Body Leaping Backward, Maureen Stanton
Body Leaping Backward, Maureen Stanton
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Body Leaping Backward
Memoir of a Delinquent Girlhood

Author: Maureen Stanton

Narrator: Coleen Marlo

Unabridged: 7 hr 43 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 07/16/2019


Synopsis

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.

About Maureen Stanton

Maureen Stanton, the author of Killer Stuff and Tons of Money, has been awarded the Iowa Review award, a Pushcart Prize, the American Literary Review award in nonfiction, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. Stanton teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Mackenzie - PhDiva Books on January 06, 2020

A haunting, often humorous, and though-provoking story of one woman’s journey of delinquency, self-discovery, and healing. I found Stanton’s words captivating, I read her story in a single sitting. Her memoir taught me a lot about a time period in our country that I never really had as much of a gra......more

Goodreads review by kelly on July 22, 2019

"Body Leaping Backward" is a memoir of Maureen Stanton's life growing up in the mid-70's in a working class family in Walpole, Massachusetts. Throughout the book, the shadow of the maximum security prison in the area looms large, in both the author's mind and in the warnings her mother gives her to......more

Goodreads review by Nancy on July 05, 2019

I have reviewed this book for New York Journal of Books where it will be posted on the site the evening before the publication date. Body Leaping Backward: Memoir of a Delinquent Girlhood by Maureen Stanton Houghton Mifflin Harcourt July 16, 2019 10-1328900231 Memoir Many young teens turn rebellious as t......more