The Sky Isn't Visible from Here

October 22, 2007
A poignant memoir by writer Sullivan palpates the wounds of growing up with an unstable, cocaine-abusing mother. The young narrator’s emotionally manipulative mother, Rosina, worked as a waitress at whatever Brooklyn diner hadn’t fired her yet for stealing from the cash box in order to feed the increasingly destructive cocaine habit she formed while living with her Israeli-born boyfriend, Avram. Sullivan grew up cringing in the shadow of her crass, chain-smoking mother, who moved from boyfriend to boyfriend, from Sunset Park, Brooklyn, to upscale Valley Stream, Long Island. Sullivan tried hard to distinguish herself in school, despite drinking heavily as a teenager to ease social pressure and shoplifting to strike back angrily at her mother. Later, she explains, she fell into similar patterns of self-anesthetizing with cocaine and alcohol while grasping after a lucrative career in finance in her early 20s. Sullivan’s memoir cuts predictably back and forth in time and features some memorable types, such as needy early girlfriends whose mothers were as wacky as her own; junkie Aunt Marisol who died of an overdose; and her mother’s battering boyfriend Eddie. Putting herself through Fordham, then Columbia’s M.F.A. program hardly eased Sullivan’s pain, but the act of writing purges her memory.

February 15, 2008
Lev Tolstoy famously said, "All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Sullivan both proves and disproves this statement in her memoir. Like that of many memoirists of late, Sullivan's childhood was a horror of physical, sexual, and chemical abuse. Her single mother was a master manipulator, thief, and cocaine addict. Sullivan spent her childhood in Brooklyn, following her unpredictable mother as she careened from one man to another, one job to another, one apartment to another. Sullivan attempted to reinvent herself via a variety of friends, hairstyles, and a rich imaginative life. Unsurprisingly, she ended up as a drug-addicted adult, although with a college education and a slot in the prestigious Columbia University writing program. Told through flashbacks, her narrative is harrowing. What makes her family different from other unhappy families is that Sullivan eventually came to terms with the person her mother was and learned to accept the love she was able to give her. The author shakily worked her way to living a clean and sober life, which her mother could never achieve. Recommended for public libraries.Jan Brue Enright, Augustana Coll. Lib., Sioux Falls, SD

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