The Sky Isn't Visible from Here: Scenes from a Life

Description

A young woman from Brooklyn "looks at her rocky childhood growing up with a beautiful, drug-addicted mom" in this remarkable memoir (Vanity Fair). Felicia Sullivan's mother disappeared on the night Felicia graduated from college. The daughter would go on to receive an Ivy League education and numerous accomplishments—but eventually, just like her missing parent, she would succumb to alcohol and cocaine abuse. In this "brave and lovely" account, Felicia looks at the ways she was shaped by the shame of her past, and how she finally overcame it (Roxana Robinson). Looking back on the tough streets of Brooklyn in the 1980s, where she lived among drug dealers, users, and substitute fathers who tended to be indifferent at best and abusive at worst, Felicia reveals how she became her mother's keeper, taking her to the hospital when she overdosed, withstanding her narcissistic rages, and always wondering why her mother would never reveal the truth about the father she'd never met. The Sky Isn't Visible from Here is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit, and an "extraordinary memoir [that] will keep you awake at night and haunt your dreams" (Dani Shapiro, author of Family History).