BLOG TOUR: Body Leaping Backward: Memoir of a Delinquent Girlhood by Maureen Stanton @tlcbooktours @maureenstanton1 @hmhbooks #bodyleapingbackward

A haunting, often humorous, and though-provoking story of one woman’s journey of delinquency, self-discovery, and healing. I found Maureen Stanton’s words captivating, I read her story in a single sitting. Her memoir, Body Leaping Backward taught me a lot about a time period in our country that I never really had as much of a grasp on before this. I want to seek out more about this time, and learn more from people who lived it.

About the Book

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.

Reflection

Though for the most part this book is told chronologically, there is a weaving through time as Stanton reflects on lessons learned that felt very fluid—the way memories feel. Beginning as a child when she was asked to go to confession, and Stanton ponders whether she was agnostic even then, as she made up things for confession each week. Her childhood was punctuated by the separation of her parents. A story told at times matter-of-factly, but in a way that also felt ripe with the sadness that comes from a young person who hasn’t yet grasped what happened.

Actually, I took the news of her parents’ splitting up hard as well. I was never totally sure why it didn’t work, but in the final chapter she provides a lot of insight and reflection that can only be gained from growing up and getting to know our parents as people outside of being our parents.

From a young age, Stanton and the town itself are fascinated by Walpole Prison. The prison is like a character in the town, and I often felt like the town sort of existed around the prison, rather than being a town that happened to have a prison in it. The prison was a place to be feared. And yet, as Stanton grows up, her stories left me feeling that the prison felt like a symbol of the racial inequality in the 60s and 70s. The disproportionate punishment for people of color, and the disproportionate diagnosis of mental illness.

As Stanton slips into her delinquency as she calls it (a whimsical word that doesn’t quite capture the sadness she feels for herself as a young girl trying to escape the pain of life), she begins to experiment with angel dust. Stanton’s is a story that ends well—she manages to pull through her addiction and learn to feel again and heal herself. But the story was peppered with a variety of outcomes and statistics around the drug crisis and how the country was dealing with it at the time.

I’ll be honest, I thought of the 60s and 70s drug use as being more fun, free-love, and laidback than today is. Through Stanton’s story, I learned a lot about the darkness that crept beneath the surface of this time. It wasn’t all fun and freedom. The drugs marked a generation who wasn’t equipped for some of the pain that they felt through what was going on around them at the time.

The stories of Stanton’s mother also fascinate me. It seemed hard for Maureen to learn morals and what is and is not ok, when she would see her mother casually shoplift. Of course, it wasn’t casual at all. Stanton’s mother was barely able to support her kids after her separation, but the kids were perhaps not aware of the need they were facing. Then there were moments where Stanton’s mother would cook an entire roast and bring it to the beach for them that just made my heart swell with the love of a mother who doesn’t want her children to worry. Stanton’s happy memories of sandy roast sandwiches on the beach with her family, before they split up and she lost her way were so beautiful and vivid.

The depression of Stanton’s youth was a powerful theme to the story. Stanton was a person overwhelmed by her own emotions, it seemed, and she wasn’t able to fully process them. For as Stanton’s parents loved their kids, they weren’t perfect. I felt through Stanton’s words—before she fully acknowledged it herself—the pain and abandonment she felt, even though she still had both parents in her life.

There were so many raw moments in this book. The moment when a teacher mentions she comes from a broken family, and Stanton first realizes that they are broken. The moment when Stanton realizes how lonely her dad is. The moment where she realizes that neither of her parents noticed her extreme drug abuse. The moments where she realizes how lucky she was to never seriously hurt herself or others with her drug use.

These moments are told in such a reflective way. The book may sound sad or hard to read, but for me it wasn’t at all. Stanton’s writing captivated me. She wrote with an authenticity that made her stories feel relatable even for someone who didn’t really live through the same things.

This is a perfect choice for non-fiction November. Or really for any time. Thank you to TLC book tours for my copy. Opinions are my own.

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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.

Find out more about Maureen at her website, and follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

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