Pig Boy's Wicked Bird
A Memoir
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- £11.99
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- £11.99
Publisher Description
This gritty tragicomic memoir is set in one memorable year—1976, the Bicentennial, when Jimmy Carter ran for president and seven-year-old Doug Crandell lost two fingers in a farming accident. More than anything, Doug wants to shed his nickname, Pig Boy, and grow up to be a hog man like his father. His older brother Derrick reads pulp novels to him each night as he soaks his remaining fingers in Epsom salts. His brothers urge him to "flip the Wicked Bird" any time another child makes fun of his "lobster-red hand." Doug shares his summer of healing in Wabash, Indiana, with humans and animals who've suffered life-changing traumas: a brutal grandfather gentled by stroke, a deaf dog with a deadly taste for pig's ears, a tough-love mother coping with depression, a bevy of runt piglets saved from extermination. This is a story of love, loss, healing, and a family's relation with the land they love and know that they will lose.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Set on a small hog farm in Indiana, this moving chronicle follows one year (1976) in the life of an impressionable seven-year-old and his hard-luck family. Young Crandell was a very plump child. According to family lore, he consistently gained weight even though no one ever saw him eating dinner. When somebody spied him suckling a pig sow with the other piglets at the trough, he earned his moniker: Pig Boy. Crandell, whose work has appeared in the Nebraska Review and elsewhere, relates the story of his nickname, as well as the trials of his childhood: his family were bankrupt sharecroppers; they struggled with expensive medical bills from Crandell's mother's hysterectomy; Crandell had to have several fingers re-attached after a farm accident. He captures the emotional adhesive of family bonds when he portrays how they came together to love and support each other in crisis, committed to one another and their home. Richly anecdotal, the work leaves no detail unexamined, whether physical or ethereal. Crandell addresses everything the loss of property and pride, the presidential candidacy of Jimmy Carter, childhood fears, the effects of the TV series Roots on a poor white family, the far-reaching effects of his mother's depression with poetry and imagination. This version of growing up in America delivers several compelling, stellar moments.
