Sweet Mystery: A Book of Remembering - Hardcover

Paterson, Judith H.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374272263 ISBN 13: 9780374272265

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996

Synopsis

Set against the backdrop of the rural South in the 1940s, an evocative memoir of a troubled childhood and family captures a painful world of alcoholism, mental illness, and denial as its explores the effects of trauma and the strengths of circumstances that allow children to survive them.

About this title

Review:

Judith Hillman Paterson, a journalism professor at the University of Maryland, has fashioned a courageous chronicle of a horrific childhood that included an alcoholic father, who once beat her until she blacked out, and a mother who died at age 31 after years of mental illness and substance abuse and left behind four children under the age of 10. Sweet Mystery mostly takes place in the rural South around the time of World War II, during the author's first decade. Seen through the eyes of a child, the book tells of a life filled with grief and trauma.

About the Author:

Judith Hillman Paterson is associate professor of journalism at the University of Maryland.

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0374272263
• ISBN 13: 9780374272265
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288