Body Leaping Backward: Memoir of a Delinquent Girlhood ~ Maureen Stanton

Hardcover: 240 pages

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (July 16, 2019)

What a wild life!

Born to strict catholic parents who often threatened to throw their children into the nearby maximum security prison if they stepped out of line, Maureen grew up attempting to fit into a very straight and narrow mold.

That all began to crumble when her parents went through a divorce, forcing her once perfect (at least in image) mother to make drastic changes to her own moral code in order to keep up the life style she believed she and her children deserved.

Shoplifting, larceny, and other desperate measures sent the then imperiled family down a rather rocky road. Along that road, Maureen falls into a hole of angel dust and her own desperate measures.

At once intriguing and heartbreaking, this is one family’s story of reacting to life on life’s terms and while it makes for a very interesting read, it made my social worker heart break at points. I am so proud of Maureen for coming out on the other side of her childhood and living to tell the tale.

Photo by Heather Perry

About Maureen Stanton

Maureen Stanton is an award-winning nonfiction writer, and author of “BodyLeaping Backward: Memoir of a Delinquent Girlhood,” a People Magazine “Best New Books” pick, and “Killer Stuff and Tons of Money,” winner of the 2012 Massachusetts Book Award in nonfiction. Her essays and memoirs have been published in many literary journals, including Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, The Florida Review, New England Review, and River Teeth, among others. She has received the Iowa Review Prize, the American Literary Review Prize, Pushcart Prizes, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and Maine Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowships. She has an M.F.A. from Ohio State University, and teaches at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.

Find out more about Maureen at her website, and follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

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