Body Leaping Backward

June 3, 2019
This jumbled memoir follows Stanton throughout her troubled girlhood in the prison town of Walpole, Mass., as she navigates her parent’s divorce and her own drug addiction. After her family moved to Walpole in the mid-1960s, Stanton’s mother would drive her and her six siblings by Walpole prison and warn them, “If you misbehave, you’ll end up in there.” The threat loomed in the background of her seemingly idyllic childhood, until her parents’ divorce set grade-schooler Stanton adrift. Stanton’s ideas of good and bad blurred—if the bad people were inside Walpole prison, why was it okay for her mother to shoplift from the local grocery? Soon, Stanton began shoplifting. During her sophomore year of high school, Stanton tried smoking angel dust, which ramped up to “Dust in the morning, dust at night, dust at school.” She would drive around high with friends or hitchhike (“I wonder how I was not raped or killed or both, why was I not brain-damaged, ruined, sent away, locked up”). Eventually, she got counseling and quit angel dust, but she then began snorting cocaine; her path of recovery is not linear. Her writing is clear and thoughtful, yet while Stanton has created a solid portrait of a 1970s prison town, her reminiscences never quite coalesce into a satisfying narrative.