Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. The heartbreaking story of an emotionally battered child delivered with captivating candor and grace.Ī former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.ĭiscovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. While McCurdy didn’t emerge from her childhood unscathed, she’s managed to spin her harrowing experience into a sold-out stage act and achieve a form of catharsis that puts her mind, body, and acting career at peace. Late in the book, she shares a crushing secret her father revealed to her as an adult. At the same time, McCurdy exhibits compassion for her deeply flawed mother. Throughout the book, she honestly portrays Debra’s cruel perfectionist personality and abusive behavior patterns, showing a woman who could get enraged by everything from crooked eyeliner to spilled milk. As a young celebrity, however, McCurdy became vulnerable to eating disorders, alcohol addiction, self-loathing, and unstable relationships. Eventually, the author grew understandably resentful and tried to distance herself from her mother. She tinted her daughter’s eyelashes, whitened her teeth, enforced a tightly monitored regimen of “calorie restriction,” and performed regular genital exams on her as a teenager. As she matured and starting booking acting gigs, McCurdy remained “desperate to impress Mom,” while Debra became increasingly obsessive about her daughter’s physical appearance. McCurdy candidly reconstructs those in-between years, showing how “my mom emotionally, mentally, and physically abused me in ways that will forever impact me.” Insistent on molding her only daughter into “Mommy’s little actress,” Debra shuffled her to auditions beginning at age 6. Though she initially survived, the disease’s recurrence would ultimately take her life when the author was 21. When McCurdy was 3, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. Born in Los Angeles, the author, along with three older brothers, grew up in a home controlled by her mother. 1992) reveals the raw details of what she describes as years of emotional abuse at the hands of her demanding, emotionally unstable stage mom, Debra. In her debut memoir, titled after her 2020 one-woman show, singer and actor McCurdy (b. The former iCarly star reflects on her difficult childhood. The most noteworthy material appears in an epilogue, where, after excellent detective work, Jordan and Rodman establish conclusively that Costa did not kill three women he was suspected of murdering-a payoff that for followers of the case may be worth the 300-page wait.Ī grisly but low-impact tale of horrific crimes and their impact on the author. In the absence of high suspense, the authors try to pump up the tension with pulpy clichés (“his blood went cold”), stilted dialogue (“That kid is trouble….Mark my words”), and a deceptive-appearances theme familiar to the genre. Yet the story is curiously lacking in drama, in part because the book doesn’t reveal the author to have been in serious danger of harm from Costa. The two threads alternate in a briskly written text that isn’t for the faint of heart: Costa committed gruesome dismemberments and other sadistic acts about which the adult Rodman has understandably had nightmares.

A second strand involves Rodman’s painful relationship with her distracted mother, who worked as a tourist-season motel housekeeper and often let Costa take her daughters for drives-including to a forest where he had buried his victims-when the author was between the ages of 8 and 10. One strand tells the story of Antone “Tony” Costa, a handyman “who just about everybody considered the friendly, even charming guy next door”-until he was convicted of the murders of Patricia Walsh and Mary Anne Wysocki and believed to have killed at least three other women. With journalist Jordan, Rodman recalls her preteen summers on Cape Cod with a younger sister and a mother “so self-absorbed that she unwittingly left her children in the care of a psychopath.” For a book about vulnerable children-a topic that usually tugs the heartstrings-the narrative is not as affecting as one would expect. A true-crime “hybrid work of memoir and narrative nonfiction.”

The babysitter book