Description
I WAS BORN, SEPTEMBER 1985, IN THE VORTEX OF THE LOWER EAST SIDE OF NEW YORK: THERE WERE FEW RULES OF LIFE AND ZERO CONTRAINTS ON BEHAVIOUR. IF YOU WERE NOT ECCENTRIC, YOU WERE WEIRD.
It was a tenement building at the centre of the drug-addled, punk-edged, permanent riot that was iO''s corner of the Lower East Side of New York City in the ''80s and 90''s. There iO grew up - or rather scrabbled up - under the broken wing of a fiercely protective, yet wildly negligent mother.
Rhonna was a showgirl, actress, dancer, poet. A widow by police murder, she was also an addict. She doted and obsessed over iO, yet lacked an understanding that a child needs food and sleep and safety.
Unfolding in animated, crystalline prose, an emotionally raw, devastatingly powerful memoir of one young person''s extraordinary coming of age - a tale of gender and identity, freedom and addiction, rebellion and survival in the 1980s and 1990s, when punk poverty, heroin and art collided
