"A painful truth of family life: the most tender emotions can change
in an instant. You think your parents love you but is it you they
love, or the child who is theirs?" --Joyce Carol Oates, My Life as a
Rat
Which should prevail: loyalty to family or loyalty to the truth? Is
telling the truth ever a mistake and is lying for one's family ever
justified? Can one do the right thing, but bitterly regret it?
My Life as a Rat follows Violet Rue Kerrigan, a young woman who looks
back upon her life in exile from her family following her testimony, at
age twelve, concerning what she knew to be the racist murder of an
African-American boy by her older brothers. In a succession of vividly
recalled episodes Violet contemplates the circumstances of her life as
the initially beloved youngest child of seven Kerrigan children who
inadvertently "informs" on her brothers, setting into motion their
arrests and convictions and her own long estrangement.
Arresting and poignant, My Life as a Rat traces a life of banishment
from a family--banishment from parents, siblings, and the Church--that
forces Violet to discover her own identity, to break the powerful spell
of family, and to emerge from her long exile as a "rat" into a
transformed life.
