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Title: The Ugly Cry: a Memoir by Danielle Henderson
Details: Copyright 2021, Random House
Synopsis (By Way of Front Flap): "An uproarious, moving memoir about a grandmother’s ferocious love and redefining what it means to be family
“If you fight that motherf**ker and you don’t win, you’re going to come home and fight me.” Not the advice you’d normally expect from your grandmother— but Danielle Henderson would be the first to tell you her childhood was anything but conventional.
Abandoned at ten years old by a mother who chose her drug-addicted, abusive boyfriend, Danielle was raised by grandparents who thought their child-rearing days had ended in the 1960s. She grew up Black, weird, and overwhelmingly uncool in a mostly white neighborhood in upstate New York, which created its own identity crises. Under the eye-rolling, foul-mouthed, loving tutelage of her uncompromising grandmother— and the horror movies she obsessively watched—Danielle grew into a tall, awkward, Sassy-loving teenager who wore black eyeliner as lipstick and was struggling with the aftermath of her mother’s choices. But she also learned that she had the strength and smarts to save herself, her grandmother gifting her a faith in her own capabilities that the world would not have most Black girls possess.
With humor, wit, and deep insight, Danielle shares how she grew up and grew wise— and the lessons she’s carried from those days to these. In the process, she upends our conventional understanding of family and redefines its boundaries to include the millions of people who share her story."
Why I Wanted to Read It: I like a good funny/tragic memoir, obviously, and this promised to be exactly that.
How I Liked It:
It's the end of the calendar year as I compose this review! But it didn't take until the end of the year for my reviews to seem like they referenced one another. Earlier this year, I asked if death of the author could still work in a memoir. But what happens when you're already reading the book before you recognize the author from other work that might influence what you think about this one, even if they're very different books? As always, you'll see by the time I'm through.
But first! Meet Danielle Henderson, but more importantly, meet her grandmother. When her teenage mother runs off with her prom date (her horrified parents actually report her missing and wait with their two other younger children for a call claiming to have found her body), she and her parents reconnect months later (thanks to the Henderson's grandmother's sleuthing), once she's pregnant and setting up house with her new would-be spouse. But unfortunately he wasn't interesting in sticking around, and so the wayward daughter returns with a baby and also a pregnancy (that would be the Henderson, born only a year apart from her older brother Corey).
The children adjust to life full of adults, in an overstuffed house led by Henderson's gruff, practical, no-nonsense, foul-mouthed, horror-movie-loving grandmother. Their mother tries life on her own, moving them into a tiny apartment, but she can't seem to quit her love of awful men, flirting with everyone, including her daughter's gym teacher. The book takes a turn when the mother takes up with a man who first hit on her younger sister. A violent, shiftless ne'er-do-well, Luke makes Henderson's life a living hell with both his violent outbursts and his nighttime visits to her bed. Worst of all is the hold he has on her mother, which leads her to neglect her young children almost entirely for him. When his own child, slightly younger than the author and her brother, turns up, his father installs him at the overstuffed apartment and beats him almost to death, causing Luke to be arrested and to be kept from the Henderson children. Forced to choose between her children and Luke, Henderson's mother chose Luke, with whom she goes on to have two more children, all but abandoning Henderson and her brother with their grandparents.
The author grapples to find herself after her mother's betrayal and Luke's abuse. She finds an outlet in the discovery of a world outside their small white New Jersey town, mostly accessible through pioneering cult late '80s/1990s teen magazine Sassy and cable television. She starts carefully negotiating the waters of teenhood, but her past trauma seems to await at every turn. A turning point comes when in the midst of a particularly horrible depressive period that has her attempting suicide, she confides in her grandmother about the abuse she suffered from Luke and is met with love and support. From there, she's still wobbly with becoming herself, but surer in where she's going and why. The book ends with her going off to college, and some suggestions of what life would then hold for her.
