Driving with Dead People by Monica Holloway - and conversation with the author!

WITH A CONVERSATION WITH THE AUTHOR, MONICA HOLLOWAY!

Hey all! As promised/threatened, we'll be reading Monica Holloway's memoir, Driving With Dead People for May/June. (The meetups will be earlier in the month for the next few to counteract some summer vacations.) It's a captivating, easy to read and engrossing story that just happens to be a memoir of the author's childhood. And we've got the unique opportunity to discuss the book with ourselves, then with the author!

Monica Holloway will be calling in after we've had a chance to talk about the book, so while reading it, think about some questions you'd like to ask her directly. (And I hope the speakerphone on my cell will be sufficient...)

Here's the link to order the book on Amazon, though of course I'd suggest purchasing it from your favorite local bookstore (support 'em!)
http://www.amazon.com...

Description cribbed from Amazon:
Death lurks everywhere in Holloway's childhood. A neighbor boy accidentally shoots and kills a train conductor; a little girl is mowed down by a motorist. Her father's main hobby is filming grisly car wrecks and natural disasters, and her best friend's family runs the town mortuary. Observing the dead in their coffins, Monica wonders: would she be better off in a casket than alive in her parents' home? In this memoir, Holloway (an actress turned writer) tackles the horrifyingly familiar story of father/daughter incest: the secrecy that surrounds it and the ways it corrodes families from the inside out. Even though her memories of the abuse were repressed, evidence cropped up everywhere, from her chronic bed-wetting and compulsive lying as a girl to her adult attraction to abusive men; when her older sister, JoAnn, comes forward with her recollections, Holloway begins to remember her own trauma. As a writer, Holloway might not be in Mary Karr's league, but her blunt sentences deliver the unvarnished truth. In coming to terms with her tragedy, Holloway writes, "Knowing there is no cavalry is much better than hoping for a cavalry that never comes." Her memoir sings with the power of a disenfranchised woman finally finding her own voice, and her brutal memoir is hard to forget.