Joan Cusack Handler's
adolescent self narrates short vignettes, diary-like entries, in her memoir of
growing up as an Irish-American Roman Catholic in a predominantly working class
neighborhood in the Bronx (NY) in the 1950s. Twelve year-old Joan is a bright,
sensitive girl who believes that "Jesus counts on me to come see Him at
Mass as much as possible..." Joan--self-conscious, awkward and plagued by
nervous ailments--is a misfit who stands five feet eleven and a half inches
tall, wears a size eleven, quadruple A shoe, and is often mistaken for being
older. The journal offers Joan a safe place to purge feelings on subjects ranging from the father-son relationship between
God and Jesus, sin, the Eucharist, obedience, purgatory, lying, honoring her
mother and father, snitching on her siblings and her thoughts about some of the
quirky nuns and kids at school.
Young Joan has three siblings, most notably a brother who is a
bully. She is fiercely devoted to her father, a devoutly religious man who
works hard and likes an occasional whiskey, and her mother, who is a
no-nonsense disciplinarian and tows the line on the home front. A beloved aunt,
a nun, visits the family weekly and indulges in Blackberry Brandy and likes to
drive past all the pretty houses in the upscale section of town, and she also
expresses high hopes that Joan will someday join a religious order. This
disparity of a familial culture anchored in the practice of religious faith
versus the tug toward secular interests makes it hard for Joan, who wants
"more than anything... (to have) a clean and pure soul," to navigate
her own way in the world in this gentle, gracefully told, coming-of-age tale.
Cusack Handler's prose reverberates with evocative imagery,
insight and emotion, conjuring not only the physicality, mystery and allure of
the Roman Catholic faith of the 1950s, but also the authentic intensity and
vacillation of adolescent feelings. The story, constructed in slice-of-life
fragments and steeped in the present tense, deepens the intimacy of this
well-drawn, psychologically astute narrative.
Confessions of Joan the
Tall by Joan Cusack Handler
Publication
Date: November 13, 2012