KooKooLand

November 16, 2015
In this grim memoir, screenwriter Norris (The Moment) writes of growing up in the housing projects of Manchester, N.H., in the 1960s, and escaping to California to find success as a filmmaker. Norris’s father, Jimmy, overwhelms her with awe and fear when she’s a little girl, and disgust when she’s an adult. But Jimmy is the story’s star, and its arc is his evolution from a drunken, abusive criminal to a more egregiously drunken, abusive criminal. It’s an awful tale, told dispassionately, of a man who claws his way through life dealing stolen TVs, drinking and drugging, berating those who cross him, and taking his daughter to shoot rats at the dump. Things get worse at particular points—when a family friend butchers his estranged wife with a kitchen knife, when the daughter of that family murders her dad, and finally, when Jimmy almost kills the author’s mother. He’s never redeemed. The only way forward for the women in Jimmy’s world is to flee. They head to Kookooland, Jimmy’s name for California: the author moves there to retreat from her dad and write this story from a distance, both literal and metaphorical; Norris’s mother visits in the last years of her life, after Jimmy dies; and the murdering daughter of the family friend has her ashes scattered in California. Unfortunately, because Norris takes herself out of the action, the memoir feels like little more than a rap sheet of her father’s misbehavior.

October 15, 2015
An independent film producer's story of how she grew up dominated by her charismatic, troubled father but managed to break free of his influence. Norris' hard-living Greek-American father, Jimmy, was larger than life. A fisherman, hunter, and racetrack gambler fascinated by violence, he often took the family to see slasher movies at the local drive-in. There, he playfully scared his daughter by transforming his hand into what she called "the Hairy Claw." But Norris knew better. "I had seen that hand rip out the still-warm guts of dead animals ten times my size," writes the author. Jimmy often humiliated Norris, her mother, and sister with his misogynistic comments and behavior, but the author loved her father and identified with him to the point where her colorful, slangy English was virtually indistinguishable from what Jimmy used. At the same time, she also found herself longing to be like her friend Susan, a beautiful and talented rich girl who was "really going places" and whom even Jimmy could not fault. Then Susan's father murdered her mother, and her mother's lover and Susan descended into personal chaos. At the same time, the Norris household began to unravel as Jimmy became more erratic and eventually threatened to kill his own long-suffering wife. The author escaped by becoming the only member of her working-class family to go to college, where she immersed herself in the filmmaking that became her life's work. Away from her home and the father who terrorized it, Norris finally began the slow process of learning how to remove the words that her father put into her mouth "like a ventriloquist." By turns heartbreaking and darkly humorous, the book not only offers a compelling yet comic portrayal of a fraught father-daughter relationship. Norris also reveals the way violence can become a self-replicating cancer within families. An intelligent and bracing memoir.

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November 15, 2015
Although many vibrant characters populate this chilling memoir, Norris' re-creation of her early 1960s nine-year-old self is a spot-on treat and a terror. Although she is determined not to be cowed or undermined by her often cruel, scheming, and drunken dad, Jimmy (like older half sister Virginia and nice mother Shirley), her telling ratchets up a spooky, excruciating tension. The racist, misogynistic Jimmy is a loaded gun, ready to fire at nearly anything for any reason. Yet it's his best friend, Hank, who blows, murdering his ex-wife and another man. Thus does young Norris' brightest spot and mentorher older friend Susan, Hank's daughterland in a mental hospital, over and over, while Hank goes free. Norris compellingly leads readers through her young life, alternately loving, fearing, and hating her father (the latter two with especially good reason), and it's a bravely faced and remembered coming-of-age that segues into Norris' amazing comeback as a filmmaker and writer who never forgets her mentor, Susan. A tumble through a tumultuous time, in which the heroine inexplicably, beautifully lands on her feet.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)