fierce: a memoir

Scribner - Agent, Wendy Weil
Moss does what you’d expect from a visual artist: she paints pictures with her words. As with her first memoir, Change Me into Zeus’s Daughter, she uses the painful stuff of her life – an alcoholic father, abusive husbands, continual, exhausting poverty – and turns it into chilling, visceral imagery. Recalling a day in her tumultuous childhood when her father shot the family pony in a rage, she writes, “Then I saw it, clear as a bell – the tractor dragging the dead pony through the freshly plowed soybean field behind our house. The velvet, red mud guttered on either side of the pony like a wake left by a boat.” She mercilessly braids the gruesome beauty of images like this with a hopeful message: survive. But beyond surviving, Moss creates. She holds fast to her dream of becoming a visual artist, no matter how impractical a notion it is for a woman from a working-class background. Even more moving, she doesn’t become an artist – or a writer for that matter – who transcends and leaves her beginnings behind; she carries them with her, puts them on canvas and paper and exhibits them for the world to see. Admittedly, there are times when the rhythm feels a bit off, but even Moss’s lack of pacing feels like part of the erratic whirlwind that is her life.

 Change Me into Zeus's Daughter

Out of America’s ashes, a beautiful ‘Daughter’ rises
By Ann Prichard

Special for USA TODAY
This elegant and moving new memoir is nothing short of an Angela’s Ashes for Americans, beautifully written in female voice. Author Barbara Robinette Moss has Deep South roots, a backbone born of deprivation overcome, and an inner beauty of the highest order. The notion of beauty is inherent in the title, Change Me into Zeus’s Daughter. Moss was born in 1956 in a rural Alabama to a family so poor that her mother ate dirt and poison-covered seeds to save food for her nine children. They were often starving and chronically malnourished to the point that Barbara failed to develop normally. Her facial bone structure, complexion, gums and teeth were so anomalous that schoolmates and strangers reviled her. She prayed daily to be changed into Zeus’s daughter Aphrodite-the goddess of beauty.

Her prayer may have been a petition to change her father as well for he was more akin to a devil than a god. She portrays SK Moss as a shiftless, vicious alcoholic who shot the family pets and routinely returned from bars at 3 a.m., awakening his kids to harass and torture them until dawn.

The troubles and travails of the Mosses were legion and more than compatible to the sufferings depicted among Depression-era Irish in Angela’s Ashes. It is all the more amazing that the Moss family suffered so much during the 1960’s in rural America and refused out of great fear and pride to accept any government aid or private charity.

Remarkably, Zeus’s Daughter has no "woe is me" tone. Perhaps that is what makes the memoir most affecting. The Moss children suffered hunger, abuse and pervasive neediness with no little overt anger and such innocent irrepressibility that the story is, against all odds, entertaining and uplifting. Moss attributes most of her hopeful spirit to her mother, Dorris Robinette, who enriched her children’s lives with music, art and books. The nine siblings stuck together with love and mutual support. Necessity was the mother of the Moss children’s inventions. They went "boating" in Styrofoam packaging from the trash. They memorized and recited poems in lieu of giving store-bought gifts. In darkest times, the children would line up (always, without thinking about it, in birth order) to drink hot tea from a dented metal mixing bowl. (Their father had smashed what few dishes they owned.)

The children’s lives were punctuated by episodes of cruelty, violence, suicides, ostracism, evictions, and the like. Ultimately Moss transcended her childhood, changing her life and her face. There were many painful medical and dental procedures and experimental, radical facial surgery: "I’ll recognize myself, I’ve always been right there, underneath, like an underground spring. Several months later, as I was wheeled into surgery. I told the doctor, ‘Just cut away everything that’s not me."

Readers can only delight in Moss’ success as an artist, writer, parent, wife and lovely woman. Her mother, whose modest dignity touched many hearts, once admired the moon and was told, "That moon’s got nothing on you."

And the goddess of beauty, it may be said, has nothing on Barbara Robinette Moss.

