Following the wildly popular award-winning Overlay: One Girl's Life In 1970s Las Vegas, the author continues her remarkable journey in Angeles, revealing the underside of a life lived in 1980s Los Angeles.
This searing, often bizarre tale of Marlayna's teens and twenties reveals the author's flight from Las Vegas to the formidable world of self re-invention among the angels and demons populating 1980s Los Angeles. The author unflinchingly begets a self from the unlikeliest beginnings, and now delivers a sequel illustrating both heaven and hell on her continuing flight for self discovery.
"An amazing story of a young girl who comes of age with only snippets of guidance from the adults around her. This is a well written book with explicit prose of Marlayna's continued journey looking for love and acceptance. She tells this very personal story vividly. There were moments I had to stop reading to absorb the "life shattering" events Marlayna experienced that would have crushed many and other moments in the book that I laughed out loud." - Eileen Cahill Moalli
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #25,272 Paid in Kindle Store
#2 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Biographies & Memoirs > Regional U.S. > West
#8 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Biographies & Memoirs > Arts & Literature > Artists, Architects & Photographers
When the bus nears the downtown Los Angeles terminal I awake with my head on my neighbor's shoulder. I lift my head in surprise when I groggily realize I don't know this man, and I struggle for a moment to remember exactly where I am and why I'm here. As the haziness fades, the details take form once again, sleepily arranging themselves in a sensible fashion.
It is 1982 and I am seventeen years old. I'm on a bus to Los Angeles where I will live with my mother and her fifth husband. I haven't lived with my mother for the past five years and I've not yet met this particular husband, though I knew the three others who came before him. I'm nervous about this transition as her previous husbands haven't exactly been ideal men and this is the reason I haven't been living with my mother in the first place. A girl may need her mother, but that doesn't mean she needs the men her mother needs.
Another small detail is that I quite recently survived a suicide attempt.
I wish this last detail would recede into the haziness from which it came. It refuses to do so, as if it has a life of its own and has earned the right to do as it pleases. It stands before me and walks beside me and hovers above me like an unwanted shade.
I worry that I've doomed myself. I've attempted the greatest sin man can commit: killing the physical and leaving the spirit prematurely homeless. And I failed in the attempt. I now exist in a murky limbo when perhaps I really shouldn't. My spirit is still in place, but perhaps it shouldn't be. I worry that my actions may have sent the wrong message to the world, to God, to the Universe: I don't appreciate the gift of physical and spiritual life.
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Spanish
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Already translated.
Translated by Cinta Garcia de la Rosa
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Author review: Wonderful! Very professional. |
