Mary Ann Tirone Smith Views

General Goods

We read this for my book club and found ourselves bogged down in a discussion about the rights and wrongs of the approach adopted by Mary-Ann Tirone Smith. Some of us wondered if she had been too cynical and used the murder of her schoolfriend in order to make her memoir more exciting. A couple of us, myself included, thought that if this was the case, then the plan had backfired because we found the book a bit too unsettling and would have preferred not to have shared the suffering of that poor girl. However, it was a good choice of title as we argued long and hard, and marks out of ten ranged from nine to two.

MARY-ANN TIRONE SMITH Bob Malm was disappeared by the Fifties when denial was recommended as a cure for all ills, a phenomenon known as positive thinking. But his crime left a splinter of glass in my brain. He'd murdered my little friend Irene and the Fifties killed her again: cld"Don't think about Irene, don't talk about her. We'll just have the janitor take her desk out of row two. Now children, move up and fill in the gap.prd" One day, out of the blue, I heard Irene calling to be freed from limbo. I would celebrate her short life, her final act of heroism and assure a proper mourning. A memoir would show how a silenced tragedy upended a community. Ah, but everyone knows you must have a dysfunctional family to write a memoir. Mine managed to function, but it was definitely outreeacute;. Has writing so openly about your family affected your subsequent writing?

Mary-Ann Tirone Smith was brought up on a low-income housing estate in 1950s Connecticut. Her family is large; an eccentric mix of French and Italian. Mary-Ann's brother, Tyler, has severe autism but nobody knows about autism yet so the family tiptoe around him. She is not allowed to cry because if she does, her brother will chew off his hand.

Interspersed between chapters about her mother being fired for getting married and racism in the local factory, Tirone Smith includes snippets about a boy living on the other side of the country. The lad is Bob Malm, who was adopted as a baby but told about that only when he was arrested, aged 12, for molesting a little girl. Malm is a dark shadow moving towards her childhood and by the time he meets Irene, Mary-Ann's schoolmate, there is almost unbearable anxiety.