Survivors of abuse find various ways of coping with and processing their experiences. Author Harold Phifer endured what he describes as a “sick, twisted, and formative relationship” with his aunt Kathy, so a memoir of his childhood was the result—one that uses wry humor to sustain the reader through some grim episodes.
The impetus for Phifer’s MY BULLY, MY AUNT, AND HER FINAL GIFT was his aunt’s death at the age of 96, the news of which came to him while in Afghanistan on contractor work. She was a fire-and-brimstone sort. Much of Phifer’s early childhood was spent moving back and forth between his psychotic-presenting mother’s broken-down shotgun shack and his aunt’s three-bedroom house, where she would beat him—on one occasion, with a broomstick on a baseball field—work him in the vegetable patch for no wages, and instill the fear of God into him. According to Phifer, she spent her time “destroying lives and tormenting families” and “was bitter to be alive and happy if she died.”
Phifer has a good ear for the arresting description, particularly where people are involved. The pastor of his hometown is “God-in-a-bottle” to his parishioners; Sister Gertrude, “twice as big as a man,” would regularly lapse into reveries and become uncontrollable during church services; and so on. The laidback writing style is, however, combined with a tendency to freely italicize words and phrases, such that emphasis is supplied at peculiar junctures. This, as well as some mechanical errors (in the way of missing or misplaced punctuation points and the odd spelling mistake), is distracting and takes the gloss off the presentation a little.
However, Phifer’s is a touching memoir, if only because of the honesty with which he describes the myriad ways in which he coped with a mentally ill mother and an abusive aunt. As so many children do in such situations, he managed one and kept on the right side of the other as far as he was able, shrugging his shoulders as best he could when his elder brother Jerry was forgiven his demeanors while Phifer was made to pay for his. Parents and guardians playing favorites is the pits, but Phifer emerged intact. It is no small feat, and readers will find themselves cheering his younger self on.
Harold Phifer’s MY BULLY, MY AUNT, AND HER FINAL GIFT offers a humorous and touching memoir of an abusive childhood in America’s Deep South.
~Craig Jones for IndieReader