Tale of a Sky-Blue Dress - Hardcover

Moss, Thylias

3.15

26 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0380975505 ISBN 13: 9780380975501

Publisher: William Morrow, 1998

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Within my life's present unified theory of being, splendor divests itself of its own integrity, splitting to belong to everything that notices it, each part as effective as the whole splendid thing. It belongs to whatever wants it and is inexhaustible even as someone lays dying, even as someone else cries thinking there is none, their tears becoming prisms. . .

With these words, the acclaimed poet Thylias Moss proclaims a hymn to the power of light over darkness, both in her own life, and in the wider world. In this, her first prose work, the author of six books of poetry and winner of the most distinguished honors--including a MacArthur Fellowship Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship and a Writing Award--delivers a brilliant, passionate, and utterly moving memoir.

It is the story of the only child of a maid and factory worker who moved to Ohio from the segregated South of the fifties. Raised with much love, she flourished until the age of five, when disaster struck, in the form of a girl in sky-blue dress. Her childhood was shattered by this girl, her babysitter, who took pleasure from infliction pain, and whose reign of terror, even after its abrupt end, would send poisonous tendril further into her life.

Yet ultimately, TALE OF A SKY-BLUE DRESS is about how a young woman retrieved her life from the grasp of darkness. It is about refusing to accept tyranny. It is about feasting on splendor. How can there not be pain in a world spinning madly, in the lovely calculable chaos. . .? asks Thylias. But, she says, I am saying that joy is too necessary to abandon.

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Review:

Tale of a Sky-Blue Dress is enough to convince loving parents never to leave their children in the tender care of a baby sitter again. Thylias Moss's memoir begins when she is 5 and a family with an older girl moves into the apartment downstairs. The girl, Lytta, becomes Thylias's baby sitter, and over the course of several years her propensity for cruelty blossoms into a full-fledged reign of terror culminating in young Thylias's rape. Though she never tells anyone of the abuse, its effects have already begun to poison her life: "Evil, presumably the only product of hell, perhaps it is like a virus, but given what certain strains of virus can do, given the way these viruses can completely possess (and usually ravage) their hosts ... then a virus actually becomes a possible model of God." She goes on to add, "From what appears evil emerges the best established symbol of goodness." And indeed, though Thylias Moss recognizes the terrible evil that was visited upon her and its destructive aftermath, she also realizes that she wouldn't be who she is now--an award-winning poet, a wife, a mother--if not for what she experienced then. Moss's memoir is often grim yet through it all runs a steady undercurrent of hope. "Joy is too necessary to abandon," she writes, and in this story of a difficult life overcome, the author is as good as her word. --Margaret Prior

About the Author:

Thylias Moss is a professor of English at the University of Michigan. The author of six volumes of poetry and two children's books, her work has also appeared in many journals and in four editions of Best American Poetry. She has won numerous honors, grants and awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, and a Whiting Award. She lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with her husband and two sons.

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