Holler Rat
A Memoir
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
From a critically acclaimed, Pushcart Prize–nominated performance artist, a funny, vivid, and ultimately heartbreaking memoir about forging identity in the chasm between cultures and classes
Anya Liftig grew up with her feet in two very different worlds. While her mother’s upbringing was so rural that the other kids called her “holler rat,” her father came from a comfortable, upper-middle-class Jewish family. Anya spent her childhood school years in Connecticut and her summers in the holler. Shaped by the experience, she would go on to win a scholarship to Yale and become an acclaimed artist, using provocative performances to explore the contradictions and unanswered questions of her life. But when the world Anya was building for herself shattered, she was forced to reconcile where she’d come from with who she was and who she wanted to be.
In Holler Rat, Anya skillfully interweaves family lore from her childhood with descriptions of her performance art pieces and scenes of the year-long period in which her life fell apart, then plumbs the cathartic self-reckoning that followed. She takes us from her mamaw’s porch to the site of a violent family land feud; from Yale to the rancid odors of a pre-gentrified Bushwick loft; and from making out with a 14-pound salmon to having 243 raw eggs pelted at her in the name of art. In visceral, beautiful prose that ranges from raunchy and outrageous to serious and tragic, Holler Rat is the origin story of an unconventional artistic life and a captivating account of the stumbling blocks, sacrifices, and discoveries along the way.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Performance artist Liftig recounts an upbringing caught between two worlds in her searing debut memoir. While Liftig and her younger sister were raised in upper-middle-class Westport, Conn., in the 1980s, their mother came from Ganderbill Holler, Ky., an unincorporated community home to "proud hillbillies, whose most persistent wish was to be left the fuck alone." When Liftig visited her maternal grandmother, known as Mamaw, in Kentucky, she stepped into a different life: one where gunshots were used to frighten off rats, derelict homes dotted the landscape, and nearly everyone was a blood relation of some kind. Liftig vividly explains her struggle to reconcile her identities ("the problem isn't keeping my two worlds separate, it's the chasm that exists between them") and sheds light on family tensions, as when she matter-of-factly observes that "marrying my father solidified my mother's escape from poverty. As much as Mamaw loves us, I am old enough to tell that she also resents us." Liftig, too, ended up marrying a rich man, and the dissolution of their relationship rounds out the narrative. This often somber account is buoyed by Liftig's genuine love for her family, and draws on age-old questions of nature vs. nurture without devolving into cliché. Readers put off by the sermonizing of Hillbilly Elegy may find this glimpse at Appalachia more illuminating.
