Johnny's Girl
A Daughter's Memoir of Growing Up In Alaska's Underworld
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- 18,99 €
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- 18,99 €
Publisher Description
Johnny’s Girl the nationally acclaimed memoir of growing up in Alaska’s underworld as the only child of gambler John F. “Johnny” Rich and exotic dancer, Frances “Ginger” Rich. It chronicles Alaska’s mean streets and her parent’s tragic lives that were cut short.
Kim Rich was an ordinary girl trapped in an extraordinary childhood, someone who dreamed of going to parties and getting good grades while living in an after-hours hell of gamblers, pimps, and con men. She longed for normalcy, yet she was inescapably her father's child, and she had no choice but to grow up fast. Her mother, who suffered from mental illness, was a stripper and B-girl: her father was a major player in the underworld of Anchorage, Alaska in the sixties, a city flush with newfound oil money. Only after her father was gruesomely murdered when she was 15, and Kim became a journalist, was she able to fill in the missing pieces of one American dream gone horribly wrong. Kim's true story is a tale of a woman's search for her parent's secrets. What she finds is both shocking and tragic, but in the end she's able to discover her true self amid the remnants of her parents' lost lives.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this engaging memoir, the author, a journalist raised in Alaska and now living in New York City, probes her late parents' past. Rich was 15 years old in 1973 when her father, Johnny Rich Jr., a well-known mobster in Anchorage, was murdered. Her mother, Ginger, a former stripper, had died the previous year. Although they both grew up in New England, Johnny and Ginger met in Los Angeles in the late 1950s. Soon they embarked for Alaska, where Johnny became a big man about town and Ginger would soon begin her sojourn through a series of mental institutions. Rich traces and plumbs official records to capture the minutiae and major moments of her parents' lives, including their deaths. Along the way, she comes to terms with her relationships with her parents, especially her father: ``Now I'm beginning to like being Johnny's girl.'' Photos not seen by PW.
