Even Dogs Go Home To Die
By Linda St. John
HarperCollins, $24
ISBN 0060186313

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In this harrowing memoir, Linda St. John recreates her impoverished southern Illinois childhood. Through a series of brief vignettes, with titles such as "She Didn't Even Know What P.T.A. stood for" and "Hell on a Houseboat," St. John depicts growing up within her desperate and often violent family.

St. John's visual art has made her an acclaimed "outsider" artist, and her family is the subject of her pictures as well as her book. Like those pictures, Even Dogs Go Home To Die captures snapshots from her childhood, featuring her alcoholic father, her deliberately obtuse and sometimes unkind mother and her three siblings, each of whom bears his or her own burden.

The story "Tuff Love" describes a vicious beating St. John's father gives her brother, and his regret that comes too late. The harshness they experienced toughened the children. As St. John writes, "I look back now and see that dad didn't make a man out of Ralphie with all that meanness but, by god, he sure enough almost made one out of me." In "We Didn't Fall For That Crap," St. John writes of her mother that "We knew she couldn't like anyone . . . so what the hell. We let her have it. We called her names and back talked her and totally disrespected her." With a child's cruel insight, St. John demonstrates the difficulty her family had in forming relationships.

Damage wrought by favoring children runs throughout Even Dogs Go Home To Die. St. John's mother "was easily provoked by Alice" and goes after her with a hair brush after she plays with the vacuum cleaner. When her own daughter comes along, matters get even worse. St. John writes of how "Ann was only 11 when Suzi was born and they were brought up side by side. Dad made it plain though that he favored my daughter. He'd take Suzi out shoppin' and let Ann tag along."

As adults, the family background of the siblings haunts them. One sister revels in her power over their parents, while the youngest sister vies for the attention she never received, and her brother follows in their father's alcoholic footsteps. Even in the bleakest moments of the memoir, though, St. John emphasizes survival. She writes of her brother's falling asleep smoking, and suffering lung problems as a result of inhaling fumes from the burning furniture. "He hacked and coughed and spit. He didn't go to a doctor. He just finally got over it the way white trash does."

Eliza R. L. McGraw writes from Cabin John, Maryland.