Powerful Memoirs by Powerful Women

The urge to leave home can be powerful—especially when home is a "vast patch of nothing" in an Indiana backwater where having new (if dirt-cheap) clothes is a point of pride and the river floods so often that sandbagging a house is a routine exercise. Angela Palm wanted more than a life circumscribed by hardship and rage. "Anger in our family was like the water," she writes in this perceptive memoir. "It had to go somewhere. Rise up, sink down, or burst everywhere at once." As a child, she turned to religion, but she found no comfort there. Her mother's consolation that Jesus, Angela's grandfather and their two dead dogs had gone to heaven and were watching her all the time was distressing ("I preferred to pee alone, and now there were two invisible persons, one invisible God and two dead dogs following me into the bathroom"). For years she pinned her hopes for escape on Corey, the boy next door, but he landed in jail after committing a double murder. Her decision to pull up roots, marry, then return to visit Corey in prison and admit her stubborn love for him is her attempt to discover, finally, the healing power of home.