I was about a fourth of the way through this book and enjoying it before I realized I'm actually familiar with the author and her other work. Among other things, the author created the highly imitated (and surprisingly impactful to the point that I think he had to address it) Feminist Ryan Gosling memes (which became a book, since that was how life was in the early 2010s) and I'd actually read interviews with her before and liked her snark and insight. So it was somewhat strange to suddenly connect that with knowing the troubled ins and outs of her early life described in this memoir.
But did it really make a difference? Despite perking up a bit more when she mentioned feminism, not really. The book doesn't cover her strange rise to meme fame or much about her adult life at all, in fact.
And it is fascinating and incredibly compelling. If you've even a bit familiar with this blog, I don't have to go into how important memoir voice is or link you to the review where I've harped on it the most so far (although I will anyway!). And the author has a light touch with her own voice in the book to highlight other characters, most especially her grandmother, who literally saves her life many times. Plenty of memoirs promise to be both hilarious and heartbreaking, but this one I'm happy to report actually is. It's fitting Jenny Lawson blurbs the front, since the book has Lawson's levels of tragi-comic whiplash, although this is not a book of essays, it's a straightforward memoir.
The author relates being the only Black family in a predominantly white town and also her own experiences with colorism as a light-skinned Black child. From being called the n-word by the parents of a nasty classmate and the classmate herself (who she gives the pseudonym "Jennifer Weiringer" in the hopes that the classmate has turned her life around and now "become a prominent lawyer for the NAACP", pg 33), all of whom her mother angrily confronts ("I had gone from never hearing the word until that day to hearing it about a hundred times in a row.", pg 37) to not seeing herself anywhere, over and over, to Black families both her own and generally, the author explores a lot.
I was baptized in the Catholic Church a few months after I was born and didn't step foot in a church again for seven years. They were big on protecting the soul, but there wasn't much God in my life following my baptism, aside from the casual way every adult in my family took the Lord's name in vain every ten seconds. Like all Black families raised in the jive-talking seventies and politically oppressive eighties, "godddamn" was the most widely used descriptor of all things animal, vegetable, or mineral. Though sometimes used aggressively, it was primarily a gentle way to indicate the world-weariness and overall exhaustion cultivated deep in the bones of middle-aged Black folks. It filled a space, and your job was to figure out how to read between the lines of what each "goddamn" actually meant. "I said pass the goddamn salt" meant you were tired after a long day, certainly too tired to repeat yourself. "Do you know where my goddamn gloves are?" was code for "Which one of you moved my stuff after I expressly told you not to move my stuff?" The rapid-fire, multiple wielding of "goddamn" was a threat-level-red situation, a clear sign that you had just pushed someone to the limits of their sanity. It wasn't unusual for my grandma to condemn me straight to hell for not letting her goddamn play the goddamn Nintendo she goddamn bought for these little goddamn motherfuckers. It was her expletive-laden form of praying that someone, anyone, would give her the strength to keep from murdering me for trying to level up on The Legend of Zelda when it was clearly her turn. When she dies, I will make sure her tombstone simply reads:
GODDAMIT, I TOLD YOU KIDS TO LEAVE ME ALONE
(pgs 62 and 63)
It was a short walk to the squat, stone church that housed the answers to life, the universe, and why my family thought I needed to be indoctrinated in a dominant religion that had wreaked globally destructive havoc on brown people who looked just like me for centuries. (pg 64)
Bianca was my first black friend. I didn't have to explain my cornrows to her or talk about how my hair would shrink up if we ever decided to swim in the pool. I didn't have the language to describe how exciting it was, so instead I described who all the people in my town were white. Other than my brush with the Weiringers, no one in my orbit really talked about race. I knew my family was black, and that other black people existed, but that was about it. As a kid who lived in a relatively diverse midsize city, Bianca couldn't understand how it was possible to live in a purely white world.
"All of them?" she asked, waving a Barbie doll back and forth on the floor to mimic footsteps.
"All of them. Except for me and my brother and my mom and my grandma and grandad." I said, digging through the pile of tiny clothes.
