This memoir of a biracial girl growing up in Boca Raton, FL was extremely enjoyable and lyrically written. It beautifully discusses the ups and downs of growing up during female adolescence.

T Kira expertly builds a world around her childhood, filled with vivid settings, compelling main and side characters. There are surprises throughout, and I found myself tearing through huge chunks of this book at a time when I'd only planned on reading one chapter before bed. She manipulates the memoir's timeline expertly, doling out information in small doses that illuminate everything that came before.

This book makes me want to cry, and rage, and howl. This girl was not only fatherless, she was motherless, grandmother-less, friend-less and community-less. There is something very wrong in a society that lets this child think that being raped by two teen-agers in the back of a car at a mall is an expression of love. And yet, as T. Kira replays her life, and her mother’s life and her father’s life, you begin to wonder if everyone is always doing the best they can with really terrible material. I don’t know the answer to that, but I do know this is a memoir that will break your heart over and over again.

I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

This memoir has it all - lonely childhood, parents struggling with addiction, sexual assault, bi-racial young woman also dealing with her sexual identity. I was emotionally involved from the first chapter and had my heart gutted when I read about Madden’s sexual assault at just 13-years-old. Madden’s writing is gritty, open, honest, vulnerable, and brave. Many times my mama heart wanted to reach through the pages to hug her. She is resilient and hopeful and I loved this story so much!

This memoir stopped me in my tracks. Madden’s writing is so striking, so precise, so honest—her debut reminded me of Lydia Yuknavitch in style, but with a rawness uninfluenced by other writers. This book is at times painful, and any reader would feel wrenched by the situations Madden describes. But her doggedness to survive, even when she thinks she doesn’t want to, is the ultimate redeemer of her story—a story that is worth every minute of your time.

I wanted love the size of a fist. Something I could hold, something hot knuckled and alive.

Growing up as a privileged child isn’t always as glorious as the rest of us think, and of course no one wants to hear you complain because you have all that wealth, the private schools, horses, fantastic shoes but as a biracial child coming of age in Boca Raton, Florida -T Kira Madden struggles mightily. Born as a love child, early childhood begins with a mannequin father whose heft has more presence and love than her own flesh and blood daddy. Her beautiful Chinese Hawaiian mother knows her best and as single mother does everything she can to protect them, the mannequin is her mother’s idea used as a stand in for her her father’s sporadic visits to their mice infested apartment. Her father who feels like a giant stranger. A successful older man who already has an established family shifts sails and decides to live with T Kira and her mother, so begins the fierce memoir.

When her parents aren’t fighting or in drunken, drug-fueled fights her dad is passed out on the couch in a stupor, life is mad obsession over her show horses, an uncle who is unlucky in love, massive humiliation during junior high, hunger to fit in, and the gut wrenching loss of innocence that isn’t confronted until years later. Her father in their life means overflowing ashtrays, they’re rich but live off cheap food, life going off the hinges as much as the wooden doors in the house after one of his rages. Like this, she still loves him. Then there are secrets, so many secrets through generations and her father isn’t the only one with things to hide. As her family grows so too does an understanding of all the things she didn’t see while her eyes were smeared with youth. There is cousin Cindy and her beauty, which isn’t always a prelude to a charmed life. When T Kira ‘finds her own pretty’, she goes wild with her tribe of fatherless girls. The exotic features that once made her prey to kids in school with racial slurs becomes ‘sexy’ among her girls. Parties, drugs, sexual exploration, losing people and herself until the girl from Boca becomes a New York woman. In college she allows herself deeper love and intimacy with girls and faces what it means to be queer.

There are moments of such honesty it makes you wince. She lets too much happen to her, living at times on autopilot, as young people hungry for love and attention do. Terrible things happen because of her trusting naivete. Her parents didn’t shelter her from all the adult situations were tangled i, and it costs her. We are shaped in childhood, but it doesn’t have to be our ruin. There is love between T Kira and her father, but the confusion of living in the storms of his moods, his violence towards her mother, threatening her as well, wrecks her home. In his absence her mother destroys herself with drugs, and her father abandons them, leaving T Kira to be the caregiver, addiction in a parent a force someone so young shouldn’t have to contend with. Children are meant to be the needy ones. It wasn’t always nightmarish, she has sweet memories of her father taking her to her first baseball game, their trip to Vegas when she was five, but there is so much distance between them. She tells us at seventeen of New York “I’ve moved here to be closer to my dad. I want to walk his streets, eat his favorite pastrami, try on a new relationship with him.” She loses her father, every remnant of him is ash, except the memories.

