Arts and Humanities Commons^™

A Group Of Hyenas Is A Cackle, Kristin Gallagher

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A GROUP OF HYENAS IS A CACKLE is a memoir about sisterhood, success, and self-worth. The memoir spans approximately twenty-five years in the memoir-speaker’s life and is divided into five sections. Book one explores her childhood through high school graduation, focusing on her experiences as the eldest sister in a hardscrabble, IrishCatholic family living in New England during the 1990s and its central defining eventthe death of her mother from a drug overdose. Book two examines a slice of adulthood in the protagonist’s twenties when she was a law student living in New York City with her sister. The remaining …

Own Way Girl, Melissa I. Aldana

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

OWN WAY GIRL is a memoir about growing up in a Caribbean family of women. The memoir covers the narrator’s tentative beginnings as she was adopted by a single woman in Barbados at three months old until she turns sixteen and learns the secret that has weighed heavily on both her birth and adopted mother. This memoir explores the narrator’s layered relationship with her adopted mother, her complicated relationship with her birth mother, as well family dynamics with her adopted grandmother and adopted sisters. It interrogates the nature of kin and blood ties and probes the ultimate question of what …

The Death Of Superman, Shane F. Mcfarlane

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

THE DEATH OF SUPERMAN is an autobiographical novel that covers the years from 7 to 17 in the life of Shane McFarlane, who struggles to overcome the effects of his inner-city environment and an addict father in and out of incarceration. The title is a metaphor for the decaying presence of the narrator’s father in his and his older brother’s life and the resulting consequences of that absence.

With the narrator’s father in prison, new threats emerge, including his mother’s ruthless boyfriend and his brother’s attraction to the allure of fast money. The narrator must ultimately make decisions governed by …

Split At The Root, Robert S. Gryder

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Influenced by— and sometimes in conversation with— diverse literary voices such as Dorothy Allision (BASTARD OUT OF CAROLINA), Harry Crews (A CHILDHOOD), and Mark Doty (FIREBIRD), SPLIT AT THE ROOT is a literary bildungsroman told primarily in the narrative mode. The memoir traces the narrator’s volatile beginnings in the trailer parks of rural South Carolina in the 1980s to the day he accepted, sight unseen, an offer of admission to Yale University, boarding a plane in 1993 for the first time in his life. This memoir explores the narrator’s quest for agency, deploying the essayist mode to interrogate along the …

Apparent Magnitude, Diana Anaya

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

APPARENT MAGNITUDE is a collection of lyric essays that explores family relationships, the Cuban-American immigrant experience, coming-of-age, and sexual trauma through the dual lenses of science and myth. This collection uses experimental forms, playing with the page. The experiences of an immigrant Cuban family are recounted through extended metaphors of celestial bodies, fairy tales, fables, and myths.

The literary influences of APPARENT MAGNITUDE include Rebecca McClanahan’s lyric essay, “Interstellar,” as well as A SMALL PLACE by Jamaica Kincaid. McClanahan’s use of scientific language and the metaphor of celestial bodies informs the way this collection approaches autobiographical experience. Kincaid’s prose style …