Bianca wrinkled her nose. "That sounds bad."
I'd never really thought about it much, but through her eyes, I could see that Greenwood Lake left a lot to be desired. I wanted her to think I was cool, so I agreed. "Yeah, it's bad."
As soon as the words left my mouth I felt the first twinges of betrayal. I tried to backtrack-- there was a lake, and my teacher Mrs. Dietzel let us make a teepee out of a big roll of brown paper where we could read during quiet time.
"But you're the only black people?" Bianca asked.
I nodded.
She made the Barbie hop on the carpet. "Well, you look white, so..." She didn't finish the sentence, but I didn't need her to. (pgs 99 and 100)
She experiences an awakening with Sassy magazine, for many reasons.
And most importantly, some of [Sassy's] models were Black. Girls like me, looking cool and comfortable.
It sparked something in me to see girls my own age doing things their own way. My world was so small-- everyone looked the same, wanted the same things, talked the same way. Being Black kept me outside of the bubble; even though I had friends, they always pointed out things that were different about me as a source of some inherent freakiness, like the fact I didn't wash my hair every day or live with my mom.
Maybe I didn't have to try so hard. Maybe it was okay, and even cool, that I couldn't afford to buy brand-new clothes, instead relying on the thrift store and creativity. Maybe it was okay that I didn't want to spend all day talking about boys and crushes, or try to look like all the perfect, pretty, rich white girls who surrounded me. The more I read about girls who lived in cities, on the street, or in the middle of nowhere, the less shame I felt about being different. (pg 176)
When Grandma came home from work, I trotted downstairs and walked past her to the kitchen as casually as possible. "Child, what did you do to your head?" I returned to the living room.
"I shaved it." I didn't want to apologize for what I wanted to look like anymore, whether it made Grandma feel bad or not. It was a bit too heavy to carry the burden of my whole race and the respectability politics that ruled Grandma's life. I wanted the freedom of a white kid-- to mess up, to go wild, and still have access to a life beyond my teenage mistakes. (pg 204)
I bought a book of stamps and sent letters to the [colleges] I found interesting, asking them to mail me their catalogs and admission materials. All the stuff that showed up had white kids on the cover, but I tried not to let that psych me out. (pg 273)
She also discusses how her trauma and chaotic upbringing both shaped her at the time and in the future.
Cory had developed an after-school routine of his own that largely involved keying cards, riding his bike into oncoming traffic, and other acts of minor delinquency. His life was outside-- I rarely saw him, and when I did, we still fought like demons. He kept having fun, as if everything with Mom and Luke didn't even happen. I didn't know how to talk to him. Other siblings may have banded together or grown closer in such a traumatic environment, but we became two islands, connected by nothing, sharing only the violent waves beating at our shore. (pg 142)
I'm still not at ease in my body. This, too, have been taken from me. (pg 170)
There was also the question of Luke. Molestation isn't rape, but I'd still been pushed beyond my sexual boundaries before I even knew what my sexual boundaries were. In the eyes of God and the world, I fell somewhere in the chasm between virgin and sex. (pg 224)
For context for that quote, she spends time working with her grandmother with nuns and a very rigid (and troublesome) kind of thinking.
My depression still came back in waves, poking holes into moments that should have felt happier. But it felt less like I was carrying the weight of a secret and more that I was part of a family. Unburdening myself didn't cure me, and it would be another five years before I knew that I was suffering from depression or that I would be in a relationship with it for the rest of my life. I didn't yet know I would take almost a dozen different antidepressants before I found the combination that worked best. I wouldn't learn to think about depression as something that occasionally happened to me as part of my wiring, not a bomb waiting to go off all the time, until I was thirty-nine years old. And it wasn't until my forties when I learned, in therapy, how to integrate my thoughts in order to avoid sinking to the bottom of the depression well, learned how to notice warning signs and actions I could take before things got too bad. The first time I felt confident and happy again at the same time, I was forty-three years old.
