Freeing Vera by Elissa Raffa

Freeing Vera

Elissa Raffa

You have to leave home more than once to get it right. New York, the 1970s: Frannie D’Amato, activist young artist and unashamed truth-teller, wants to awaken her disabled mother, Vera, from her 1950’s housewife slumber and rescue her from physical neglect; to call to account Anthony, her arrogant physician father; to convince indifferent onlookers about the urgency of her struggle–and, if possible, to save her own neck. ‘Freeing Vera travels with Frannie through a vivid and highly-charged decade, from adolescence into adulthood, as she runs away from her family and back several times. On her own in the world, Frannie makes common cause with disability rights activists, left-wing artists, socialist lesbian feminists, and media figures real and imagined–all of whom make justice their religion and bolster her indomitable hope of somehow curing her family’s ills. But back at home truth is enigmatic, not static. The childhood monster that Frannie once battled keeps growing new heads. Ultimately, she must free herself to love. Compelling and funny, evocatively written and elegantly structured. ‘Freeing Vera recalls the turbulent optimism of the 1970s for young people in America–and at the same time casts an emotionally accurate light on the complexities of independence, caring, confrontation, forbearance, loyalty, disappointment, and greed that all truth-seekers and their kin must face.

From Publishers Weekly

Frannie D’Amato, the lesbian artist and activist narrator of Raffa’s earnest, angry debut novel, owns all the willfulness and fury her multiple sclerosis-stricken mother won’t. The target of Frannie’s anger (which never dissipates over the course of the novel, spanning the ’70s and ’80s) is her father, Anthony. A physician, he mentally abuses and manipulates Frannie and her three older siblings while neglecting his invalid wife, who abdicated her willpower long before she lost control of her muscles. Frannie’s survival instincts catapult her away from home and her dysfunctional family the day after she graduates from high school, and she leaves upstate New York for Chicago, where she finds community with a socialist lesbian feminist collective. Though she comes into her own–falling in love with a woman, agitating for disability rights–Frannie can’t free herself of her warped family and her suffering, abandoned mother. Long repulsed by Vera’s decay, Anthony leaves her for a younger man and attempts to use his homosexuality as a point of common ground with Frannie. Despite his children’s insistence, Anthony never does the right thing by his wife. Raffa certainly piles up the evidence against Anthony, but this unmitigated vilification reads more like an exorcism or political screed than literature. (Aug.)

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Details

ISBN	9781579621209
Genre	Fiction
Publication Date	30-Aug-05
Publisher	Permanent Press (NY)
Format	Trade Paperback
No. of Pages	263
Language	English
Rating	NotRated
BookID	4309