The Taste of Anger: A Memoir

By: Parnell, Diane Vonglis

"I'll kill the first person who comes through this door." My father grips a baseball bat in his meaty hands.

It is 1962 and Diane is three years old when her violent father moves their family--her, her pregnant mother, and her six siblings--to a remote farm in Upstate New York. There, she grabs the reader by the hand and takes them to the broken-down barns, barren fields, and rows of bunk beds in her rat-infested attic bedroom as she questions all that feels wrong about her new world. She watches her ever-pregnant mother grow emotionally colder with each new baby and wonders, Where is she when he swings his fists, his steel-toed boot, or a crowbar? Forced to perform adult manual labor in between the erratic beatings she and her siblings pound on one another to release their own aggressions, she asks herself, Is this what we've become? What I've become?

Narrated in the ever-hopeful voice of a child, The Taste of Anger explores in raw, unflinching detail how years of isolation, oppression, and the threat of retaliation create an environment in which family secrets are guarded at all costs. Tension is palpable with the turning of each page, ensuring that the reader won't let go of Diane's hand until she gets an answer to her most urgent question of all: Who will rescue us?

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1647426847
• ISBN13: 9781647426842
• Release Date: June 2024
• Publisher: She Writes Press
• Length: 232 Pages
• Weight: 0.72 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.4" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

Very descriptive and well written memoir

The Taste of Anger: A Memoir grabs you on the first page and doesn’t let go. From the first sentence to the last, you are drawn in. It is well written, with vividly detailed imagery from the eyes, thoughts and perceptions of a child. The author makes it easy for the reader to “see” and “feel” what is happening to her and her siblings. Born into a time when abuse was rarely acknowledged, you truly feel her struggle to understand, to wonder why, to cope, to survive, to hope. At the end, I am left wanting to know what happened next to all of them. I would definitely look forward to a “Part 2” from Vonglis-Parnell.