Book description
A haunting and triumphant story of a difficult and keenly felt life,
Change Me into Zeus's Daughter
is a remarkable literary memoir of resilience, redemption, and growing
up in the South. Barbara Robinette Moss was the fourth in a family of
eight children raised in the red-clay hills of Alabama. Their wild-eyed,
alcoholic father was a charismatic and irrationally proud man who, when
sober, captured his children's timid awe, but when (more often) drunk,
roused them from bed for severe punishment or bizarre all-night poker
games. Their mother was their angel: erudite and stalwart -- her only
sin her inability to leave her husband for the sake of the children.
Unlike the rest of her family, Barbara bore the scars of this abuse
and neglect on the outside as well as the inside. As a result of
childhood malnutrition and a complete lack of medical and dental care,
the bones in her face grew abnormally ("like a thin pine
tree"), and she ended up with what she calls "a twisted,
mummy face." Barbara's memoir brings us deep into not only the
world of Southern poverty and alcoholic child abuse but also the
consciousness of one who is physically frail and awkward, relating how
one girl's debilitating sense of her own physical appearance is
ultimately saved by her faith in the transformative powers of artistic
beauty: painting and writing.
From early on and with little encouragement from the world, Barbara
embodied the fiery determination to change her fate and achieve a life
defined by beauty. At age seven, she announced to the world that she
would become an artist -- and so she did. Nightly, she prayed to
become attractive, to be changed into "Zeus's daughter," the
goddess of beauty, and when her prayers weren't answered, she did it
herself, raising the money for years of braces followed by facial
surgery. Growing up "so ugly," she felt the family's
disgrace all the more acutely, but the result has been a keenly
developed appreciation for beauty -- physical and artistic -- the
evidence of which can be seen in her writing.
Despite the deprivation, the lingering image from this memoir is not
of self-pity but of the incredible bond between these eight siblings:
the raucous, childish fun they had together, the making-do, and the
total devotion to their desperate mother, who absorbed most of the
father's blows for them and who plied them with art and poetry in
place of balanced meals. Gracefully and intelligently woven in layers
of flashback, the persistent strength of Barbara Moss's memoir is
itself a testament to the nearly lifesaving appreciation for
literature that was her mother's greatest gift to her children.
Jack Davis Vice President/Planning, Chicago Tribune
Publishing The reader is witness to stunningly beautiful moments
frozen by a remarkable natural writer. This book will hold you with
the horror and comedy of a family's survival, and with the control and
clarity and passion of the storyteller.
Barbara Robinette Moss, author of the acclaimed
memoir Change Me into Zeus's Daughter, is a full-time artist
and writer whose awards include the Gold Medal for Personal Essay in
the William Faulkner Creative Writing Competition (1996), the Iowa
Authors Award (2000), and the Alabama Authors Award (2002). She lives
with her husband in Iowa City, Iowa.
