Book #39: Driving with Dead People

Title: Driving with Dead People
Author: Monica Holloway

In Driving with Dead People Monica Holloway recounts her childhood-- her father's scary rages, her mother's detached way of dealing with the situation, her trashy extended family, her siblings' various reactions to growing up in a dysfunctional environment. Her parents divorced when Monica (the youngest) was an early teen, and her dad moved out, her mom moved out, and she and her next older sister raised themselves. Weird, huh? She did gain some stability from her best friend's family, who ran a mortuary.

The thing that surprised me most about Holloway's book was not the experiences she had as a child (though those were pretty shocking), it was the rancor she expressed for both of her parents, who are still presumably alive and kicking in Ohio. As a new writer, I've struggled with what is and isn't appropriate to say in print about my family (rule of thumb: anything that could possibly be construed as negative will be taken that way, so don't go there), but Holloway seems not to care. It's almost as if telling the story is her way of exacting revenge on parents who never acted like the parents she and her siblings really needed.