“Bastards” by Mary Anna King – Daughter of Fragmentation

Our upbringing is without a doubt the most crucial part of our existence, shaping our essential being in all the necessary places, creating a structure that is hopefully solid and can last in the world. Though our development is certainly directed by nature and genetics, it cannot be denied that nurture plays an equally-big, if not more important part in it.

It's not for nothing that many psychologists and whatnot seek the root of some of their patient's problems in their earliest memories: first impressions can indeed end up shaping us for the rest of our lives.

Though we all certainly have some interesting stories to tell from our days, in the developed world most of us have quite happy childhoods without too much drama. However, for newly-established writer Mary Anna King, her earlier days were far from being normal, something she ponders upon in her first and critically-acclaimed memoir, Bastards.

To give a brief idea of the kind of life you'd be reading about in her book, the author was born in the early 80s in Camden, New Jersey, where her family lived in squalor. She describes her parents as being much more proficient at creating children than keeping them, which of course seldom helps those with a lack of money.

Her father left the house when she was at a very young age, at which point she was basically raised by a commune of mothers in a low-income housing complex. After her mother finds herself unable to provide even for her own daughter, she sends Mary off to live with her maternal grandparents.

They had already been raising her younger sister Rebecca, and not long after they legally adopted Mary... which technically meant that legally-speaking, Mary's mother became her sister while her older brother Jacob became her nephew.

As she grew her life kept on pulling her back into the past, worrying about all her parents' children that might one day come back to do and claim God-knows what, about her father that left but may one day return, worrying about the mother she had to leave behind.

However, bad endings don't always prevail in life, in the years Mary spent as a college student her sisters started getting back in touch with each other. As the meetings became more frequent, the family grew closer and closer, eventually leading to a family that is whole again.

Though this memoir doesn't exactly contain traumatic and shocking memories or spectacles that will leave you wide-eyed, it is nevertheless one of the more touching and real childhood stories I've read in recent memory.

King is fantastic at conveying the many thoughts and emotions that ran through her back then, contrasting them with the observations she can make from today's vantage point. She really takes us deep into her own suffering and confusion, elaborating on interesting and unexpected details that came with having to deal with an unusual situation.

King has a very smooth way with words and takes care not to fall into too deep of a lyricism, helping to keep the story's down-to-Earth feeling. As much as she discusses the difficulties of her life, King isn't hung up on them and actually places more and more focus on the reunification of her fragmented family as the book goes on.

It manages to be an extremely uplifting read that shows even the more estranged and broken relations out there can be mended. All in all, Bastards is a touching memoir, a vivid portrayal of difficult times as well as better ones (eventually) by the author, of a quest and a search that molded her into the person she is today.

If you enjoy reading biographies with emotional and intellectual complexity, you may very well find King's work to be a very interesting one.

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Mary Anna King Personal site Mary Anna King is an American writer from New Jersey who was adopted at the age of ten and grew up in Oklahoma City. She studied English Literature at Colgate University, after which she began her career as a writer. In her critically-acclaimed debut and memoir, Bastards, unravels her troubled upbringing.