Mama’s Little Firecracker– Memoir

“I don’t remember the moment my heart started beating, but I’m paying attention now.”  So begins the memoir of a girl- actually two girls, one a shadow of the other- growing up in working class Marin County, California.

Lindy, diagnosed a paranoiac schizophrenic, has spent most of her life in mental institutions.  Her unexplained relocations from one locked facility to another provide background for the author’s own journey from a childhood locked in confusion, abandonment, and loss, to her eventual healing and recovery.  Each life casts a shadow on the other.

Unfortunately Lindy continues her life in locked rooms with a locked mind.  The author wants Lindy to know that this book is about her: “I want her to know that her life counts. But I’m not so sure she still reads, or even cares that I wrote.  She was hospitalized and I wasn’t.  I thought I was crazy, too.  We did the same stuff.”   Pru Starr is “paying attention now” –to both of their lives.

Audience

Pru’s memoir concerns Marin County and moves Northwest.  It’s a true story of survival.