• Publishers Weekly July 31,2000
In the sepia-toned photograph on the cover of this touching memoir, Moss, Her brothers and sisters, and their mother squint into the sun in a tableau that evokes Depression-era images of the rural South. On the back cover, a colorful self-portrait by the author shows a beautiful woman with huge hazel eyes. The contrast between the two images is symbolic of Moss’s Journey from poverty and despair to artistic and personal accomplishment. Many of the difficulties Moss suffered as a child will remind readers of Angela’s Ashes, although the setting for the family’s grinding poverty is rural Alabama. She remembers vividly the day her mother tasted corn and bean seeds coated with poisonous insecticides, figuring that if she survived, she could let her children appease their hunger. She lived, and the children ate the seeds. Moss’s alcoholic father would often come home in a drunken rage and rouse her and her seven brothers and sisters to punish then far into the night for imaginary misdeeds. Moss was singled out for being left-handed; he attempted to "cure" the problem by tying down her left hand. Her mother, although weak, tried to protect the children from their father’s irrational behavior. Most humiliating to Moss was the abnormal growth of her facial bones because of malnutrition or lack of dental and medical care. But Moss’s childhood was not all despair and deprivations. She describes with nostalgic warmth the good times she shared with her siblings, and her mother’s appreciation of music and poetry, which fueled Moss’s aspirations. Moss has structured her memoir in layers, impressionistic flashbacks gracefully revealing the joys and sorrows of her remarkable life’s journey.

• New York Times Book Review
This divinely titled memoir is...a Deep South cousin to Frank McCourt's "Angela's Ashes."

• People Magazine, 9/25/00
...more than a litany of deprivation. It is a story of overcoming.

• Publisher's Weekly
"Moss's journey from poverty and despair to artistic and personal accomplishment...gracefully reveal[s] the joys and sorrows of her remarkable life."

• From Kirkus Reviews
A writer remembers the indignities, the poignancies, the cruelties, and the compromises demanded by the deep poverty of her Alabama youth.In her debut volume, Moss says she wishes "to go back in time-to heal old wounds and reclaim my family." Such old wounds-and such a family. Her mother was an ex-Marine with a heart capable of myriad acts of forgiveness for her husband, a drunken, abusive ne'er-do-well whose serial failures as father, husband, and wage-earner would qualify him for a Faulkner novel-or for a guest-spot with Jerry Springer. Moss, along with her numerous siblings, somehow developed the character to persevere, despite (or because of?) Dad's eccentricities and the absence of amenities (like adequate food, clothing, shelter). Moss adopts a rough chronology, occasionally leaping elsewhere in time to visit a moment of particular importance or to prepare us for something of ensuing significance. She begins with a stunning, symbolic account of her mother's preparing a "meal" of seeds they had intended to plant-seeds saturated in pesticide: there is nothing else to eat. With increasing momentum, Moss takes us through a weird series of sensational funhouse incidents. In the 1960s her father yelled out the car window to blacks marching to Washington: "Get a goddamned job!" Cruel classmates, noting Moss's comprehensive dental problems, called her "Bucky Beaver." (She later underwent a painful experimental facial surgery, emerging from it to more closely resemble Zeus's daughter Aphrodite-Moss substitutes "Venus," confusing the Roman and Greek names for the goddess of beauty.) A tornado "sucked from under the porch in a feathery cloud" the chickens they had hoped to raise. Her uncle Jake lost a game of Russian Roulette, blowing part of his skull out onto his front steps. Moss divorced twice (one husband beat her), had a son, went to graduate school. Her father, unable to tolerate chemotherapy, shot himself in the head.A lucid and sometimes lurid reminder that pain, deprivation, and humiliation need not destroy; they can also animate. (3 b&w photos) -- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

• Glamour, September 2000
"Poignant but far from dreary, Moss's coming-of-age tale is a study in chutzpah and a fascinating exploration of a child's love-hate ties to an abusive parent."