BOOK: Murdering The Mom: A Memoir
AUTHOR: Duff Brenna
GRADE: D
Duff Brenna’s dark memoir of growing up in a home so abusive
that it defies comprehension is one of the strangest memoirs I’ve read in a
while. Murdering The Mom tells the tragic tale of Brenna as he tries to will
his way out from under the thumb of his mentally unstable mother and her
variously abusive husbands. Along the way, Brenna gets caught up in the usual
vices of kids in his situation: drugs, violence, booze and women. In fact, by
the time he turns 14, he favorite activity is car theft and mass alcohol
consumption.
The fact that he made it out alive and with enough working
brain cells to write a memoir is nothing short of a miracle, but unfortunately
the book is not. The writing is direct; and hard to take in. Brenna employs the
stream of consciousness writing style – but the result is simply confusion. To
be totally honest, I had trouble convincing myself to finish Murdering The Mom
and would be hard pressed to recommend it. But I do commend Duff Brenna for the
courage to write about his trying existence.
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