The Hooker's Daughter: A Boston Family's Saga
Dale Stanten, 2011
Infinity Publishing
240 pp.
ISBN-13: 978074146402
Summary
It’s been called the "oldest profession in the world." I call it everyday life.
My mother is a hooker who turns tricks in our tiny apartment. At six years old, I shudder every time the doorbell rings and rings and rings.
In our tight-knit Jewish community, my family’s behavior is not welcomed. While my mother runs her "business," my father behaves like an ostrich with his head in the sand. He barely functions. My sister, a lesbian in an era when being gay is reprehensible, is placed into a convent and then sent to a mental institution. And there is shoplifting, scamming checks, and a stolen car ring using the rabbi’s garage.
I strut through my teenage years with a display of arrogant posturing designed to conceal the internal angst of isolation, loneliness, and fear of following in my mother’s footsteps.
My fantasy is to have a cookie-cutter life. I find my life’s mate, marry, become the perfect wife and mother, yet, in my secret heart, I am still out of step. The cookie crumbles when my husband is diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor. He becomes blind and suffers six grueling years. As he struggles, I struggle to keep it all together. I cry for all of us.
The Hooker’s Daughter is a memoir of a life dictated by shame and discontent. It traces the path of a young woman from childhood, through bewildered adolescence, to wife, mother, widow, and successful entrepreneur. The story is about trauma, survival, and triumph.