“Ghosts are better than nothing. Ghosts move. They want things. To haunt each other, then, is a way for my mother and I to keep him. He is more than a voice in the walls., a Ouija board movement, an iridescent cloud in the dark; he can exist here, inside us, through possession. We do our best to play the roles. Our bodies are not big enough.”

Falling in love with someone, I think, is at least like that.”



An innocuous Christmas present after her father’s death pries her mother’s past open wide. There may be more love out there than T Kira could have ever hoped for. The end of the memoir was moving and heartbreaking. It’s an unfinished story, because T Kira has so much living left, and so the family grows. It’s not just about the ache of missing ones father while he is alive and dead, her mother is a larger than life presence too, especially in the later years.

Others have called this gritty, and it is, it has its funny moments, particularly in her blind youth, because no matter how cool people claim they were, there was an awkward desperate phase we can all relate to. You want to jump into the pages and stop her from embarrassing herself as much as save T Kira from dangerous decisions. Rich doesn’t mean happy, being wealthy isn’t protection against the dirt of the adult world. It is a story of surviving your childhood, and coming to terms with your parents flaws while also recognizing they were people before they had you, people who made immense sacrifices and mistakes. It is holding on to the love you find in the memories, even those we revise.

Publication Date: March 5, 2019

Bloomsbury USA

The style of this book wasn't for me--I tend to avoid contemporary memoirs that feel overly precious or overwritten, and this is both. However, Madden has a unique, interesting voice and I am looking forward to reading more in the future.

T Kira Madden has written a beautiful memoir – poetic, painful, honest. Despite the title, which may made me think that perhaps Madden didn’t have a family, it was quite the opposite. Madden has a family, and many members make an appearance, but at many times, she is as alone as if she doesn’t have a father. Growing up, her parents struggled with drugs and alcohol, and Madden would find herself navigating her most awkward moments of her childhood and adolescence with glimpses of her family versus a strong dose of her friends by her side.

But, and I have much respect for this resilience, she never writes with bitterness or hate towards her family. She writes from her perspective and tells her stories as they have unfolded. They don’t appear to be discolored from negative feelings. What is notable is that as she ages, most friends are on the outskirts, just voices on phone calls after many years of silence, while her parents and family remain present.

There are many instances where Madden has experienced pain and trauma, and she writes it in such a raw, honest manner. She is definitely not a blamer. I saw fun pieces of our shared generation - a time period comprised of a young Britney Spears, body glitter, and cucumber melon scented everything from Bath and Body Works. Her life and memories are not a clear-cut, all-bad or all-good collection.

It’s hard to write a review for a memoir. How are you supposed to lay judgment regarding someone else’s experiences? It would feel invalidating and wrong to read about someone else’s life and say, “I didn’t like reading that.” Thankfully, I don’t have to do that. I truly enjoyed and appreciate the window into Madden’s past.

Also – I’m grateful that Madden explained how her first name was chosen. I was curious about that, and hoped she’d mention it.

Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls: A Memoir


This 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, mostly visiting at odd school breaks and maybe Christmas break. There’s plenty of money for a good school, but she doesn’t seem to fit in well since she spends so much time alone talking to her store mannequin. She’s not real good at making friends and gets teased a lot. Being bi-racial and beginning to become aware that she likes girls more than guys isn’t helping her popularity either. The book jumps around some, but I found it pretty readable. Perhaps because I grew up in a chaotic household myself where there was alcohol and things got out of control many times. When that’s your normal you can relate. It doesn’t seem strange when the mother keeps wanting to go check to see if the father is at the bar on their way home from school, stopping at the grocery store in the same plaza.

The book follows as they get older and situations happen that get more intense. I won’t give away any more. It’s worth reading, rather different in some ways. I didn’t find it all that humorous, as touted; perhaps sharing the pain of a similar way of growing up with secrets, I feel more the painful side of things, the times that were embarrassing and painful and such. For memoir readers. My thanks for the advance electronic copy that was provided by NetGalley, author T. Kira Madden, and the publisher for my fair review.

3.5 stars of 5

Beautifully written and poignant memoir by T. Kira Madden. This book surprised me, but in a good way. It's a tale that explores privilege - both what it gives and what it cannot protect you from.

