The Taste of Anger

A Memoir

Diane Vonglis Parnell

• Publisher: She Writes Press
• Year: 2024
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781647426859
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

“I’ll kill the first person who comes through this door.” My father grips a baseball bat in his meaty hands.

It is 1962 and Diane is three years old when her violent father moves their family—her, her pregnant mother, and her six siblings—to a remote farm in Upstate New York. There, she grabs the reader by the hand and takes them to the broken-down barns, barren fields, and rows of bunk beds in her rat-infested attic bedroom as she questions all that feels wrong about her new world. She watches her ever-pregnant mother grow emotionally colder with each new baby and wonders, Where is she when he swings his fists, his steel-toed boot, or a crowbar? Forced to perform adult manual labor in between the erratic beatings she and her siblings pound on one another to release their own aggressions, she asks herself, Is this what we’ve become? What I’ve become?

Narrated in the ever-hopeful voice of a child, The Taste of Anger explores in raw, unflinching detail how years of isolation, oppression, and the threat of retaliation create an environment in which family secrets are guarded at all costs. Tension is palpable with the turning of each page, ensuring that the reader won’t let go of Diane’s hand until she gets an answer to her most urgent question of all: Who will rescue us?

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Prologue
• 1962—Blame the Milkman
• 1963—The Monster in the Barn
• 1964—Dressing Up in Church Faces
• 1965—Go Get the Club
• 1966—Waiting to Be Saved
• 1967—Hissing Geese
• 1968—Sins of the Flesh
• 1969—War & Peace
• 1970—A Slip of the Scalpel
• 1971—Who Scratched the H?
• 1972—Cow Heaven
• 1973—The Unraveling
• 1974—Escape
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Selected Titles from She Writes Press