Book Club: Stray
I just finished reading the book Stray by Stephanie Danler, and loved it so much that I breezed right through it. I adored her first novel Sweetbitter, and her second book is a memoir about growing up in a family shattered by addiction. It was so painfully honest and raw that I couldn’t put it down. I don’t come across many stories that put such truth and feelings out there for everyone to see. Something about it feels so raw to read about her childhood trauma, and how it shapes her future relationships. I think most of us can relate to this struggle, and the attempt to find life beyond the limits of how you grew up.
The contrast of her traumas against the backdrop of places I’ve spent most of my own life — Long Beach, Los Angeles, and central California — namely, was so heavy yet beautiful at the same time. It captures southern California in such intimate detail, alongside the very dark struggle of addiction and growing up in a dysfunctional family. Through flashbacks and her reflection she shows the deep scars addiction has on children and the trauma it carries into adulthood.
Each chapter is titled after a location and, like the title, Stray showcases how growing up in an unstable household can make you never quite feel at home — always a stray wandering from one place to another. The unsettling feeling of belonging to nowhere and having nothing concrete. As her parents age she comes back to California to face the difficult past she’d left behind: a disabled alcoholic mother, further handicapped by a brain aneurysm and a meth addict father who abandoned her as a child. The story moving, devastating and beautifully written. It looks at the pain from damage and the survival it forces, and asks the question is it possible to change the course of your family history?
It’s hypnotically heart-breaking and examines what we inherit, what we can get through, and what we have to face to move past what we came from to become who we want to be. Her story will rip you to shreds. One of my top reads of the year.
