Kin: A Memoir

by Shawna Kay Rodenberg

Overview

“Kin moved me, disturbed me, and hypnotized me in ways very few memoirs have." –Rosanne Cash

A heart stopping memoir of a wrenching Appalachian girlhood and a multilayered portrait of a misrepresented people, from Rona Jaffe Writer's Award winner Shawna Kay Rodenberg.

When Shawna Kay Rodenberg was four, her father, fresh from a ruinous tour in Vietnam, spirited her family from their home in the hills of Eastern Kentucky to Minnesota, renouncing all of their earthly possessions to live in the Body, an off-the-grid End Times religious community. Her father was seeking a better, safer life for his family, but the austere communal living of prayer, bible study and strict regimentation was a bad fit for the precocious Shawna. Disciplined harshly for her many infractions, she was sexually abused by a predatory adult member of the community. Soon after the leader of the Body died and revelations of the sexual abuse came to light, her family returned to the same Kentucky mountains that their ancestors have called home for three hundred years. It is a community ravaged by the coal industry, but for all that, rich in humanity, beauty, and the complex knots of family love. Curious, resourceful, rebellious, Shawna ultimately leaves her mountain home but only as she masters a perilous balancing act between who she has been and who she will become.

Kin is a mesmerizing memoir of survival that seeks to understand and make peace with the people and places that were survived. It is above all about family-about the forgiveness and love within its bounds-and generations of Appalachians who have endured, harmed, and held each other through countless lifetimes of personal and regional tragedy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781635579345
Publisher:	Bloomsbury USA
Publication date:	08/30/2022
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	525,939
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.10(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Shawna Kay Rodenberg holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her reviews and essays have appeared in Consequence, Salon, the Village Voice, and Elle. Shawna was awarded the Jean Ritchie Fellowship and in 2017 she was the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award. A registered nurse, community college English instructor, mother of five, and grandmother of one, she lives on a hobby goat farm in southern Indiana.

Table of Contents

Prologue xi

Treasures upon Earth 1

Deborah Kay 23

Sex & Black Magic 34

Rose of Sharon 51

Chicken Pox and Army Worms 63

Aunt Hope 78

He Is Faithful to Forgive Us 87

The Doghouse 102

Shorty in the Turning Place 117

Fletcher Hill 125

Aunt Ruby 149

The First End Times 173

Yellowjackets 199

Deliverance 227

More End Times 245

A Bimbo My Whole Life 255

A New Colossus 275

The End of the End Times and the Beginning 292

Shotgun Wedding 302

Acknowledgments 329

Editorial Reviews

Defies easy definition ... Partly a memoir about growing up in an end-times religious community, partly the story of the author’s childhood in a dilapidated mining town, Kin is also a book about the complex and often fraught relationships between parents and children. Most important, Kin explores the richness and dignity of Appalachian life ... [Rodenberg] writes about her difficult childhood with a sense of grace and generosity ... [her] stories of lives that are generally overlooked make for essential reading.” - The Washington Post

“This super-smart, gorgeously gritty debut smashes stereotypes and has a similar can't-take-your-eyes-off-it appeal as Tara Westover's EDUCATED.” - OprahDaily

“Brilliantly detailed . . . Scorning the stereotypes, [Rodenberg] gives us a story about forgiveness and love.” - Newsday

“A powerful and surprising story of an Appalachian childhood . . . bountiful, sometimes haunting . . . Rodenberg's depth of feeling, intelligence, and love opens eyes and demolishes stereotypes.” - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“[Rodenberg] intersperses third-person accounts of her mother's life in Kentucky and her father's before he went to Vietnam . . . the alternating chapters provide context and feed Rodenberg's overarching theme about how stories repeat in families, that lineage ‘wasn't about the past, like people often thought, so much as the future’ . . . [Rodenberg’s] life doesn't end with the memoir's last page. There's always more to be said. Here's hoping she will.” - The Minneapolis Star Tribune

“A vivid coming-of-age account...This engrossing series of dispatches offers a humanizing take on an Appalachia not often seen.” - Publishers Weekly

“A richly nuanced portrait of people and place, along with the bounds of forgiveness.” - Library Journal

“Fascinating ... a nuanced portrait of a complicated place and people.” - Booklist (starred review)

“A beautifully written look at resilience and the power of family and place.” - Bookreporter

“Rodenberg’s memoir captures so many of the feelings Appalachian young people experience as they must choose between staying in the place they love or leaving for better opportunities.” - Book Riot, “15 More Books About Appalachia to Read Instead of Hillbilly Elegy”

“A gutsy testament to pure grit and the resilience of the human spirit. All through this astonishing testimony of a family in the grip of piety threads a remarkable place—Kentucky—benevolent and beloved.” - Janisse Ray, author of ECOLOGY OF A CRACKER CHILDHOOD

“A remarkable story that will stay with you long after you have finished reading.” - Rose Andersen, author of THE HEART AND OTHER MONSTERS

“Shawna Kay Rodenberg tells her story with a near-heroic self-awareness and insight into her family, her Appalachian ancestors, her spiritual suffering and religious sustenance, the damage done by generations of abuse, and the damage repaired by love and her own self-witness. She is a masterful storyteller, and I have tremendous admiration for her lucid courage and for the way her personal resiliency seems to have generated a specific kind of prose, both powerful and kind.” - Rosanne Cash

