Weekly Reader: Ugly Girl, Sweet Nectar: Based on A True Story by D.D. Kaye; Sad and Moving Book About The Scars Left By Child Abuse
By Julie Sara Porter
Bookworm Reviews
Spoilers: D.D. Kaye's Ugly Girl Sweet Nectar is a powerful book about child abuse and how those emotional scars resonate into adulthood, making the later years ones of hardship, fear, mental illness, and self-esteem issues.
The book is about Alessa, a woman who is going through massive stress in her life. Though unmarried, she has had three daughters from three different fathers. Right now she is constantly arguing with her youngest whom she describes as an "Angster"(a portmanteau for angsty teenager). She has a much younger boyfriend but is insecure about her relationship with him. She is unemployed and broke. Both of her parents are going through health crises. Her father is ill and in the grips of his controlling and manipulative second wife. Her mother has dementia and is living with the aftereffects of a life of alcoholism. To cope with all of this, Alessa has decided to do what she does best: write about her problems to find out how she got to this situation and what went wrong.
Most of the book consists of Alessa's current struggles with her children, lack of employment or finances, relationships, and parents and is interspersed with flashbacks of her unhappy childhood and teen years. Kaye writes this so the Reader understands where Alessa came from and why her current life is the way it is.
We get a sense that the flashbacks provide commentaries about what's going on in Alessa's life now. For example, Alessa goes through her morning arguing with her youngest daughter, Brooke, who would rather stay home with scabbed sunburned lips than be seen in public. Alessa is also remembering her last boyfriend who dated her for a few months until he updated his dating profile to "seeking a slender girl with a flat stomach" and is beginning to date Arman, who is almost 20 years her junior.
Alessa then recalls how her parents' marriage was once happy with a quiet mother who had an Audrey Hepburn look and a modish style and a handsome father who was very cheerful and swung his daughters around when he returned home from his office job. Alessa remembers the rare good times that she had as a child before her parent's marriage fell apart.
As Alessa's current life spirals out of control so do her memories. Alessais is laid off as a computer programmer in an "eeny, meeny, miny, moe" decision. ("You're kidding right?" She says to her boss about the process and the fact that even though a man who has never headed any projects and isn't educated in project management like she is, is not only remaining but is promoted to manager.)
During this time, Alessa flashes back to her parents divorce when she had to take a maternal role towards her younger sister, Lilla while her father worked three jobs to support his daughters and pay for his ex wife's spending habits. The sisters hovered between their father's home in Washington State and their mother's home in Hawaii. Their more liberal mother drank, took Valium, threw wild parties, and mocked Alessa's personality and appearance.
Some of the darker aspects in the flashbacks involve Alessa's parents' subsequent romances. Pam, their Dad's much younger girlfriend and later second wife goes from being an understanding sympathetic pal to a controlling manipulative shrew in a matter of a few paragraphs. She puts Cinderella and Snow White's stepmothers to shame as she dominates and verbally abuses their father, isolates him from his daughters by spreading lies, keeps to her room while the girls do all the chores, and withholds his money for herself. As they age, Pam focuses on her lesser aches and pains as his health deteriorates. Alessa and Lilla can only watch in dismay as their father, once a loving strong willed man is reduced to a shell of his former self.
The picture becomes clear when we see their father as an old man dying of an advanced stage of leukemia and Pam sends him to a nursing home citing a sore foot and spending time in a wheelchair as reasons not to care for him. (In actuality, it would ruin her narcissistic ego to care for someone else other than herself.) I don't blame Alessa for wanting to punch Pam. I wouldn't mind reaching through my Kindle to take a few hits at her myself.
They don't have it any better at their mother's home with her string of boyfriends and frequent drunken episodes.These men are absolutely horrible but at least once they are out of Alessa's mother's life, they are gone. Unlike Pam who stays and stays.
One, Big Manu, sexually assaults Alessa and reads The Joy of Sex out loud to then 7 year old, Lilla. When Alessa tells her mother about the near rape, Mom sides with Manu and tells her that this type of thing will happen all the time.
Another boyfriend, Lou, practically keeps the girls and their mother captive in a cabin in Arizona. They only managed to be rescued when a thunderstorm knocked the power out and rangers checked on their status. Alessa's mother begged for her and her daughters to be rescued.
That moment and a subsequent chapter when their mother braves a dust devil to drive her daughters to safety are the final moments of self sacrifice. Alessa and Lilla's later years with their mother consist of more frequent alcoholism and Valium and further mental decline to the point that she requires caregivers. In a haunting conversation, Alessa's mother delusionally believes that she is in prison and asks if it's because Alessa still hates her for being a bad mother. Alessa cannot find a way to answer.
These scars become more fleshed as Alessa matures. Her relationships with her daughter's fathers all ended badly partly because none of them wanted to stay with her. One wanted to continue partying, another became controlling and abusive, and the third was Christian and found Alessa's New Age beliefs to be "too occultic." (even though she cited them as giving her the strength to get her through her unhappy youth.) Looking at her relationships with them and comparing them to her parents, she realizes that she didn't want to follow the same patterns that they did. She wanted to end a relationship that wasn't working rather than be miserable and make her daughters miserable as well.
Even when things seem to go well in her current life, the rug pulls out and Alessa is left unhappy. She is no sooner happy with Arman than she sees pictures on his Facebook wall of him with scantily clad young women. She becomes closer to her older daughters, Emma and Willow but that's because they move back in to help their unemployed mother with the cost of rent. She has a male friend, Kristofer, whom she might want to pursue more than a friendship but he doesn't "want to ruin what they have" and uses Alessa only as a rebound or a shoulder when his romances fizzle out. However, he is a constant steady presence in her life and a good friend.
To keep her sanity, Alessa not only is writing out her problems but looks for signs from the Universe. During the book, she sees two different psychics and they both help her find light inside the darkness. Alessa meditates, exercises, and finds common signs and symbols that surround her. These things help center and remind her that the Universe still loves her. Even if her life is falling apart, she allows herself chances to grieve but also chances to be more open and accepting of the inward. Her spiritual path reminds her that everything will be okay and gives her the love and acceptance that her parents never did.
Writing the book allows Alessa to look for those signs from the Universe and recognize the patterns in her life. She realized that her parents' unhappiness led to her own. She became excessively
cautious and terrified of men and became overprotective of her daughters to make up for the mother that she didn't have. These realizations plus a final revelation about her mother's youth finally gives her a chance to exorcise the ghosts that have long haunted her and to make peace with her dying parents.
Alessa's writing about her past is not a quick fix. The ending makes it clear that there are still tears, criticisms, periods of anger and rage at the Universe, her parents and others, and low self-esteem. However, she will also have periods of support and love from friends and family, self-encouragement, and understanding towards herself.
D.D. Kaye writes lovingly about a woman who reviews the ugliness in her life before she recognizes her own beauty.
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