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All That Is Bitter & Sweet - Hardcover

Judd, Ashley; Vollers, Maryanne

 
9780345523617: All That Is Bitter & Sweet
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 034552361X ISBN 13: 9780345523617
Verlag: Ballantine Books, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

Drawing on vivid journals of the celebrity activist's visits to violence- and poverty-stricken regions on four continents, a personal account describes how her witness to basic human rights violations helped her to work through damaging issues in her own life. 150,000 first printing.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ashley Judd received her masters degree in public administration at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. At Harvard Law, she was awarded the Dean’s Scholar Award for her paper on gender violence. She continues to combine her acting career with human rights and public health work around the world, serving on various boards of directors and leadership advisory councils. She and her husband, race-car driver Dario Franchitti, live in Tennessee and Scotland with their many beloved animals.

Maryanne Vollers is the author of Ghosts of Mississippi, a finalist for the National Book Award. She has also collaborated on two memoirs: Living History, with Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Ice Bound, with Jerri Nielsen, both #1 New York Times bestsellers.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter 1

FAMILY OF CHANCE, FAMILY OF CHOICE

Say not, "I have found the truth," but rather,"I have found a truth."
-KAHLIL GIBRAN

My favorite author, Edith Wharton, wrote in herautobiography, "My last page is always latent in my first, but theintervening windings of the way become clear only as I write." So it hasbeen with me as I have undertaken to make sense of my own past.

Although the home of my heart is in the AppalachianMountains, I always considered it auspicious that I was born in Southern California,one of the most transitory places in the world, during one of the mostturbulent springs in American history. When I arrived by cesarean section atGranada Hills Hospital on April 19, 1968, California was the epicenter of asociety in the throes of a cultural and spiritual upheaval. The Vietnam War wasraging. The nation was still reeling from the assassination of Martin LutherKing Jr., and Bobby Kennedy would soon be gunned down at the Ambassador Hotelin Los Angeles, leaving a generation of idealists lost in a tide of grief andregret. Some of the flower children who had flocked to San Francisco for theSummer of Love were now panhandling for loose change along Hollywood's Sunset Strip-aplace I would soon know well.

My parents, Michael and Diana Ciminella, were small-town kids from rural eastern Kentucky. Like mosteveryone else in the Los Angeles basin, they had moved to California lookingfor a fresh start in what Joan Didion described as "the golden land whereevery day the world is born anew." In 1967, my parents bought a tracthouse on a cul-de-sac in Sylmar, a suburb carved out of olive groves in the SanFernando Valley, about twenty miles north and a world away from Hollywood. Mydad sold electronic components for the aerospace industry; my mom stayed homeand seethed with boredom. They had dreams, just different ones. And they hadsecrets.

They had married too young and for the "wrong" reason-namely,the unplanned pregnancy that produced my older sister, Christina (you know heras Wynonna), when Mom was only seventeen. It was a typical story of the time:high school girl becomes pregnant and "has" to marry her teenageboyfriend. But there was a twist: Michael wasn't the father of Diana's baby-somethinghe didn't know at the time of the wedding, and something my sister and I wouldn'tlearn for decades. When I came into the world four years later, my family'stroubled and remarkable course had already been set in motion, powerfullyshaped by my mother's desperate teenage lie and the incredible energy she dedicatedto protecting it.

I began to understand the dynamics of my past, and how weare only as sick as our secrets, when I was thirty-seven years old and startedon a simple and practical path of personal recovery. It was then that Idiscovered we all belong to two families: our family of choice and our familyof origin. My family of choice is a colorful assortment of surrogate grandparents,aunts, uncles, and friends who infuse me with love, belonging, and acceptance.My family of origin, the one into which I was born, was also brimming with lovebut was not a healthy family system. There was too much trauma, abandonment,addiction, and shame. My mother, while she was transforming herself into thecountry legend Naomi Judd, created an origin myth for the Judds that did notmatch my reality. She and my sister have been quoted as saying that our familyput the "fun" in dysfunction. I wondered: Who, exactly, was havingall the fun? What was I missing?

