Postmortem by Laurel Saville

This is a memoir and an eye opening story of what alcohol abuse can do to a family. The author writes about her mother and spending the first thirteen years of her life watching her mother decline day by day. Her mother was a alcoholic. This story shows how a once beautiful, coddled woman, given every advantage a young lady in the thirties could have, a model, a talented artist, a dress designer ends up being a single mother of three, jobless, with vagrants and drunks coming in and out of her home until finally she ends up dead in her bed with her panties around her ankles and her throat strangled with a one eyed dog barking at the police.


It's a memoir of the sixties, of hippy parties, of free love and a nine or ten year old girl forced to swim naked in a pool with adults, forced to walk past coupling people in her own living room, forced to find her naked mother getting slapped around by a boyfriend's drunken friends, forced to wash her own clothes in a bathtub and run to KFC for food. The further into the book I read, the more disturbed I became as her mother's "illness" progresses to the point that she yells and curses at her daughter, allows her numerous boyfriends to hit on her daughter and grows jealous over her daughter instead of protective. There were moments I had to set the book down, I was so upset.

Def. a thumbs up to Ms. Saville to have the courage to share this shocking story. She reveals some very intimate things about her life, her mother, her feelings and fears. I give it four instead of five stars because there were some parts that bored me.  I feel she went on a bit too much about paintings and photographs and except for the interesting part about her grandfather's metal aircraft he designed (WAY COOL!!), I didn't care so much about reading about her grandparents. They seemed like normal, well meaning people, but that doesn't make for intriguing reading.

Four stars. I highly recommend it for people who like memoirs about dysfunctional families, but brace yourselves. It's a shocker.

I received this in ebook format from Amanda at getredPR.