T Kira Madden lived a privileged life in Boca Raton, Florida thanks to the wealth made possible by a designer shoe.  Underneath the happy image that included a big house, private schools, and horse trophies, Madden was on her own from a young age while her parents battled addictions and each other.  She searched for love and acceptance in destructive places, suffered objectification and ridicule, and faced racism regularly, all while remaining completely devoted to her parents.Madden's memoir is...

only on book 3 of 2022 and I’ve already found a favorite of the year :]4.5 stars, short rtc

This memoir in essays is so incredibly powerful and heartbreaking. I’m in awe of Madden’s raw talent—this beautiful tribute to her complicated family and herself.The first half of the book buzzes with late 90s and early 00s nostalgia as Madden recalls her middle school and high school years in Boca Raton, Florida. There’s the Juniper Breeze lotion and the Boys 2 Men playing at seventh grade dances and the harrowing ways that vulnerable teenage girls convince themselves that they own even the mos...

My review of this will be fairly short since I put it down for pandemic stress reasons and took far too long to get back to it so it's not fresh in my head. This is not the kind of memoir I usually read, it is filled with beautiful prose, it is not focused on a particular story or theme, the style can be extremely disjointed, jumping from one person and time to another. And yet, I really liked it. It may be a fancier memoir than I usually go for, but something about the way Madden connects with

Agh good grief this is raw and gutting and gorgeous. "Unflinching" is a pretty overused word for memoirs, but this one definitely feels that way, staring without blinking down overdoses, coerced teenage blowjobs, intense parental misconduct, the unfathomable cruelty of teenage girls, the tantalizing temptations of money, warped sexual bravado, desperate loneliness, burgeoning queer identity, the chasms of cultural misunderstandings, familial death, and more and more. It's a beautiful devastation...

I loved this - but it is also a memoir that needs the reader to trust the author. T Kira Madden's memoir is impeccably structured in a way that I highly appreciated by the end. She tells of her life in fragments, not always taking time to ground the reader, and some the chapters did not work for me - until the incredible last essay that reframes much of what came before and had me so in awe that I set staring at nothing after finishing the book. For me, the language alone would have been enough

This memoir is everything I search for in writing. Hopeful in spite of loss, redeeming without letting cruelty off the hook, and searching for truth. How do we love people when they continually disappoint us? When they fail us? Are there some people that are impossible to untangle ourselves from, like our parents, our families? Will we always love these people so much? These are questions that have always seemed unanswerable to me. Whether Madden meant to answer or not, I found some responses to...

Madden writes strikingly about her childhood and young adulthood in a fragmented way that is quite powerful. She veers back and forth between present and past - mixing up the joy and trauma and confusion of her life and bringing the reader along with her.

A memoir in essays, a memoir in moments, a memoir of courage, a memoir of fearlessness. Writers of colour are redefining the genre and this sits perfectly next to Heavy by Kiese Laymon. I let Madden’s words and experiences wash over me and it was a singular and poignant experience. The structural complexity and layering here are stunningly crafted. Mind blown.

With such raw and emotive prose, reading this book felt like watching a series of bright, vivid movie scenes play one after another. T Kira Madden details her childhood in Boca Raton, Florida, a place of cult-like privilege and crime and extravagance and danger. She writes about her forced foray into independence as the daughter of parents who both dealt with substance addictions, how she faced objectification and formed intense friendships and reckoned with her queer, biracial identity. Long Li...

I wish I could give 10 stars. I cried as it ended. A gorgeous and raw book.

this book hit me right in the heart.as madden weaves together events from her childhood (and adulthood), i cry and grimace and ache right along with her. a youth full of longing, and populated with father figures who can't give her what she needs. ouch.her writing is beautiful, and the essays interconnect marvelously. sometimes something is briefly mentioned in one section, then hits like a gut punch when it's revisited with greater significance later on. absolutely wonderfully done. much admira...

| | blog | tumblr | ko-fi | |“I wanted to be the diametric opposite of who I was; am. To get gone.” T Kira Madden’s bold and unsparing storytelling makes for a brutal yet ultimately kaleidoscopic coming of age. This is easily one of the best memoirs I’ve read this year. Madden’s memoir makes for a bittersweet read, one that I look forward to revisiting again. “Did I want to die? Not really, no. I wanted the beauty of the doomed. Missing girls are never forgotten, I thought, so long as they don...

“When I think of my father, I think of my heart breaking in stages. A dull pain, then piercing. Electric. Still, somehow, gradual.” T Kira Madden [bloomsburypublishing #partner] last month I read and love T Kira Madden’s Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless GirlsThis gem is nothing short of amazing — from the way it was written and constructed. The authors voice is very strong — it commands your attention with every detail. It embodies many things as well — parents whom are addicts, queer awakening...

Update: Longer thoughts here: https://www.guernicamag.com/in-search...I came to this extraordinary memoir of linked essays through "The Feels of Love," a gobsmackingly good essay that the author wrote for Guernica Magazine. "The Feels of Love," which I have taught in every writing class since 2016, is a wrenching, vivid look at the rippling consequences of teenage sexual assault. I was excited for LLtToFG (great title!), and could only hope that the other essays would match the experience. And,

I'm of two minds on this memoir. The prose style is engaging and first rate. Madden is a natural stylist. But in terms of content, I'm not a fan and I know that's weird because I don't mean to challenge or judge anyone's life experiences. But I'm over reading memoirs about rich people bemoaning their self-inflicted woes. At least 80% of this memoir is the story of rich people (her parents and her) doing incredibly stupid things. It centers in south Florida and focuses quite a bit on private scho...

Before I read this, I considered myself to be a relatively honest person.Now I know that I, alongside the global populace excluding T Kira Madden, am a deceitful horrible devilish liar.This is the most honest book in the world.With every passing day I grow closer to reading exclusively memoirs, and I have no regrets. What work of fiction can give me the story of Steve Madden’s niece, the at-first-illegitimate daughter of one of the closest allies of the Wolf of Wall Street, as she navigates drug...

Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls: A MemoirThis was a quite gritty, but real memoir, written about a young girl growing up in Florida with a mother who was involved with someone else’s husband at first. They eventually got together and married, but it was not an auspicious beginning. The girl seems to grow up under a bit of a cloud, with a mannequin for a housemate and eventually dealing with both parents having sobriety issues. She has two step-brothers but they don’t really become close,...

Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls was a breath of fresh air.  If you isolate many of its thematic elements and you read a lot of this type of memoir, there's plenty of familiarity - coming of age, coming to terms with queerness, racial identity, sexual assault, trauma, drugs, love, family ties.  But T Kira Madden does something completely unique with it, revealing enough of her life to the reader in each chapter to keep us absorbed, yet employing a non-linear structure so faultlessly that

‘Focus, he says. Move it. Put the hurt somewhere else.’.memoirs have always been my favorite. there is something that feels so healing and honest to me about taking that leap and putting it all out there. it’s an authenticity and an experience i never want to take for granted. Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls by @tkmadden was no exception to this feeling, and is a memoir worthy of all your attention..there was something so fascinating about this reading experience— like Madden has the abi...