Catch Me Before I Fall
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
Because she was black, Clare Malone was the talk of her Liverpool council estate. Her mother and her mother's husband were both white and from birth she was stigmatised for this proof of her mother's infidelity. Clare was left in a bare, filthy council house to fend for herself and her siblings until, aged nine, she was placed in the care of an order of strict and often cruel nuns.
She finally embarked on a settled life as a nanny and pre-school teacher, but she couldn't escape from herself and the black cloud of her childhood. After suffering a breakdown, Clare was placed in a series of dehumanising psychiatric hospitals for many years until she was helped to remember the horrifying secret of the childhood she thought she had buried forever. Now, with support, she has rebuilt her life as Rosie Childs and has moved on. She is truly happy at last.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Childs, born Clare Malone, was dropped into the world on the couch of her mother's dirty house in Liverpool in 1954. In this heart-wrenching read, Childs tells of growing up as a lone mixed-race child in an all-white area, where she is the shamefully visible product of her dissolute mother's extramarital trysts. Filthy and neglected, she and her siblings scrape by with stolen bread and lice-filled heads until Childs is nine and they are removed from her mother's custody into an orphanage, run by punishing nuns. Childs rebelliously adapts to their vigilantly tough custody until she is discharged at the age of 15, unadopted and afraid. She is subsequently placed with foster parents found by her mother, with whom she has sporadic contact, and makes the first of her many lifetime name changes. After a period of success as a nanny and preschool teacher, she enters college at 30 and has a breakdown that sends her on an ugly carousel of self-mutilation and eating disorders. Somehow this horrible existence remains hopeful: her indomitable spirit is heartening, and the book is hard to put down. Vulnerable but without self-pity, Childs tells a story of survival that's a shot across the bow from the many unwanted children.
