| Title | : | A Working Class Family Ages Badly |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0349702349 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780349702346 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages | : | 320 |
| Publication | : | Published February 10, 2022 |
Through a series of interconnecting essays covering a range of major topics, but with reference to the intensely personal - pubic lice, drug smuggling on budget airlines, the painful process of dilation after gender reassignment surgery - Juno Roche seeks to debunk complacent preconceptions and radically hone in on our essential humanity. This is beautiful, vulnerable, often very funny writing which, despite the extremeness of the writer's own experience, is constantly, reassuringly relatable. Destructive impulses, sexual and romantic awkwardness, ill equipped parents and a constant sense of feeling out of sorts in and with the world, there is a universality to much of this, and that feels crucially important.
A Working Class Family Ages Badly Reviews
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this was excellent. really moving and devastating, yet hopeful. also the best bit of pandemic adjacent literature I’ve read, whilst being a lot more than that. definitely need to read more of juno roche’s writing!!
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What an extraordinary achievement this memoir is: Juno Roche walks us through their family life, their history with drug use, their life with AIDS and their present dealing with COVID-19 during the first lockdown, while writing the book. This book is lucid, clever, profound and memorable, infused with a dreamlike atmosphere despite the harshness of the topic and the pain that flows throughout. There is a cathartic power in Roche's pages, a profound sense of honesty and genuine desire to reshape the narrative around illness and trauma, familial violence and intergenerational trauma, gender, loneliness and grief.
I for one am profoundly grateful to the author for the privilege of accompanying them on a journey that has been surely a painful one, but has stirred inside me the genuine need for deconstructing the ideas of what danger and safety are, what it means to be alive and how concepts such as illness and abuse need to shift from an individual to a collective meaning, to recognise each other as parts of an organism that is alive and pulsating with the lives of every each one of us, and it's our responsibility to make sure that everyone who's part of it can heal or live through illness and trauma with dignity and respect. -
Roche writes with expert precision, making the beauty in the language stark and addictive. I honestly underlinded so many parts of this book, I think I've made a note on every page. It's a story many of us understand, the violence of poverty but Roche writes in such an accessible way, that even those who don't understand what it means to grow up with nowt would find solace in this book.
Brave, beautiful and starkly honest. You must read now! -
🌱 unflinching
🌱 I liked how the book wasn’t chronologically written it instead kept one foot in the present and one in the past; offering interesting parallels between different pandemics, familial relationships, and desperate longing
🌱 The thread of intergenerational trauma and the ripples of that really rang true. -
Brutally honest, meandering essays: I found this writer interesting & likeable. Some funny digressions (the bit about their crab offspring ...). I hope they keep on writing.
