Maureen Stanton - "Body Leaping Backward"

This is a free event, however we request that you RSVP. You can use the Eventbrite form below (it may take a couple seconds to load), sign up in-store at Wellesley Books, or call us at 781-431-1160. Thanks! 

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ABOUT BODY LEAPING BACKWARD

“A blazingly important memoir about the possibility of change.”
—People Magazine

For Maureen Stanton’s proper Catholic mother, the town’s maximum security prison was a way to keep her seven children in line (“If you don’t behave, I’ll put you in Walpole Prison!"). But as the 1970s brought upheaval to America, and the lines between good and bad blurred, Stanton’s once-solid family lost its way. A promising young girl with a smart mouth, Stanton turns watchful as her parents separate and her now-single mother descends into shoplifting, then grand larceny, anything to keep a toehold in the middle class for her children. No longer scared by threats of Walpole Prison, Stanton too slips into delinquency—vandalism, breaking and entering—all while nearly erasing herself through addiction to angel dust, a homemade form of PCP that swept through her hometown in the wake of Nixon’s “total war” on drugs.

Body Leaping Backward is the haunting and beautifully drawn story of a self-destructive girlhood, of a town and a nation overwhelmed in a time of change, and of how life-altering a glimpse of a world bigger than the one we come from can be. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MAUREEN STANTON, the author of Killer Stuff and Tons of Money, is the recipient of an Iowa Review award, a Pushcart Prize, the American Literary Review Award for nonfiction, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Stanton teaches at UMass Lowell and lives in Georgetown, Maine

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