Imagine being privy to the diaries of both a 16-year-old girl and her mom! Based on their two-year journal project, Wake Up, Maggie! Go Away, Mom! invites readers into the life of a single mom and her teenage daughter, ushering them through the tangle of feelings that come with this familial bond.
The dual entries, peppered with poems by both authors, grant a firsthand look at flashbacks of Carol’s recovery from alcohol addiction and subsequent divorce, her imprudent dive into a long-distance romance, and her daily refrains from wringing her daughter’s neck, as she dangles precariously from the edge of a menopausal cliff. You’ll see her daughter caught in the confusion of school and friends, longing to launch her hovering mom into outer space, who begins her senior year with the attacks of 9/11, trying desperately to hold her fear at bay.
Moving from one voice to another, readers eavesdrop on their frequent power struggles, chronic doubts and fears, and humorous ways they wrestle with the grief of letting each other go as they re-negotiate their relationship and move on with their separate lives.
Wake Up, Maggie! Go Away, Mom! A Memoir in Two Voices, launched on Tuesday, May 7, from Heliotrope Books.
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This woman-child stumbles and falls over and over again until finally, she picks herself up and stumbles home.
Carol Weis bares herself (sometimes literally) in her debut memoir, where she unveils her two lives, before and after, in a collection of alternating chapters that divulge her change. In those chapters, you’ll meet a desperate young woman riddled with anger and fear from childhood trauma and an equally desperate sober, single mom struggling to push those feelings aside to care for her young daughter.
Like many who abuse alcohol, the author grew up in a world where feelings were never discussed and were typically resolved by drinking. Her mother was hospitalized with tuberculosis for 18 months when Carol was three, and being passed around from family to family left a tenacious fear of abandonment that persisted through her often reckless life. Alcohol was the salve that soothed the wound and hid her shame. And for 25 years it ruled over her actions, while she tread her way through the chaos it created.
Starting off on the night of her last drink, Stumbling Home quickly reveals the author’s love-hate relationship with the legal drug, then brings the reader along on the sundry adventures she takes under the influence, interspersed with the challenges she faces after she quits. Ultimately, on her quest to reinvent herself, she finds out who she really is.
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*****
Previously published titles:
While Ida Mae’s busy daydreaming ’bout how to get famous, her twenty-six cows are busy flying the coop. Now it’s up to Ida Mae and her trusty dog Calliope, to rustle up that herd of loitering livestock. ‘Cause it’s the only after each of those cavorting cows is corralled that Ida Mae can finally get back to the task at hand — making her own dreams come true.
Carol Weis makes a stellar debut as she joins New York Times bestselling artist Ard Hoyt in a lively tale where one determined girl tracks down twenty-six bovines and discovers the answer to her dreams right outside her own back door. Received a starred review from Kirkus.
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Simon & Schuster, Indiebound, Amazon, Barnes and Noble
*****
Bull Thistle Press, 2002
A chapbook of 18 heartfelt poems about the anguish of divorce. Letterpress printing and design by Greg Joly.
CAROL WEIS 