Product Overview
Mesmerizing... A portrait of something familiar gone wildly, tragically awry.
The New York Times
Sometimes, a child is born to a parent who cant be a parent, and, like a seedling in the shade, has to grow toward a distant sun. Ariel Leves spare and powerful memoir will remind us that family isnt everythingkindness and nurturing are.
Gloria Steinem
Ariel Leve grew up in Manhattan with an eccentric mother she describes as a poet, an artist, a self-appointed troublemaker and attention seeker. Leve learned to become her own parent, taking care of herself and her mothers needs. There would be uncontrolled, impulsive rages followed with denial, disavowed responsibility, and then extreme outpourings of affection. How does a child learn to feel safe in this topsyturvy world of conditional love?
Leve captures the chaos and lasting impact of a childs life under siege and explores how the coping mechanisms she developed to survive later incapacitated her as an adult. There were material comforts, but no emotional safety, except for summer visits to her fathers home in South East Asia-an escape that was terminated after he attempted to gain custody. Following the death of a loving caretaker, a succession of replacements raised Leverelationships which resulted in intense attachment and loss. It was not until decades later, when Leve moved to other side of the world, that she could begin to emancipate herself from the past. In a relationship with a man who has children, caring for them yields a clarity of what was missing.
In telling her haunting story, Leve seeks to understand the effects of chronic psychological maltreatment on a childs developing brain, and to discover how to build a life for herself that she never dreamed possible: An unabbreviated life.