As I write these words, I am happy to say that each of ushas embarked on a personal process of healing, and my family is healthier thanit has ever been. We have come far. In our individual and collectiverecoveries, we have learned that mental illness and addiction are familydiseases, spanning and affecting generations. There are robust strains of eachon both sides of my family-manifested in just about everything from depression,suicide, alcoholism, and compulsive gambling to incest and suspected murder-andthese conditions have shaped my parents' stories (even if some of the eventsdid not happen directly to them) as well as my sister's and my own.Fortunately, along with the dysfunction is a legacy of love, resiliency,creativity, and faith in a family whose roots I can trace back at least eightgenerations in the mountains of Kentucky and about 350 years in America, and asfar as the shores of Sicily. That history is as much a part of my DNA as thearch of my eyebrows or the color of my hair. It's imprinted in the soft r's andlong vowels that well up in my voice when I'm speaking about my home place orthe way I whoop for my dogs from the doorway, barefoot, in a nightgown,assuming my mountain woman stance with a hand on one hip, a way of being asnatural to me as breathing.

Although I now make my home in rural middle Tennessee,eastern Kentucky still calls to me. Kentuckians have a deeply ingrained, almostmystical sense of place-a sense of belonging that defines us. As a teenager, Itook a friend to see my great-aunt Pauline's farm. She passed away when I wasin the fourth grade. Nevertheless, although I had not been there since I wasten years old, I navigated my car deep into the countryside, to her homesteadon Little Cat Creek, without making a single wrong turn. More recently, afterflying over catastrophic mountaintop removal coal-mining sites in Pike County,I drove to Black Log Hollow in Martin County, where my paternal grandmother wasraised. When I pulled onto Black Log, something ineffable-without words anddeeper than memory, from a place so primal that it transcends thought andconscious action-tugged at my soul. I went unhesitatingly to the first mailboxon the right. The stenciled name read "Dalton," which was my paternalgrandmother's maiden name; I had found my great-grandparents' home and realizedthat folks to whom I am kin lived there yet. I called on the residents, andlike a cliché, the old woman inside accused me of being the law or a taxcollector. The only thing missing was a rifle across her lap.

These mountains can hold dark secrets. Mary BernadineDalton, who became my Mamaw Ciminella, never talked to me much about her familyor her years growing up. Her mother, Effie, was married at least five times.The husband who fathered Mamaw and her two sisters disappeared from the scene-shenever said why, at least to me, although Papaw Ciminella, who loved familydearly and was a devoted reminiscer, told me that my great-granddaddy had hitEffie and she'd ended that marriage on the spot. Mostly, what I knew was thatMamaw was a gorgeous mountain girl with a luscious figure who, like the KimNovak character in Picnic, fell for a charming, exotic outsider who lovedadventure.

Michael Lawrence Ciminella (Papaw) was the son ofSicilian immigrants who had settled in western New York, on the shores of LakeErie. His mother was a classic homemaker in the Italian tradition, his fatherhad a good job making wine for Welch's, and they were surrounded by a vibrantextended family. They raised five children together, including Papaw. But,according to my cousins, there was a dark side to this quintessential Americanstory. A family member had raped Papaw's mother, and his oldest brother wasconceived in incest. I can only imagine the suffering that created in Papaw'sfamily as he grew up, and it may explain why he developed ulcers that kept himout of military service during World War II. As a young man, Papaw, after hisexciting tenure in the Civilian Conservation Corps in the western states, whichallowed him to discover his love of rambling, installed copper roofing andgutters up and down the Appalachian Mountains. It was on one of these tripsthat he met the beautiful Billie Dalton at a clandestine juke joint in Inez,Kentucky. He swept her away from the local hero she was dating and married herin 1944, after a six-week courtship. They moved to...

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Verlag
Ballantine Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2011
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
034552361X
ISBN 13 
9780345523617
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
406
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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Verantwortliche Person
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