“An agonizing truth of family existence: one of the most tender emotions can transform immediately. You think your parents love you but is it you they like, or the child who’s theirs?” –Joyce Carol Oates, MY ENTIRE LIFE like a Rat

Which should prevail: loyalty to family or loyalty to the reality? Is telling the reality ever a mistake and is resting for one’s family ever justified? Is one able to do the right issue, but bitterly regret it?

My Life like a Rat follows Violet Rue Kerrigan, a girl who looks back about MY ENTIRE LIFE as a Rat: A Book upon her life in exile from her family members subsequent her testimony, in age twelve, concerning what she knew to end up being the racist murder of an African-American boy by her older brothers. Within a succession of vividly recalled episodes Violet contemplates the conditions of her lifestyle as the initially beloved youngest child of seven Kerrigan children who inadvertently “informs” on her brothers, establishing into movement their arrests and convictions and her very own long estrangement.

Arresting and poignant, My Life as a Rat traces a existence of banishment from a family-banishment from parents, siblings, as well as 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” right into a transformed lifestyle.