I love a good, gritty memoir, so Madden's book (one I chose primarily for the incredible title) definitely delivered. Madden (related to the Steve Madden shoe company) lived a strange childhood filled with drug-addled parents and a painful private school experience, and this backdrop created some truly odd and unique memories to recount. I think Madden has a wonderful way with words - her writing is graphic, intense, and insanely honest. I did have a hard time with how much the book jumped around though; it was difficult for me to keep track of what age Madden was during different events. I would have given this book five stars if the narrative was more chronological. I also wished the events at the end of the book with her mother and long-lost relatives had been given more time (maybe rather than the many drug and alcohol-filled exploits of her youth). Madden's voice is definitely a powerful one, and I'll be interested to see what she does next.

Raw real open honest.A childhood of privilege a childhood you would think was perfect a book that brings you into this world& shares all.Gorgeous writing highly recommend,#netgalley #bloomsburyusa

I am unable to read and review pdf files. If a book is unavailable in kindle format, it is helpful if the publisher mentions that in the description.

Wow! I loved this incredibly moving, funny, devastating memoir about girlhood and grief and the complications of family history. This is a gorgeous, necessary book.

I have read everything T Kira Madden has published online or in literary magazines and was really excited for this memoir, not only because of the content, but because of the way she wrote the Cindy essay and the Guernica essay before this book came out. I guess I felt like it was a little too long and then when we got to the larger family connections at the end, that really solidified this lifestyle in Boca, it was almost too little too late. I loved the essays that had been previously published, but a lot of the book fell flat for me or felt like it was hitting certain markers that make memoirs interesting rather than telling a really heartbreaking story of adolescents.

I guess maybe I don't agree with marketing as well. This book has a lot of density but sometimes I thought those really dense subjects were just washed over. I hate when people say they want more of something when an author is so clearly leaving it all on the page, but I ended up feeling a little bit like how people feel about Joan Didion, rich girl gets memoir stories. Because the parts that mattered so heavily (her mom giving up the baby, how she was treated by her friends in Florida for being biracial, what she takes from her biracial heritage) got the shortest space and the parts that felt like a checklist of current memoir (drugs, teenage years, family tension, spiraling) all got the most space. I think I might just be disappointed, but I so badly don't want to be. I may need to read it again. I really respect T Kira Madden and I wanted to love this one.

T. Kira Madden has accomplished the challenging feat of writing a memoir about a childhood of privilege while also depicting the struggles and unhappiness she felt. Her writing is excellent and the situations she portrays are just bizarre enough to separate herself from other memoirs. She also shows the ways that privilege cannot always save you from the discrimination of others.

Thank you to NetGalley and Bloomsbury Publishing for gifting me with an ARC of T Kira Madden’s raw memoir. In exchange I offer my unbiased review.

I have read many memoirs but none have affected me like this one did. Written with such honesty and credibility, I was amazed at the bravery and resilience T Kira possesses. The mama tiger in me was raging for young Kira, as she painfully relates her early years up until present day. One kind of forgets how brutal high school girls can be but the descriptions on these pages were so visceral and startling that I honestly felt like I was right there with Kira. Although she was raised in a privileged neighborhood her life was far from perfect. Her story is shocking and relentless, full of pain and sadness, yet there are so many tender moments. The heart of this story is the constant reminder that a child’s love is unconditional and sometimes parents just don’t appreciate that gift.
Be prepared for an unbelievably brutal read with some surprising revelations that literally left me with goosebumps.

. When this galley passed through my "you might enjoy this" I wasn't so sure at first - reading the memoir of someone who grew up with what appears to be a sizeable little pile of privilege isn't usually my steez, but I'd actually found my way to this Prada-bespectacled author via my newest Twitter account the same day I'd seen this book on NetGalley.

Since I am, in the end, a bit of a memoir junkie, I decided to give it a go, got behind on my studies even, and had to decode a pretty oddly-formatted galley (NOT the author's fault). T Kira Madden is an excellent writer.

Privileged kids can have crappy upbringings too, of course, but when you're born with a plastic spoon in your mouth, it can be hard to drum up compassion for those who got the silver ones unless can you withhold judgment, open your mind a bit and just listen to another woman speak her piece.. Glad I did. There's a lot of emergence here.

What kind of book does a memoir writer produce next? Who knows - many don't. I hope she does. She's got a good gift.