years for killing his daughter. Later when he got out of prison, he committed suicide. The reasoning that he left in a letter was because he hated that what he had done, and he wished he could go back and fix himself for his family. He thought that leaving this world was better than trying to make amends with his children. My mom didn’t have a father figure in her life. She