“Whatever you believe about Appalachia, prepare to have those beliefs upended, or at least beautifully complicated. Unless, of course, you are from there, and then prepare to glimpse what is possible. Kin in about remembering ‘who and what’ we are—to not only making peace with that, but to shape it into something remarkable.” - Nick Flynn, author of THIS IS THE NIGHT OUR HOUSE WILL CATCH FIRE

“An intimate portrait of hardscrabble life in a much-derided, little-understood place. Rodenberg crafts the raw notes of faith, addiction, and generational trauma into a hymn to survival. By focusing on the deeply personal lived experience of a family, Kin contains worlds.” - Michael Patrick F. Smith, author of THE GOOD HAND

“This startling memoir of a wild soul will electrify you. The unbreakable Shawna Kay rises again and again to forgive, despite every institution that failed her.” - Bonnie Jo Campbell, author of MOTHERS, TELL YOUR DAUGHTERS

“Written from a reservoir of astonishing empathy ... bears testament to how family and place can nurture and maim—and to the redeeming act of storytelling.” - Jason Kyle Howard, author of A FEW HONEST WORDS

“Shawna Kay Rodenberg may have been born 'bruised-ass-backward into a world of chaos' in Appalachia, but her memoir Kin is so full of ballsy intelligence and unremitting love that it feels like secular scripture. An American original.” - Benjamin Anastas, author of TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE

“Rodenberg’s lyricism, mastery of form, and command of image and metaphor are matched only by the power of her honesty and the precision of her recall. Kin will endure and bring light and warmth to all who encounter this beautiful book.” - Robert Gipe, author of POP: AN ILLUSTRATED NOVEL

From the Publisher

04/05/2021

Rodenberg counters the “hopelessly incomplete and exploitative” narratives that commonly come out of Appalachia with a vivid coming-of-age account of her own. As a child, Rodenberg lived in an end-times religious community called “The Body,” where she was sexually abused. When she was 10, in 1984, after her grandfather gave her father a piece of land to build on, her family moved to the hills of eastern Kentucky. She became a cheerleader and a runner in high school with the encouragement of her father, who knew it to be true that “Shawna gets in trouble when she’s not busy.” (He was also worried, Rodenberg writes, that he would “catch me with my pants down.”) This kind of disparaging rhetoric followed Rodenberg into college, unsurprisingly affecting her grades. Even her adviser brushed her off with the startling question, “Do you want to be a bimbo your whole life?” Lacking direction and confidence, she got pregnant and reluctantly agreed to a shotgun wedding at age 19. While there isn’t much of a denouement, Rodenberg’s narrative is sobering and wisely avoids the cliches and stereotypes common to similarly themed memoirs. This engrossing series of dispatches offers a humanizing take on an Appalachia not often seen. (June)

Publishers Weekly

04/09/2021

Essayist Rodenberg (English, Big Sandy Community and Technical Coll.) shares her story of growing up in Appalachia, spanning from before her birth until her early twenties. Rodenberg spent her early childhood years as part of a religious community called the Body, where she experienced sexual abuse from a church elder. When her family moved to eastern Kentucky, she constantly felt alienated from her peers due to her religious upbringing and economic status. Her relationship with her father was contentious and often resulted in Rodenberg experiencing verbal and physical abuse; but with the women in her family Rodenberg found acceptance. She enrolled in college but faced numerous obstacles, causing her to drop out, and an unplanned pregnancy led her into a loveless marriage. Throughout the memoir, Rodenberg juxtaposes her stories with those of earlier generations of her family as a way of exploring how actions of the past manifest in the present. VERDICT Rodenberg writes with an evocative and unflinching style, despite sometimes jarring shifts in narrative. This is a richly nuanced portrait of people and place, along with the bounds of forgiveness. Good for biography readers eager to explore the complexities of family relationships, or readers interested in women's lives in Appalachia.—Anitra Gates, Erie Cty. P.L., PA

Library Journal

★ 2021-03-31
A powerful and surprising story of an Appalachian childhood.

Rodenberg opens with a scene in 2017, when she was "acting as an ambassador" for a TV crew eagerly hunting for "Mountain-Dew-mouth and dirt floor stereotypes" for a segment about her Eastern Kentucky hometown, "often as inscrutable and inaccessible to outsiders as a war-torn third-world country." In between takes, she surreptitiously darted to her aging parents' trailer for a quick errand. In the remainder of the book, she takes us on a journey that expands our understanding of these scenes. After her father returned from Vietnam in the early 1970s, he moved his young family to Minnesota, where they spent a few years in a rural Christian commune before moving back to the area where he was raised. Throughout, the author's densely detailed writing style makes for engrossing reading. On her grandmother's grooming routine: “She rubbed her hands with grease when she did housework, to keep them soft and young-looking. She steamed her face each night with a fresh hot rag, wiped it with Pond's, then Oil of Olay.” A childhood game: "We played veterinarian with stray cats and dogs, pulling wolf worms from their necks with matches and tweezers and engorged ticks from the clusters on their backs, stomping and smearing the ticks in to red swirls across the blacktop; when we ran out of ticks we stomped clusters of poke berries to finish our pictures." The story continues through her teenage years: "I won't say that being punished for things I hadn't yet done made me want to do them, but it definitely finalized my plans." This is a bountiful, sometimes haunting story, but Rodenberg's structural choices may deter some readers. Her first-person story is told in a sometimes-confusing order, interrupted by novelistic third-person sections recounting the early lives of her parents and other relatives. This approach doesn’t always work, but it’s a minor quibble for an important memoir.

Rodenberg's depth of feeling, intelligence, and love open eyes and demolish stereotypes.

Kirkus Reviews