MY MOTHER once said to me, “what has happened in the past.” But without that map, I cannot find my beginnings, trace the progress of my own journey. I must circle back, pick up the threads that bind me to the lives of my parents, in order to understand what brought us to that place in the woods, where our windows had no curtains, our doors no locks, where I did not understand that beneath the nightly narratives of strength and survival that grew and thrived with the telling, there were stories not being told—stories of failure and despair, of chaos and rejection, stories that had been cast off and abandoned like ragged, ill-fitting coats. At the age of eighteen, my father had left Oklahoma with his widowed mother and his three brothers to come to Idaho. Until the death of his father in a drunken car wreck only months before, their lives had been defined by increasing poverty and the chaos of my grandfather’s worsening alcoholism. My father was the second-youngest, the responsible one, strange in his way.
What do You think about Hungry For The World (2011)?
