Shelf Awareness Review
Maureen Stanton won the Massachusetts Book Award in nonfiction for Killer Stuff and Tons of Money, a portrait of a master antique dealer and the flea market scene. In Body Leaping Backward: Memoir of a Delinquent Girlhood, Stanton's subject is herself, the scene her hometown of Walpole, Mass., and its omnipresent maximum-security prison.

"Dusted" is how Stanton spent several formative teen years in the mid-1970s. For her, angel dust--phencyclidine, more commonly known as PCP--and other drugs offered respite from the pains of her large family's broken home and her damaged sense of self. Teenage Stanton dreams of liberation, of "flying monkeys and smoking caterpillars and Big Sur and Haight-Ashbury and communes and love and everything from the sixties that we didn't know was already gone." Glamorous Walpole is not; Stanton's first job is at a gas station. (Trying for a job at the pharmacy, she is rebuffed: "We only hire pretty girls.")

Stanton often positions herself at arm's length, still reconciling the confluence of drugs, geography, love and dumb luck that shaped the life she longed to escape, one that somehow rarely saw consequences. "Wish I didn't have to come home at all" she writes in her diary in 1975. With hindsight, she adds: "There was nothing oppressive about my home life; the opposite--nobody was paying much attention." Perhaps aptly, Body Leaping Backward is not always tidy in its fractured blend of memories and research. But it is memorable and beautiful--people will certainly pay attention now. --Katie Weed, freelance writer and reviewer

Discover: This candid memoir explores a drug-addled adolescence in the landscape of a small Massachusetts prison town in the 1970s.

Maureen Stanton grew up in the town of Walpole, MA, home of the maximum corrections institution formerly called "Walpole Prison" and now renamed as Cedar Junction due to the association many made between the town and the prison. Maureen's mother used the prison as an example of where her 7 children would end up if they did not behave. Since 5 of those children were female, there is no way they'd serve time in that prison, but what do children know?

Maureen's drug use certain showed the prison threat meant nothing to her. The amount of drugs used was incredible to think she survived it all. I lived in the town of Walpole years after Maureen grew up and left the town and I never saw this drug use even though my children were teens at the time. A lot seems to come down to who your friends are and who those friends also associate with.

Her story is a scary one, but it also brought back memories of people mentioned in the story. I'm glad I read this. Thank you NetGalley for an advance reader copy in exchange for an honest review.

The kind of life story that makes you feel things, emotions, make you realize how hard some people's lives have been and how you should stop complaining about simple things or be bitchy when you have a small headache.

I felt for Maureen.

Well written, deep and meaningful. I wish I read more books like this.

5 stars from me!

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC of this book. This is my honest review. All opinions are my own.

I have reviewed this book for New York Journal of Books where it will be posted on the site the evening before the publication date.


Body Leaping Backward: Memoir of a Delinquent Girlhood by Maureen Stanton
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
July 16, 2019
10-1328900231
Memoir


Many young teens turn rebellious as they grow up. They're trying to gain their own individuality to become independent, and many times they do this by bucking the system. This is the situation Maureen Stanton faced. Born in 1960 and one of seven siblings, she and her family lived in Walpole, Massachusetts, a small town south of Boston known for its maximum security prison.

Every time they drove by the facility, Maureen's mom would comment that unless the children behaved themselves, they would end up sequestered behind the high concrete walls topped with barbed wire. Maybe she thought this would keep them in line.

For some reason, the prison fascinated Maureen. "The prison reminded me of the castle we visited in France, in the Loire Valley, where we lived for two years when my father worked on computer systems for the military . . . "

At that castle is where they got lost and locked in a room until a guard discovered and freed them after an half an hour.

". . . For years after I had dreams of wandering in the castle, the damp stone walls, those tall wooden doors. When my mother said, 'If you're not good, I'll put you in Walpole Prison,' I envisioned the castle in France."

Maureen displayed ambivalence toward her deeply religious, Catholic mother. Too young to understand the tenets of the religion, Maureen questioned going to confession. "I realized that no one checked whether you said the prayers, or said them right. The church used the honor system. Why did the priest trust someone he knew to be a sinner, someone who regularly—every Saturday!—arrived with a fresh litany of sins? Did he really think this person, this incorrigible recidivist person, was to be trusted carrying out her own penance? I must not have believed in God, or else I'd have worried that He was watching. Could I have been agnostic at the age of seven, eight? Instead of repenting, I kneeled at the altar for a certain amount of time, studying the intricate frescoes, Jesus on the cross, nails pounded into his living flesh, the ignominy of hanging alongside two thieves, his slow, agonizing, cotton-mouthed miserable death."

When Maureen turned 12 and her parents separated, things fell apart. Not long after, her mom, a strong proponent of the Ten Commandments began shoplifting. Could she be doing this due to lack of money? Maureen, embarrassed by her mom's actions saw this as a case of "do as I say, not as I do," and she, too, took up the act.

In 1975, at age 15, Maureen developed a sudden overwhelming depression. She cried constantly without understanding why. Two visits to a psychiatrist did not help so she refused to return. Before long, Maureen became incorrigible. Stealing from local stores, as well as drinking, she smoked marijuana and other drugs then escalated to angel dust on a daily basis. She tried any and all substances, and one can wonder, did she hope to self medicate the depression, use this as retribution for her parents' split and the fact that her overworked and overstressed mother did not have time for her, or was this "normal" teenage angst and hormones? Where she had once been a superior student and quite popular, Maureen's world spun out of control.

