Bastard Out of Carolina

This book, recommended to me by a professor many years ago, is a master class in writing voice. It’s not an easy book—filled with family trauma and abuse (big-time content warning here)—but it masterfully explores the complex relationship between mothers and daughters.

Ruth Anne is broken by her mother’s (and stepfather’s) actions, but the others around her help to put her back together. Yet another lesson is that those who find us can sometimes be the best family for us.

I loved this book because, for the first time in my life, I understood that I was not the only broken and damaged person in the world.

Because of her honest portrayal, I felt less alone and more like there were other souls out there who understood my fears of not belonging, of not being able to be “good enough,” of not being wanted, and of being ignored by one parent while being belittled, abused, and blamed by the other.

Allison wrote clearly about the effects of poverty on family dynamics and the dysfunctional family and explained to me for… show more.

In this 1992 page turner, we meet Bone Boatwright, a scrappy kid who grew up poor in Greenville.

The book is semi-autobiographical, and Allison shows with great skill the devastating effects of child abuse. It’s important, when focusing on the harms of the child welfare system, to understand these painful and devastating situations kids are subject to, before we’re able to find a better way to help children find their way out of them. 

I put this book on my TBR list back in 2015 when I was doing research on child abuse for A Sparrow Falls, and there it stayed for years. I am sorry I waited so long. 

During my research I ran across a YouTube video of an interview with Allison. Knowing this is a semi-autobiographical novel about child sexual abuse, I was intrigued by the loving way she spoke about her family, primarily because, in writing my book I took the view that people are rarely one-dimensionally evil, not even abusers.

Using the language of poor white southerners, Allison unflinchingly… show more.

Bastard Out of Carolina is the story of Ruth Anne Boatwright, known as “Bone.” This coming-of-age story about poor whites in rural South Carolina centers on the Boatwright family, clannish with loyalty, and who tolerate no unkindness to one of their own. When Bone becomes the target of her mother’s new boyfriend, a man she calls “Daddy Glenn” a whiny, mealy-mouthed man with the compulsive behaviors of an abuser, the family loyalties are tested, particularly between Bone and her mother.

Both heart-wrenching and gut-wrenching, this is another one of those books that leaves you reeling after you read it.