Ebook: Swallow the Ocean: A Memoir

An “extraordinary” memoir of growing up in 1970s San Francisco with a paranoid schizophrenic mother (Booklist, starred review).

When Laura Flynn was a little girl, her beautiful, dynamic mother, Sally, was the center of her imagination. It wasn’t long, however, before Sally’s fun-loving side slowly and methodically became absorbed by madness. As Laura’s parents divorced and her father struggled to gain custody, Sally’s symptoms bloomed in earnest while Laura and her sisters united in flights of fancy of the sort their mother taught them, so that they might deflect the danger threatening their fragile family. Swallow the Ocean is a luminous memoir that paints a most intimate portrait of what might have been a catastrophic childhood, had Laura and her sisters not been resilient and determined enough to survive their environment even as they yearned to escape it.

“Flynn’s haunting memoir vividly recaptures the San Francisco of the 1970s, an emotionally fraught era in which quirky behaviors were more likely to be sanctioned than scorned. Flynn’s ability to render the perspective of a child elevates this memoir from ordinary to extraordinary. From the start, readers see inside her impressionable young mind as she lives from one breathless moment to the next, grappling with scenarios that would level the most well-adjusted adults.” ―Booklist (starred review)