What They're Saying
“Mary Catherine Bateson has written that ‘women have always lived discontinuous and contingent lives…the individual effort to compose a life, framed by birth and death and carefully pieced together from disparate elements, becomes a statement on the unity of living.’ In Rotting Floorboards and Debut Dreams, Kathryn Rabuzzi interweaves memoir and memory to compose a life that is as real as it is imagined, but which is definitely readable. This is a book that invites the reader to settle in and get to know an author of vision and creativity.” ~ Margaret Susan Thompson, Maxwell School of Citizenship & Public Affairs
"The remarkable story of a young woman's coming of age. Intelligent, perceptive and forgiving. Told with compassion, lottsa humor and grace." ~ Gerard Moses, Syracuse Stage "Read this book, remember your own childhood, and smile." ~ Paul DeLima |
Featured book: Rotting Floorboards and Debut Dreams
The newest memoir by Kathryn Rabuzzi - Rotting Floorboards and Debut Dreams: Tripping through Childhood before LSD.
Spoken in the voice of 'Alicia,' a childhood alter-ego, this memoir details a strange life as the only child of old-line WASPs living out the American Dream - in terrifying reverse. Starting at the top, 'Alicia' experiences the descent of both parents. Mama, with a Biochemistry Ph. D., is conducting early radiation research at Sloan-Kettering [then Memorial Hospital] when she elopes from a Manhattan Speak Easy with Howard, Alicia's never practicing lawyer , perpetual dreamer, Daddy. The bizarre family odyssey begins wen Howard's newest dream, to be a Hudson Valley 'gentleman farmer', derails with no warning, following Pearl Harbor, and enlistment.
Life from then on accelerates in oddity, taking 'Alicia' and Mama first to Manhattan, then on to Plainfield, Vermont - for the Bohemian Eden of Goddard College. Out of the blue, two years post-War, Daddy phones, having just bought a new farm while launching and 'liquidly refreshing' himself, Alicia deals with the dream-infused 'reality' inside the house, and that of the world outside the door. A backdrop of nightly drinking and fighting is stark contrast to the nightly farm chores done all alone.
Yet each summer Alicia is a repeat quest at her aunt's posh summer camp where most campers arrive in chauffeur driven Cadillacs. Here she must perform yet another struggle to distinguish 'real' from 'unreal.' Who are these privileged young Southern belles in the making? Who is she, 'Alicia'?
Spoken in the voice of 'Alicia,' a childhood alter-ego, this memoir details a strange life as the only child of old-line WASPs living out the American Dream - in terrifying reverse. Starting at the top, 'Alicia' experiences the descent of both parents. Mama, with a Biochemistry Ph. D., is conducting early radiation research at Sloan-Kettering [then Memorial Hospital] when she elopes from a Manhattan Speak Easy with Howard, Alicia's never practicing lawyer , perpetual dreamer, Daddy. The bizarre family odyssey begins wen Howard's newest dream, to be a Hudson Valley 'gentleman farmer', derails with no warning, following Pearl Harbor, and enlistment.
Life from then on accelerates in oddity, taking 'Alicia' and Mama first to Manhattan, then on to Plainfield, Vermont - for the Bohemian Eden of Goddard College. Out of the blue, two years post-War, Daddy phones, having just bought a new farm while launching and 'liquidly refreshing' himself, Alicia deals with the dream-infused 'reality' inside the house, and that of the world outside the door. A backdrop of nightly drinking and fighting is stark contrast to the nightly farm chores done all alone.
Yet each summer Alicia is a repeat quest at her aunt's posh summer camp where most campers arrive in chauffeur driven Cadillacs. Here she must perform yet another struggle to distinguish 'real' from 'unreal.' Who are these privileged young Southern belles in the making? Who is she, 'Alicia'?