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Tale of a Sky-Blue Dress

by Thylias Moss

ISBN: 0380793628
ISBN-13: 9780380793624
Format: Paperback

Summary

This memoir by poet Thylias Moss tells the sad story of a happy childhood that was shattered by the sadistic abuse she endured from a 13-year-old babysitter-a horror that Moss kept from her parents, and that disastrously influenced her later relationships with men.

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Media Reviews

"An elegant, forthright exploration of the effects of evil on a fragile life....A stylish, well-wrought memoir that forgoes self-pity for redemption."

-- Kirkus

Bibliographic Details

Publisher: Harpercollins
Published date: 1999
Size: 5.5 x 8.25 inches
Weight: 0.55 pounds
Pages: 274

Publisher's Notes

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.

Other Editions

Hardcover - Harpercollins (1998) - from $1.00
Paperback - Harpercollins (1999) - from $1.00

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