Book Review: Raised by Strangers

Title: Raised by Strangers

Author: Brooke Lynn

Date: 2014

Publisher: Light Messages

ISBN: 978-1-61153-127-5

Length: 199 pages

Quote: "I was kidnapped, abandoned, given away, and then raised by strangers...My father had spent years searching for me with help from the police and the FBI. For him, it ended in a moment of relief and triumph...However, this wasn’t the “happily ever after” that I expected."

On the surface, the writer known as Brooke Lynn might seem like a "normal' (for Washington) yuppie-type nurse and counsellor who tries to help young people with eating disorders. Things are seldom as they seem. Eating disorders tend to have roots in a deeply disorderly life, and by typical yuppie standards Lynn had one.

Actually, if you've listened to the stories of the American welfare class, the story Lynn tells about growing up in that lifestyle is not unusual. Partly it's that people who've made poor choices often become poor in financial terms; partly it's that the system ironically rewards them for making poor choices. Individual social workers may believe they are trying to help families stay together, but the fact is that people can collect more benefits when families are split up and everyone presents a maximally "needy" profile. To reconcile themselves to taking handouts, people lose whatever sense of honor they had. They start to feel that it's "smarter" to drift from job to job, collect maximum handout benefits, and fill in any gaps with fraud and outright theft, rather than work their way up to a steadier, better paid job.

I wasn't allowed to talk to many of the people who told my parents stories like this one when I was a child. We weren't rich; after successfully petitioning for food stamps to replace a food handout program, Dad's reward in the summer of 1974 was to get to try out those new food stamps to feed his family till his next job started (he'd been the man who packed up the free food), but we weren't going to live like those people. I recognize the genre, though. I went to school with kids who were going through experiences like those of little Brooke and little James in this book.

The parents married too young, were not emotionally ready for the commitment and did not honor it. The marriage fell apart. Desperately clinging to her babies, the mother went underground and came up with a second husband who abused her, abused the children, and broke the law. Rather than restore custody of the babies to their coldhearted father and his hostile second wife, the mother left them in the care of the second husband's sister, who "seemed like the normal one in the family." This aunt-substitute, called "Natalie" in the book, got a job now and then but was really a professional welfare cheat and thief who used the children to help her steal supplies for her illegal day care operation. The mother grew sadder and sicker as the children floundered in school.

Finally the kids reclaimed their father and stepmother, who had a more conventional middle-class life...into which little Brooke just didn't fit. Among other things the father told her she was fat. She developed eating disorders and, in a few years, became really fat, eventually to gain 70 pounds of "baby weight." Especially after giving in too easily to a high school boyfriend, she heard her father's scolding words as a form of sexual abuse and ran away, spending the rest of her teen years with a friend's family.

For Lynn hope was always associated with Christian faith and, although she brought plenty of emotional baggage into her adult life, she was able to claim the promises of God to help her break the patterns of behavior she'd learned. Her own early marriage started to fall apart just as her parents did, but through their faith Lynn and her husband received the help they needed to stay together and give their children a home.

As a memoir, Raised by Strangers belongs to a genre that's not been widely published or received much attention in the literary world. It's not confessional, romantic, symbolic. It is "testimonies." Traditionally "testimonies" were primarily oral literature--the stories individuals were encouraged to tell, in some churches more than others. Though they narrated family sagas, the failures and the successes of the people involved, the focus of a "testimony" is always on what the narrator believes to be God's guiding influence. Most stories of this type were never polished enough to be collected as books, and, if published, most were privately published and circulated only in families or congregations...even though, as Kathleen Norris has observed, the retelling of "testimonies" often identifies good stories and polishes them into a solid, if simple, form.

The Internet is likely to bring many more volumes of "testimonies" before the public. How good or bad for American Literature is this development likely to be? For Women's Literature--literature as sociological documents--it will be important, and valuable. For literary pleasure...a book of "testimonies" is not a novel, but, like Raised by Strangers, it can be a satisfactory collection of good stories well told.

If you are a Christian you're likely to enjoy these affirmations of our faith. If you're not a Christian, I'd be interested in reading your reactions to this book. I suspect that it may be one of the more successful books in helping people who are not Christians themselves at least understand why so many people are. Brooke Lynn has learned better than most of us how to tell a Christian "testimony" to skeptical East Coast yuppie-intellectual audiences.