Peeing On Hot Coals
Drowning the Devil
-
-
4.7 • 6 Ratings
-
-
- $10.99
Publisher Description
This-can't-put-it-down coming of age memoir is dramatic-and-heart wrenching, as young Patsy Lou takes us on a journey through the Dust Bowl of Oklahoma and Texas at the time of our nation's greatest environmental disaster. You will keep reading to find out what more could happen to this sweet child of the Great Depression after she endures severe burns down there at age seven when she pees on ashes that were hiding under hot coals. Patsy Lou grows up listening to scary sermons about The End of the World and being thrown into a lake of fire for the least infraction of guidelines set by evangelical zealots. And with it all, her delicious sense of humor will make you LOL as you read Peeing On Hot Coals.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Montandon's intimate memoir of childhood presents a very different view of her than readers might expect from her persona as a onetime San Francisco Examiner columnist and socialite. Her childhood in Oklahoma during the Great Depression was one of privation, and her family was deeply evangelically religious, sheltering her from learning about sex and life skills. When she is only seven years old, she urinates on some covered hot coals and ends up with severe burns to her genitals that heal improperly, causing her a lifetime of pain. Montandon's youth is a continuous saga of struggling with her family's religiosity and her own attempts at freedom. At 18 she marries an older man, and he treats her like property, never attempting to know her as a person. Over a decade later, Montandon finds the strength to leave him and strike out on her own, finding success and adventure but not understanding the full extent to which her injury denied her sexual pleasure. Finally, in her 80s, she finds healing and acceptance in telling her story. The narrative focuses on her childhood, and most of all on how this one incident forever affected her relationship to her own sexuality. Readers expecting to learn more about her life after her first marriage (including her founding of humanitarian projects such as the Name Choice Center and Children as Teachers for Peace) will be disappointed, but those willing to immerse themselves in Montandon's process of self-discovery will feel well rewarded. (BookLife)
