We all wore shoes fished from discount bins and received free lunch, so what else was there?” In this way, a girl’s standard introduction to the words “honkie, Oreo, blow job” leaps to these final sentences: “Color was important on Grand Avenue.
To capture a girl’s sensibility, she risks a stylized naïveté in her language, especially in the first half of the book – but Livingston continually comes up with clinching insights. She chooses a narrative voice that speaks from a point located somewhere between an unreconstructed part of herself and a responsible adult. Livingston narrates Ghostbread to suggest that her experiences tell something immutable about human existence. Most memoirs are composed as if memory unmasks the past and liberates the future. “I see with agonizing clarity from where I stand,” she writes in the epilogue of those who now live in poverty, “and though I’d love to point them in new directions, there is no rope strong enough to pull someone from one life to another.” I’ll be honest, it has been sitting on my Goodreads “To-Read” shelf for a while, and on my Amazon Wishlist for even longer, but I picked up a copy at the event yesterday (and had it signed) and will start it later this week.Sonja Livingston’s Ghostbread is a memoir about growing up poor, fatherless, white, Catholic, and one of seven children in the bleak neighborhoods of Buffalo and Rochester, the towns along Lake Ontario, and an Indian reservation during the 1970s. This year the selected book was Queen of the Fall, by Sonja Livingston.
The goal of “If All of Rochester Reads the Same Book…” is to encourage people to connect to others in our community through reading and discussion, and through the shared experience of literature. I was thrilled when I saw Sonja Livingston is touring the Rochester Area doing readings followed by Q&A and book signings with Writers & Books as part of the “ If All of Rochester Reads the Same Book” program, and knew I had to get myself to an event.Įach year, Writers & Books selects one book for the Rochester area to explore together. I will be encouraging both my daughters to read Ghostbread when the time is right, it is beautifully written, but it also offers important lessons. Without a doubt, Ghostbread was my favorite book I read last year, and possibly ever. Sonja beautifully describes not only the hardships, but also the beauty, and joy she found in unlikely circumstances.
A memoir of Sonja Livingston’s youth spent in some of the Rochester area’s most poverty stricken neighborhoods. Last year I read Ghostbread by Sonja Livingston, and immediately connected with the book. I think authors are rock stars – so meeting an author is a terribly exciting thing for me, so I just had to share my recent meeting of author Sonja Livingston.
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