A Review of T Kira Madden’s Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls (Bloomsbury USA, 2019)

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A Review of T Kira Madden’s Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls (Bloomsbury USA, 2019)
By Stephen Hong Sohn

I read this memoir around the same time as Anuradha Bhagwati’s Unbecoming, which seemed to me a fitting to read together. Both memoirs deal with the complications of growing up. I’ll let B&N take it away from here: “Acclaimed literary essayist T Kira Madden's raw and redemptive debut memoir is about coming of age and reckoning with desire as a queer, biracial teenager amidst the fierce contradictions of Boca Raton, Florida, a place where she found cult-like privilege, shocking racial disparities, rampant white-collar crime, and powerfully destructive standards of beauty hiding in plain sight. As a child, Madden lived a life of extravagance, from her exclusive private school to her equestrian trophies and designer shoe-brand name. But under the surface was a wild instability. The only child of parents continually battling drug and alcohol addictions, Madden confronted her environment alone. Facing a culture of assault and objectification, she found lifelines in the desperately loving friendships of fatherless girls. With unflinching honesty and lyrical prose, spanning from 1960s Hawai’i to the present-day struggle of a young woman mourning the loss of a father while unearthing truths that reframe her reality, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls is equal parts eulogy and love letter. It's a story about trauma and forgiveness, about families of blood and affinity, both lost and found, unmade and rebuilt, crooked and beautiful.”

It’s interesting that they introduce Madden as an essayist, as I was listening to a podcast with Madden in which she states that this work is a hybrid essay/memoir type work. I’ve begun wondering what really is the difference between essays and memoir, and the only thing I’ve really come up with is the question of length and of content. The essay can be on any particular subject, but is fairly short in length, while the memoir is typically a longer form, focused on the subjectivity of one’s memories and experiences. Because Madden’s work is so episodic in structure and non-chronological in layout, the essay moniker seems appropriate, while the individual parts accrue larger cohesion as a whole, thus leading us to understand it as a memoir. Madden admits in that podcast as a kind of side joke that we shouldn’t tell the publisher that she’s billed it herself as an essay-memoir, perhaps as a node that the work doesn’t achieve market legibility by being listed in this way, but I am digressing away from the content.

The description does a very good job of giving us the particulars here, but the title is itself a little bit misleading: “fatherless” is seen at least at that point in the memoir as something that is more metaphorical for Madden, whose father (and actually both parents) aren’t always very physically or psychically present for her. Madden’s teenage years are largely spent finding alternative communities beyond the home, but without much supervision, she experiences a violent sexual assault and must contend with a series of complicated relationships throughout this period. But despite the “fatherless” title, this essay-memoir collection is also about Madden’s extreme and fierce love for her mother and father, and how this collection is as much a tribute to her parents as it is about finding her way in a sometimes parent-less world.

The concluding chapters are particularly affecting. Readers are slowly prepped for Madden’s eventual reveal that her father has died, and that’s she’s trying to negotiate a life without him. When the term “fatherless” becomes literal through death, Madden’s work takes on a highly affective, elegiac tonality that is perfectly luminescent. Never hagiographic in its depictions, the essay-memoir leads us to understand Madden’s father and mother as fully enfigured individuals, especially flawed but nevertheless cherished and with the ability to cherish when they managed to be fully present. Rumor has it that Madden is working on a novel (that had taken a backseat during a period of time when Madden was in mourning), and I’ll be first in line for that book!

Buy the Book Here!

Review Author: Stephen Hong Sohn
Review Editor: Gnei Soraya Zarook

If you have any questions or want us to consider your book for review, please don’t hesitate to contact us via email!
Prof. Stephen Hong Sohn at ssohnucr@gmail.com
Gnei Soraya Zarook, PhD Student in English, at gzaro001@ucr.edu