Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls by T Kira Madden

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Is that the sort of thing that you were trying to understand when you thought about your life and why you call this book 'The Tribe Of Fatherless Girls' - because your dad was there, but he also was absent in many ways? So thinking about those what ifs and understanding that I won't find those answers, but I can still write into those questions. Perhaps things could have been different. If I opened up to him about the sexual assault that occurs in the book, perhaps we would have been closer.

I started writing this book kind of accidentally just a couple months after he passed away and trying to grapple with the understanding that we didn't, in my opinion, get the finished story, the neat story with the tidy story arc and accepting that life is actually the unfinished story and thinking about why that is and how our relationship could have changed had we had conversations that we never had.Īnd I address that in some of these essays as well. MADDEN: The great question of my father was how this book began. What was the question that you were trying to answer in this book? GARCIA-NAVARRO: Memoirs are sort of interesting - right? - because they require not only for you to examine the behavior of others but also to try and understand yourself. So to look back at that time when things were really at their worst is still difficult. But my mother is so present, and we've lived lifetimes together, me and my mother.

I have other difficult essays in the book, but often they deal with people who are no longer a part of my life.

It's the time in my life that I still feel kicks up the most dirt and the most pain, how I like to describe it - and also the most love. There's a heartbreaking essay in the book about finding your mother after an overdose. But I didn't quite understand what that meant until later. T KIRA MADDEN: I knew I was different in certain ways. And she relied on her friendships with other fatherless girls. Her parents were entrenched in drug and alcohol addiction.

But her debut memoir, 'Long Live The Tribe Of Fatherless Girls,' chronicles the difficulties she faced coming of age. Her uncle, Steve Madden, and her father built a shoe empire. T Kira Madden came of age in the privileged enclave of Boca Raton, Fla., riding horses, attending private schools.

Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls by T Kira Madden