Medicine and therapy were things I would discover long after I left Warwick. I wasn't cured. But seeing Grandma take care of me in the face of my terrible shame was a step toward loving each other beyond grandmother and granddaughter, as people who really understood each other. (pg 256)
Lasell [college] would end up being a horrible choice for many reasons. With no impetus to perform well at school, [roommate] Jamie spent most of her time filing our room with beer cans and cheating on her boyfriend. I would become endlessly depressed during the spring semester and eventually have a complete emotional breakdown so intense three R.As were called into the room while Jamie looked on, stunned. I'd eventually get my degree many years later and many states away. (pg 280)
So the book isn't afraid of nuanced, complicated subjects as well as abject tragedy, but don't think it's still not absolutely hilarious in places, too.
For Cory
All that we survived.
Don't think I forgot about you filling a water gun with piss and shooting it at me just because it didn't make it into this book, though. (from the dedication)
She and her brother invade their mother's craft supplies while she's at work and deck their tiny apartment in yarn to become "Spiderweb City".
We had just decided to solve the refrigerator problem by propping a kitchen chair up against it when we heard the front door open.
Well, try to open. Mom couldn't get in and started to panic.
"What the hell is going on in there! Cory? Dani?" Her face was poking through a crack about two inches wide, which was as far as the door would open. We army crawled to her through the web, giggling, and popped up in the few inches of space we'd accidentally left near the door. Looking behind me, I could see that the living room was a beautiful mess of brightly colored, waist-high yearn. This was so much better than that long piece of crochet chain I made. This was art.
"Open this fucking door!" Mom yelled. We pulled from the inside while she pushed, destroying some of our art in the process. The look on her face was enough to knock the smiles off of ours. Have you ever seen the gnashing, muscle-tight look of a lion protecting their cubs from predators? My mom looked like that lion, except we were the predators, and she was gearing up to protect her sanity.
"ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME." There's nothing funnier than watching your mom try to beat your ass while immobilized by yard of yarn in every direction. She slammed through Spiderweb City like Godzilla, thrashing our experiment apart while we cowered behind the front door. "Cory did it!" I shouted. "No, I didn't!" he shouted back, pushing me. Now all of us were shoving, waving, and screaming while the yarn maze held back our most intense attempts at landing a slap on someone, anyone. (pgs 53 and 54)
Her grandmother has too many hilarious moments to name, but this was one of my favorites for the author's description of her foul-mouthed grandmother being forced to use a swear-substitute.
Both Mom and Grandma used this weird version of Jesus H. Christ, shortening it and, for some reason, making it kind of Irish. I can't imagine my grandma ever avoiding a chance to curse, but like all complicated women, she seems to have felt a duty to keep it classy in public. When my mom said, "Jeez O'Flip!" it sounded like a cute country phase, like someone hopped out of an episode of The Andy Griffith Show and straight into upstate New York. When my grandma said it, it looked like that part of Men in Black where the alien is trying on his Vincent D'Onofrio suit for the first time and trying to act normal. She muttered it, like she was trying to keep a load of acrid bile from dribbling out of the corner of her mouth. (pg 84)
All in all, it's a breathtakingly complex work of art of a memoir and it's almost impossible not to have some sort of reaction to it, either laughter, tears, or more likely both. I mentioned the book stops at college with suggestions into adulthood, but clearly there was much more to the story than just the author's surprising internet meme fame.
In the acknowledgments (ALWAYS read the acknowledgements!) she suggests she did not stay estranged from her negligent mother:
Mom. For the fresh start, and all the years in between. (pg 290)
Which in and of itself would be a fascinating follow up, let alone all of the author's life besides.
But the heart of the book is also expressed in the acknowledgments:
Grandma-- you are a maniac, the worst advice giver, the funniest person I've ever met, and the love of my life. Thank you for saving me. Thank you for teaching me how to save myself. (pg 290)
Whether you know Danielle Henderson from Feminist Ryan Gosling, from her work writing for television or any other of her projects, or just this memoir alone, it's clear she's a brilliant, engaging writer worth reading.
