Out of the Bronx
Book Feature - Out of the Bronx by Irene Sardanis
Book Feature - Out of the Bronx by Irene Sardanis
HBL Note: When I read the synopsis of this book I was immediately hooked. What a life this woman led! I often struggle with memoirs. With fiction I have the comfort of knowing that any character who is hurt is a work of the author’s imagination. Even historical fiction allows for the comfort that this happened to someone who is long dead. But with memoirs, the heartbreaking tales are all the more heartbreaking because you know the author is still here and still remembers the pain enough to share their story. Many memoirs have happy endings, this one included (not a spoiler!) The fact she leaves her abusive husband is written in the synopsis. Scroll down to read more.
Book Feature - Out of the Bronx by Irene Sardanis
From the publisher:
Irene Sardanis was born into a Greek family in the Bronx in the 1940s in which fear and peril hovered. Her mother had come to New York for an arranged marriage. Her father drank, gambled, and enjoyed other women―and then, when Irene was eleven, abandoned her family altogether. Faced with their mother’s violent outbursts in the wake of this betrayal, Irene’s older siblings found a way out, but Irene was trapped, hostage to her mother’s rage and despair. When she finally escaped her mother as a young adult, she married a neighbor, also Greek, who controlled and dominated her just like her mother always had.
But Irene wasn’t ready to let her story end there. With therapy, she eventually found the courage to leave her husband and pursue her own dreams. Out of the Bronx is her story of coming to terms with the mother and past that terrified and paralyzed her for far too long―and of how she went on to create a new life free of those fears.
Book Feature - Out of the Bronx by Irene Sardanis
