rough house: a memoir

By Tina Ontiveros

Book Overview

Tina Ontiveros was born into timber on both sides of the family. Her mother spent summers driving logging trucks for her family's operation, and her father was the son of an itinerant logger, raised in a variety of lumber towns, as Tina herself would be.

A story of growing up in turmoil, rough house recounts a childhood divided between a charming, mercurial, abusive father in the forests of the Pacific Northwest and a mother struggling with small-town poverty. It is also a story of generational trauma, especially for the women--a story of violent men and societal restrictions, of children not always chosen and frequently raised alone.

Ontiveros's father, Loyd, looms large. Reflecting on his death and long absence from her life, she writes, "I had this ridiculous hope that I would get to enjoy a functional relationship with my father, on my own terms, now that I was an adult." In searingly honest, straightforward prose, rough house is her attempt to carve out this relationship, to understand her father and her family from an adult perspective.

While some elements of Ontiveros's story are universal, others are indelibly grounded in the logging camps of the Pacific Northwest at the end of the twentieth century, as the lumber industry shifted and contracted. Tracing her childhood through the working-class towns and forests of Washington and Oregon, Ontiveros explores themes of love and loss, parents and children, and her own journey to a different kind of adulthood.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0870710338
• ISBN13: 9780870710339
• Release Date: September 2020
• Publisher: Oregon State University Press
• Length: 200 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

An honest look at a story that is many people's story, as well.

There is much wisdom and many life lessons in this book. I think many people can relate, in more or lesser degrees. I checked this book out from the library, and am now on the hunt for a copy for my grown daughter, to help her understand how her father deeply loves her, even though he has a wolf inside him. Thank you, Tina Ontiveros, for surviving, remembering and having the strength and courage to put it down forever in black and white.