Notable:
A good portion of the book is devoted to a kind of wry nostalgia or at least reminiscence about the 1970s and 1980s (the author was born in 1977). The author isn't purporting to write straight up history nor is she putting this forth as historical fact, merely her point of view at the time, but still, some things rankled, some things resonated.
When I was born, absolutely no one was prepared for me to arrive. Pregnancy wasn't at all like the checklist-heavy micromanagerial bonanza it is today, but you'd think someone would have at least been clocking contractions with mild interest between popping cans of Tab and smoking cigarettes down to the filter. Mom and Grandma always breathlessly tell the story between bouts of laughter, amazed at my ability to enter the world despite their own ineptitude. (pg 7)
Talking to a source for this, while certainly as a whole pregnancy is different now than it was in the 1970s, the Baby Boom generation beginning to give birth to their children (and a huge market for that) was a big deal both the involvement of fathers more than previous generations, the Baby Boom generation's insistence on doing it their own way, and, well, making it a checklist-heavy micromanagerial bonanza compared to how it was treated previously. Just the same, though, a frantic and unexpected birth in an already rocky situation is not treated the same as an expected and planned situation in any decade.
The rise of the Child Safety movement in the United States takes a starring role at times.
We also did fun things at school, like getting fingerprinted. The police were coming! To our class! Special! Taking time out of their busy jobs to visit us! Two police officers showed up one afternoon, resplendent in their uniforms and not yet a symbol of absolute terror. [...]
As an adult, I realize the real reason we were getting inked was much darker: kidnapping was on the rise, and fingerprints probably helped them identify our tiny bodies. (pg 29)
Technically it wasn't kidnapping that was on the rise, but fears of kidnapping and "stranger danger."
"Cory, turn that off," She said, giving a head nod to the radio.
"No!" we both protested immediately. David Lee Roth was singing "I Ain't Got Nobody," and our favorite part was coming up.
"Is this that white man that jumps around all over the place?"
Usually she would have to be more specific, but I'd already seen a few hours of MTV over at Erin's house and knew she was talking about Van Halen's song "Jump," the pump-up anthem of every kid we knew, the soundtrack to every hyperactive moment, the permission we needed to throw ourselves around the room and leap off of anything in sight.
"Shhhh, it's coming up!" I said, tracking the song. Memorizing lyrics was one thing Cory and I would do together without wanting to murder each other. We sat at the playground one day trying to memorize the Vincent Price part of "Thriller"; when we nailed it, he was so excited that he jumped off a swing.
Now, in our overheated kitchen, with the radio blaring and Grandma frowning, we tipped our heads back in unison and sang along with the white man who couldn't stop jumping.
"HUMMILY BABILY ZIBBILY BOOBILY HUMMILY BABILY ZIBBILY BOP!"
Cory and I immediately fell out laughing.
"You kids are idiots," she said, laughing with us. "Come on-- turn off the stove. Let's get to school." (pg 57)
That was adorable.
Mrs Garett walked a group of us to the church the first week, but after that we were expected to get there on our own, even though six-year-old Adam Walsh had been kidnapped and murdered three years earlier and concerns about child abductions were on the rise.
Throughout the eighties, kidnapping was deployed as an empty threat by overworked, exhausted parents who wanted to keep us close enough to elude Child Protective Services but far enough away to not ever have to see, hear, or smell anything we were playing with. "Oh, you want to run off and play on Elm Street without telling me where you're going? That's the fast-track to getting kidnapped!" my mom said, looking very refreshed after the three-hour nap my absence afforded her. These days, children are embedded with GPS systems in utero, but in the 1980s, we had a low-rent solution to potential child snatching: the secret password. Every parent in my neighborhood used this method, teaching us to ask strangers for the secret password before they tried to take us anywhere. The built-in trick was that the potential kidnapper wouldn't know the password, so you could then scream or run away. It's an oddly polite reaction to a serious attempted crime, and, to my knowledge, it never worked once. Can you imagine?
