Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. "Here is one of the most emotionally honest memoirs you will ever read. Mary Minock's THE WAY-BACK ROOM offers the abidingly moving narrative of a girl's life set against the blue-collar grit and texture of multi-ethnic, pre-Vatican II, southwest Detroit. Her storytelling captures mood and setting with a skill evocative of Jeffrey Eugenides and with the lyricism of Phillip Levine's Detroit poems, yet all the while with an entirely original and touching voice. I was captured after reading the first three astonishing paragraphs. There is no sentimentality here, and there are no real enemies, just the simple truth spoken through the lens of profound loneliness and shame, insatiable curiosity, wit, and immense vulnerability. This is an honorable story that will leave you at once with a flood of warmth and that achy breaky heart, wanting more from Mary Minock, and soon."—Rebecca B. Rank, author of Pears in a Porcelain Bowl

Author City: DETROIT, MI USA

Mary Minock is an author and educator at Madonna University in Michigan. She grew up and still lives in Detroit.