Kin
A Memoir
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3.9 • 17 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
"Kin moved me, disturbed me, and hypnotized me in ways very few memoirs have." –Rosanne Cash
A heart stopping memoir of a wrenching Appalachian girlhood and a multilayered portrait of a misrepresented people, from Rona Jaffe Writer's Award winner Shawna Kay Rodenberg.
When Shawna Kay Rodenberg was four, her father, fresh from a ruinous tour in Vietnam, spirited her family from their home in the hills of Eastern Kentucky to Minnesota, renouncing all of their earthly possessions to live in the Body, an off-the-grid End Times religious community. Her father was seeking a better, safer life for his family, but the austere communal living of prayer, bible study and strict regimentation was a bad fit for the precocious Shawna. Disciplined harshly for her many infractions, she was sexually abused by a predatory adult member of the community. Soon after the leader of the Body died and revelations of the sexual abuse came to light, her family returned to the same Kentucky mountains that their ancestors have called home for three hundred years. It is a community ravaged by the coal industry, but for all that, rich in humanity, beauty, and the complex knots of family love. Curious, resourceful, rebellious, Shawna ultimately leaves her mountain home but only as she masters a perilous balancing act between who she has been and who she will become.
Kin is a mesmerizing memoir of survival that seeks to understand and make peace with the people and places that were survived. It is above all about family-about the forgiveness and love within its bounds-and generations of Appalachians who have endured, harmed, and held each other through countless lifetimes of personal and regional tragedy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Rodenberg counters the "hopelessly incomplete and exploitative" narratives that commonly come out of Appalachia with a vivid coming-of-age account of her own. As a child, Rodenberg lived in an end-times religious community called "The Body," where she was sexually abused. When she was 10, in 1984, after her grandfather gave her father a piece of land to build on, her family moved to the hills of eastern Kentucky. She became a cheerleader and a runner in high school with the encouragement of her father, who knew it to be true that "Shawna gets in trouble when she's not busy." (He was also worried, Rodenberg writes, that he would "catch me with my pants down.") This kind of disparaging rhetoric followed Rodenberg into college, unsurprisingly affecting her grades. Even her adviser brushed her off with the startling question, "Do you want to be a bimbo your whole life?" Lacking direction and confidence, she got pregnant and reluctantly agreed to a shotgun wedding at age 19. While there isn't much of a denouement, Rodenberg's narrative is sobering and wisely avoids the cliches and stereotypes common to similarly themed memoirs. This engrossing series of dispatches offers a humanizing take on an Appalachia not often seen.
