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    Ghostbread
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    Ghostbread
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    Ghostbread
    Ebook271 pages3 hours

    Ghostbread

    By Sonja Livingston

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    “When you eat soup every night, thoughts of bread get you through.” Ghostbread makes real for us the shifting homes and unending hunger that shape the life of a girl growing up in poverty during the 1970s.

    One of seven children brought up by a single mother, Sonja Livingston was raised in areas of western New York that remain relatively hidden from the rest of America. From an old farming town to an Indian reservation to a dead-end urban neighborhood, Livingston and her siblings follow their nonconformist mother from one ramshackle house to another on the perpetual search for something better.

    Along the way, the young Sonja observes the harsh realities her family encounters, as well as small moments of transcendent beauty that somehow keep them going. While struggling to make sense of her world, Livingston perceives the stresses and patterns that keep children—girls in particular—trapped in the cycle of poverty.

    Larger cultural experiences such as her love for Wonder Woman and Nancy Drew and her experiences with the Girl Scouts and Roman Catholicism inform this lyrical memoir. Livingston firmly eschews sentimentality, offering instead a meditation on what it means to hunger and showing that poverty can strengthen the spirit just as surely as it can grind it down.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Georgia Press
    Release dateSep 1, 2010
    ISBN9780820337500
    Unavailable
    Ghostbread
    Author

    Sonja Livingston

    SONJA LIVINGSTON is an assistant professor in the MFA Program at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her first book, Ghostbread (Georgia), won the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Book Prize for Nonfiction. She is also the author of the recent essay collection Queen of the Fall: A Memoir of Girls and Goddesses.

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    Reviews for Ghostbread

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    • 4/5
      Memoirs are my favorite reads, and Ghostbread is easily going to be added as a favorite! Sonja Livingston pours her heart and soul into her story of growing up during the 1970's in the Rochester, NY area. Living with her single mother and siblings, life was tough. The family was poverty-stricken and times were hard. There was always church in Sonja's life...a bright spot for her to meet friends and neighbors. It took me back to a time when you knew everyone on your block, all of the neighborhood kids played together, and were called in to supper when the streetlights came on. Livingston's prose is gritty and honest...this is a powerful memoir that demands to be read.