Includes bibliographical references.

"The "mesmerizing... daring and important"* storyof a risk-takinggirlhood spent in a working-class prison town
*Andre Dubus III

For Maureen Stanton'sproperCatholicmother,the town's maximum security prison wasa way to keep her seven children in line ("If you don't behave, I'll put you in Walpole Prison!").But asthe 1970s brought upheavalto America, and the linesbetween good and bad blurred,Stanton's once-solid family lost its way. Apromising younggirl with a smart mouth,Stanton turns watchfulas her parents separate and her now-singlemother descends into shoplifting, then grand larceny, anything tokeep a toehold in the middle class for her children.No longer scared by threats of Walpole Prison, Stantontoo slips into delinquency--vandalism, breaking and entering--all while nearly erasing herself through addiction to angel dust, a homemade form of PCP that swept through her hometown in the wake of Nixon's "total war" on drugs.

Body Leaping Backward is the haunting and beautifully drawn story of a self-destructive girlhood, ofa town and a nationoverwhelmed ina time of change, and of how life-alteringa glimpse of a worldbigger than the one we come from canbe.


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"An arresting story of a risk-taking girlhood, set against the cultural turmoil of the 1970s in Walpole, Massachusetts, an "every town" with a famous state prison. "Mesmerizing . . . daring and important." -- Andre Dubus III"--