Description
A coming-of-age story with the bite of a fable, this novel follows Violet Rue Kerrigan as she looks back on a childhood shattered by a single act of truth. Disowned at twelve after she reveals what her brothers did, Violet is forced to grow up in exile—learning how survival, identity, and belonging are negotiated when family love turns possessive and punitive. Joyce Carol Oates threads themes of social, racial, and gender equality through Violet’s shifting loyalties and hard-won selfhood, asking what it costs to speak, to testify, and to be believed. With Oates’s signature intensity and psychological acuity, the book turns one girl’s life into a broader meditation on power, stigma, and the resilience required to remake a future from the ruins of the past.
Available Editions
paperback
HarperLuxe
Published Jan 1, 2019
558 pages
ISBN: 9780062911513
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Details
First Published
2019
Language
eng
Content Warnings
Content and trigger warnings for My Life as a Rat by Joyce Carol Oates.