Fruit Punch
A Memoir
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
An arresting and one-of-a-kind memoir about the alternately exultant and harrowing trip growing up as a Black child desperate to create a clear reality for herself in this country
Written in a distinctive voice and filled with personality, humor, and pathos, Fruit Punch is a memoir unlike any other, from a one-of-a-kind millennial talent. Growing up in Dallas, Texas, in the nineties and early 2000s, Kendra Allen had a complicated, loving, and intense family life filled with desire and community but also undercurrents of violence and turmoil. “We equate suffering to perseverance and misinterpret the weight of shame,” she writes. As she makes her way through a world of obscureness, Kendra finds herself slowly discovering outlets to help navigate growing up and against the expected performance of being a young Black woman in the South—a complex interplay of race, class, and gender that proves to be ever-shifting ground.
Fruit Punch touches on everything from questions of beauty and how we form concepts of ourselves—as a small rebellion, young Kendra scratched a hole into every pair of stockings she was forced to wear—to what it means to grow up in her great uncle’s Southern Baptist church—with rules including “No uncrossed ankles” and “No questions.” Inflected by a powerful sense of place and touched by poetry, Fruit Punch is a stunning achievement—a memoir born of love and endurance, fight or flight, and what it means to be a witness, from a blisteringly honest and observant voice.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this wholly original and unsparing work, essayist Allen (When You Learn the Alphabet) recounts her experience coming of age as a young Black woman in Texas in the 1990s and 2000s. Full of intense relationships that cycled through love, violence, possession, and avoidance, Allen's childhood was deeply impacted by her codependent relationship with her mother and her strained relationship with her distant father. While she lightly trots through familiar events like first boyfriends and first-day-of-high-school anxiety ("I become a cliché and have a panic attack"), Allen's prowess comes through in her blunt rendering of the powerlessness she struggled against as a Black woman navigating race and sexuality in the South. By age 16, she writes, "sex and shame with myself has become a lifeline I've conditioned to be good at." That guilt was compounded by the confines of religion and the commands ("No bare legs"; "No questions"; "No sex") of her great-great-uncle's Southern Baptist church, where she grew up. Throughout, Allen's voice is distinct and brash—recalling a car wreck she survived in high school, she writes, "I got the guts from cuts spilling out every second." Indeed, the narrative rarely lets up in its frank or discomfiting depictions, but it yields a refreshingly authentic look at what it means to create oneself in a contradictory world.
