Body Leaping Backward: Memoir of a Delinquent Girlhood

Maureen Stanton's memoir recounts her risk-taking girlhood in a working-class prison town. Her Catholic mother used threats of Walpole Prison, the town's maximum security facility, to discipline her seven children. As the 1970s brought social upheaval to America and moral boundaries shifted, Stanton's family deteriorated. Her parents separated, and her single mother turned to shoplifting and grand larceny to maintain middle-class stability for her children. No longer deterred by prison threats, Stanton herself descended into delinquency, committing vandalism and breaking and entering. She struggled with addiction to angel dust, a homemade form of PCP that became prevalent in her hometown during Nixon's war on drugs, nearly destroying herself in the process. The memoir depicts a self-destructive girlhood set against a backdrop of a town and nation undergoing profound change, and explores how exposure to a world beyond one's origins can alter the course of a life.