The Sky Isn't Visible from Here by Felicia C. Sullivan

From the Publisher

Felicia Sullivan's mother disappeared on the night Sullivan graduated from college and has not been seen or heard from in the ten years since. Sullivan, who grew up on the tough streets of Brooklyn in the 1980s, now looks back on her childhood—lived among drug dealers, users, substitute fathers, and a host of unsavory characters. Ever the responsible child, Sullivan became her mother's keeper, taking her to the hospital when she overdoses, withstanding her narcissistic rages, succombing to the abuse or indifference of so-called stepfathers, and always wondering why her mother would never reveal the truth about the father she'd never met. But then, Sullivan's volatile, beautiful, deceitful, drug-addicted mother altered the truth in many cruel ways.

Ashamed of her past, Sullivan invented a persona to show the world. But keeping up a facade has its price, and before she knew it, she, too, was snorting coke in nightclubs, throwing back shots of tequila like candy, and eventually taking a leave of absence from her Ivy League graduate program. In fact, she had become her mother.

A book about secrets and forgiveness, The Sky Isn't Visible from Here is also the story of a young woman unraveling—and then putting her life back together again.

Publishers Weekly

A poignant memoir by writer Sullivan palpates the wounds of growing up with an unstable, cocaine-abusing mother. The young narrator's emotionally manipulative mother, Rosina, worked as a waitress at whatever Brooklyn diner hadn't fired her yet for stealing from the cash box in order to feed the increasingly destructive cocaine habit she formed while living with her Israeli-born boyfriend, Avram. Sullivan grew up cringing in the shadow of her crass, chain-smoking mother, who moved from boyfriend to boyfriend, from Sunset Park, Brooklyn, to upscale Valley Stream, Long Island. Sullivan tried hard to distinguish herself in school, despite drinking heavily as a teenager to ease social pressure and shoplifting to strike back angrily at her mother. Later, she explains, she fell into similar patterns of self-anesthetizing with cocaine and alcohol while grasping after a lucrative career in finance in her early 20s. Sullivan's memoir cuts predictably back and forth in time and features some memorable types, such as needy early girlfriends whose mothers were as wacky as her own; junkie Aunt Marisol who died of an overdose; and her mother's battering boyfriend Eddie. Putting herself through Fordham, then Columbia's M.F.A. program hardly eased Sullivan's pain, but the act of writing purges her memory. (Feb.)

Kirkus Reviews

Girl from the tough side of Brooklyn leaves behind her domineering mother and invents a new, fake life for herself in Manhattan in this hard-bitten autobiography. Growing up poor in sketchy neighborhoods, her skin too pale to hang with the black and Hispanic kids, her hair too kinky for the white kids, Sullivan had a rough childhood. Her mother was a violent, monstrously selfish drug addict and thief with a thing for men who abused not only her but her daughter. The author tried to self-medicate her way past the damage. She had her first blackout from alcohol at age 17, from cocaine at 24. Escaping to Fordham University on a scholarship, she determinedly made friends with the blondest, preppiest girls she could find, doing everything possible to block out the past. But she still indulged in risky behavior, including constant drug use that got her fired from just the kind of secure white-collar job that would have helped put the old neighborhood behind her. She led a schizophrenic existence, her memories constantly besieged by her mother's manipulative, brazen insistence that the pain and neglect she remembered never happened. "I fumble for pieces of artifact that are not tainted by her voice," Sullivan writes. "For things that are real." Her narrative hops around, but this isn't a fault-the lurching chronology accurately replicates the synapse misfires of a beleaguered brain. Sullivan's bracing, pared-to-the-bone prose evokes compassion by being impressively free of the narcissistic self-worship that so often infects books of this stripe. Agent: Matthew Carnicelli/Carnicelli Literary Management

Product Details

• Table of Contents

Table of Contents