With or Without You

November 26, 2012
Life under an erratic single mom, first on welfare, then a millionaire, in the 1980s proved a wearying contest for survival of the fittest as recounted in this valiant, bittersweet debut by Danvers, Mass., native Ruta. Five feet tall and Italian American, with a loud gutter-mouth, copious breasts, and bleached blond hair, Kathi aka Mum lived from one menial job to the next that kept her comfortably supplied with pain killers she happily shared with her only daughter while concocting conflicting plans for her including school scholarships and early pregnancy. Ruta lived in the basement of her grandfather's house on Massachusetts's North Shore, surrounded by her mother's other Italian American relatives ("a band of lunatics" who enjoyed a "thuggish, moronic code of honor"), as she learned from hard experience to endure her mother's overbearing solicitude, such as when her mother sent 13-year-old Ruta to Catholic school on picture day dolled up like a trollop or traipsing through the most exclusive New England boarding schools seeking admittance. In fact, Kathi's hare-brained scheme worked, and Ruta was admitted to Phillips Academy Andover, where, to her mother's delight, her decidedly square daughter could finally catch up on sex and drugs. Fueled by profits from taking over her second husband's livery business, Kathi delved hard into heroin and other drugs, providing a titanic model for her daughter both to emulate and overcome. Survival required separation, and Ruta's account is a fairly dry, restrained chronicle of a wrenching embrace of health and sobriety.

December 1, 2012
The memoir of the emancipation of a daughter from her drug-dealer, addict mother. Despite the hardships she endured as a child, Ruta demonstrates a deep and loving bond with her mother. Other family members meander in and out of the narrative, but it is Ruta's mom who features the most prominently in these stories of coming-of-age during the 1980s. Marathon movie nights spent tucked in bed counterpoint days of poverty, trash-strewn rooms, drug dealing and her mother high on cocaine, OxyContin or other drugs. "Mum never distinguished between physical and emotional pain," writes the author, "especially when she had a pill that could cure both." Ruta holds nothing back as she realistically and tenderly portrays her childhood in Massachusetts, whether she's writing about school events at her Catholic school, her mother's ascent as a millionaire and subsequent loss of money due to drug use, or the sexual abuse at the hands of a pedophile, one of her mother's friends. Ruta also delves into her own drug and alcohol abuse, her desire to make something of herself and how she crawled back into society: "I used to be a miserable, spiritless, insecure egomaniac who smelled like whiskey. Now I am a well-intentioned, sometimes volatile, even more insecure egomaniac who smells like coffee." It is this kind of exposure, and the use of dark humor and explicit language, that makes the book so intriguing, and Ruta shows how a strong maternal bond at an early age can lead to forgiveness regardless of the circumstances. A sharp portrayal of recovery from a lifetime of pitfalls and the love that held it all together.

COPYRIGHT(2012) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

October 1, 2012

Billed dramatically as the debut of a prodigy--Ruta was finalist for the Keene Prize of the University of Texas at Austin, where she received her MFA from the Michener Center for Writers--this memoir assays the author's rise from a particularly tough childhood. Her mother was a drug dealer and user, and Ruta had to break from her to survive. An in-house favorite being compared to Mary Karr's The Liar's Club and Jeanette Walls's The Glass Castle.

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 15, 2013
In the tradition of such tragic family memoirs as The Liars' Club (1995) and Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (2012), Ruta details her struggle to rise above a childhood with a drug-addicted mother. Unexpectedly, her memories are not about shooting up but rather about the dizzying journey down and up the economic ladder as her mother sporadically succeeded at business but utterly failed at parenting. Ruta juxtaposes the hallmarks of abject poverty with visits to her father's nearby middle-class suburban life, and the schizophrenic shift brought by her mother's sudden financial boons that were never enough, however, to mitigate the hoarding, filth, or endless pills that led Ruta down her own journey into addiction. She admits when her memories are fuzzy and is bracingly honest about her own failures and never wavers from the emotional truth of what it was like to build a life in such circumstances. The intensity of the clear-eyed manner in which Ruta conveys her abiding frustration with the parents who failed their child so casually and monumentally is exceedingly powerful stuff.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)