"Get in the van."
"Pardon me, sir, but do you happen to know my secret password?"
"Uhhhh...pizza."
"'Twas peanut butter and jelly, my good man! Now unhand me and I'll be on my merry way." (pgs 64 and 65)
This method is indeed questionable and has hopefully gone out of fashion (the majority of child abductions happen by people the child knows, who would surely know the secret word), but I can tell you from experience it was still a Thing well into the 1990s.
The hardest thing to convey to my nieces and nephews about growing up is the concept of unadulterated freedom. My childhood had three modes-- being at school, being asleep, and being the fuck out of my mom's way.
When I was growing up, a successful day was one where I saw my mother for maybe two hours total. Helicopter parents were born in the 1980s, a direct response to their personal experience of being roundly ignored by their own parents. Children were not to be seen or heard and were definitely not to complain about any injuries sustained during the fifteen hours a day we were roaming the streets. The 1980s were a decade of neglect, and I haven't felt freedom or terror like it since. (pg 73)
To be fair, is she saying the concept of helicopter parenting was started in the 1980s? Or that helicopter parents themselves were literally born in the 1980s? The former has a degree of truth (I'd say the origins of helicopter parenting were at least the 1970s but started hitting their stride in the 1980s and 1990s) the latter does not. Again, I know this is the author's personal experience, but given the rise of the Child Safety Movement which was literally generation-defining, the 1980s were probably the decade in the United States where child neglect starting reaching its modern levels of concern. Child activities that were commonplace in a previous generation (leaving two children under six alone by themselves for an entire day in the 1920s, a five-year-old walking home alone from kindergarten in the 1950s) or even more recently beforehand (children allowed to play by themselves in the street with absolutely no adult supervision whatsoever) were rightly identified as harmful and dangerous, and no amount of pure luck or survivorship bias (not that that's the angle this author is trying to claim, to be clear) changes that fact.
Shitting [outside in the summertime playing] was a nonissue [compared to urinating outside]. To my knowledge, there wasn't a child alive in the 1980s who ever took a shit all summer long.
My favorite part of summer was eating outside. It happened rarely; grilling wasn't the culturally trumped up necessity that it is today, but on the super-hot days, no one wanted to turn on their ovens.(pg 77)
Again, these may be the author's experiences, but the prevalence of children allowed to play outside at that level in the 1980s varied wildly (the Child Safety Movement needed time to become commonplace, but it was moving fast) and grilling was absolutely the culturally trumped up necessity it is today, just not that the author experienced.
It was normal to be spanked. If you survived the eighties without getting hit, your parents were probably the kind of hippies who referred to your bursts of disobedience as an exploration of your wild spirit and believed that love energy was a powerful way to stop nukes from launching. (pgs 109 and 110)
While I'm willing to allow for the fact this is from the author's point of view and she's being facetious, I feel statements like this are troublesome. The benefits of physical punishment for children have long been shown to be far outweighed the the detriments (and you know when a parent is administering a physical punishment they are usually angry and frustrated and that's never a good combination).
________________________________________
We washed up at the art sink, drying our hands on the scratchy brown bark that passed for paper towels in the school system right up until I graduated high school. (pg 29)
Damned if when she described it, I wasn't rocketed back to elementary school (I seem to remember it being a bit better in middle and high school).
________________________________________
The author has a familiar but unexpected face in the acknowledgements.
Augusten Burroughs, without whom this book would not exist. Thank you for the myriad ways you told me to just write it, for responding enthusiastically to my childhood stories around the dinner table, for infusing me with hope in the beautiful example of your wild life, for the stunning depths of your friendship. There is no one else with whom I would rather watch four hours of Whitney Houston videos. (pgs 287 and 288)
I've had my issues with Augusten Borroughs beyond his more or less straight-up borrowing of David Sedaris's-- well, everything, from his casual misogyny to the horror stories I've heard from those having to deal with him in professional settings, so it's nice to hear something nice.
Final Grade: A
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