The Taste of Anger: A Memoir

by Diane Vonglis Parnell

Overview

“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?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781647426842
Publisher:	She Writes Press
Publication date:	06/25/2024
Pages:	232
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Diane Vonglis Parnell grew up on a remote farm in Western New York with nine siblings. Her essay Blame the Milkman was a winner in the Fish Publishing short memoir contest, and included in the Fish Anthology 2022. Vonglis Parnell is a Scrabble enthusiast and a lover of progressive rock music. She serves as a CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocate) volunteer for abused children in her community and lives a minimalist’s life in a 200-square-foot cottage in San Luis Obispo, California.

Editorial Reviews

Powerful and gripping, The Taste of Anger is like a car wreck you can’t look away from. The narrative opens with a tension that doesn’t subside until the very last paragraph. This is a distinct and original work that refreshingly offers a straight narrative without excuse or analysis.”
—The BookLife Prize

“This is a memoir with a brilliant narrative, studded with a host of images that will remain with me for a long time. . . . there is the indomitableness of the spirit.”
—Clem Cairns, founder of Fish Publishing

From the Publisher

2023-08-03
Parnell’s memoir follows a family as they move to a farm in the early 1960s and endure their patriarch’s extreme abuse.

In 1962, the author’s abusive father, Richard, moved the family from the city to 2727 Swamp Road, a run-down farm in western New York. When the family arrived at Swamp Road, the house was shabby and rat-infested, with an outhouse for toileting. While keeping his factory job, Parnell’s father ran the farm himself, justifying his actions with a continuous tirade about milk fees and city expenses. Parnell’s mother, Rose, constantly retching with morning sickness, turned a blind eye to the abuse the children bore as they took on physical labor that their bodies were too young to handle. Between beatings, the children attended school and completed their chores, bruised and, at times, nursing broken bones. Defeated by poverty and neglect, the author and her siblings lost hope. Finally, the abuse grew so extreme that Rose and her children made their escape. Parnell writes from the perspective of her younger self; this child’s-eye, first-person perspective gives a unique shape to the narrative: “We sleep on the bare wooden floor during our first night in our new home because my father is too tired to put the beds together. I lay awake long after the others, grateful for his snoring, which punctures the quiet and absolute blackness of the farmhouse.” This account is chock-full of heartbreaking memories, bravely mined by the author as she details the psychological impact of chronic abuse upon children and families. She also highlights the meager medical and legal support available to victims of abuse during the 1960s and the 1970s. Readers may wish for an epilogue describing what happened to Parnell and her family members in the years following the events depicted here—the author and her siblings were not yet living when they endured the privations of the Swamp Road farm. They were surviving.

This courageous memoir illustrates the catastrophic and isolating impact of abuse upon families.

Kirkus Reviews