The friends she associated with yearned for "thrills" no matter how dangerous or illegal their actions. Though Maureen did not actually commit a crime, being in the presence of those who had, made her liable. Hardly ever home, she stayed out most nights, and when her mom was away for the weekend, her home became party central where it often got trashed by other teenagers out of control.

"I didn't see my family as broken, but it was true. Broken was the perfect word to describe what happened to my family when my parents separated; we splintered like a mirror dropped to the floor, the whole broken into individual units."
Maureen's recklessness began at a young age, especially her mother's threats of being incarcerated for wrongdoing. Did the prison, along with Norfolk, a minimum-security penitentiary in the next town, Pondville, a state-run cancer hospital, and Wrentham and Medfield State Mental Hospitals in close proximity to her home incite Maureen's imagination?

This was the era of the assassinations of President Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Bobby Kennedy, the upsurge in Vietnam, Nixon's war on drugs, hippies, bra burnings, protests, and free love. It's no wonder some of the younger generation went to the extremes. Morals and norms were shifting quickly, and the country was in chaos.

Walpole, MA, and the surrounding areas are very aptly described during that time, and the emotions, not just that the teens experienced, but also Maureen's parents demonstrate how difficult times and circumstances were.

Maureen states: "Sometimes I wonder how I survived those high school years, how I wasn't maimed or killed the hundreds of time I got into car with people so fucked up they could barely stay in the lane, or by getting behind the wheel of a car myself after drinking, smoking pot or angel dust, taking speed or acid. Worse, I might have hurt or killed someone else. I could have been raped by strangers with whom I hitched a ride, or by boys on whose couches or in whole cars I passed out."

One can only empathize with young Maureen, and it would be no surprise if many of her contemporaries suffered the same disillusion as she. To open up and share her story with others must have been difficult, but also cathartic for her with the hope it helps other youngsters who feel alone and disenchanted with their lives.

Body Leaping Backwards is a gritty memoir about a teenager growing up in Walpole with the shadow of the prison looming over her.

It is an interesting read for giving some context about what drug culture was like in the 70s and how it permeated normal life. The author drip feeds in cultural information about famous Walpole prison inmates and how PCP affected well-known people in American society.

Nonetheless, though it has some very interesting parts, not much actually happens in this text: the author's childhood is described, then her parents go through a relatively amicable divorce - the sadness of which pushes her into an adolescence of taking a lot of drugs. At times it felt a bit self-indulgent with the fairly conventional aspects of childhood being described in great amounts of detail. I think it would have benefitted from being a bit shorter.

Thank you to NetGalley for the advanced copy of this text in exchange for an honest review.

Maureen Stanton's memoir <i>Body Leaping Backward: Memoir of a Delinquent Girlhood</i> is the story of the trials and tribulations of growing up in Walpole, Massachusetts in the 1970s.

Overall this is an engaging, well told memoir, with an amazing sense of place (as a person who grew up in Massachusetts, I especially appreciated the shout-out to Building 19!) Though, honestly, I expected this memoir to be a bit more dramatic, (see the author's addiction to Angel Dust, her short career as a petty criminal, the ever looming specter of Walpole Prison), it all just sort of washes over you like a drug-addled dream of the 1970s, with no real drama, no real consequences.

The most interesting facet of this book is the idea of a life lived in the shadow of Walpole prison. What does that mean for the identity of a town? For a young person? And while I appreciate Stanton's struggle, the fact that she was able to overcome so many obstacles and create a successful life for herself, it would have been nice to see a bit more awareness of the privilege that kept her out of the prison system.

On the whole, this was a really enjoyable read. Though I suspect it will resonate most with readers who have some knowledge of the area in the 1970s, I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys memoirs about delinquent girls, and their ability to rise from the ashes of their own destruction.

Thanks to Net Galley I received a digital advanced copy of Body Leaping Backward: Memoir of a Delinquent Childhood. I learned a lot about PCP, angel dust, and drug culture of the 1970’s. I know how easy marijuana was to get in the 1980’s in suburbia but I had no idea what other drugs were readily available especially in the 1970’s before the Just Say No campaign and the “War on Drugs.”

I am now a mother of teenage daughters which gave me a different perspective; at times wanted to shake Maureen, smack her, and hug her. I rooted for and her friends and family.

This is a heart wrenching story of what happened when parents divorced at a time when it wasn’t common and when there weren’t the resources there are now. It was also interesting the impact a prison had on the community just by being there.

Overall this is well worth reading!

Maureen grew up as one of seven children in a prison town. Her parents divorced, causing her mother financial hardship, which lead to her shoplifting. A troubled teenager, Maureen fell into drugs and shoplifting herself.

Most of the book seemed to be one big brag session about what drugs Maureen did, what crimes she committed, and how she got away with it. I'm sure this wasn't the intent of the author but nonetheless, this is how it came across. Overall, this book was not for me.

A gut-wrenching look at the author’s descent into crime and drug abuse. It is beautifully written and tragic, yet hopeful nonetheless.