Description

Nadia Bruce-Rawlings takes us from childhood scenes in Egypt, with servants and vacations on Cyprus, to the most sordid of L.A. streets, from parties in Cannes and karaoke in Tokyo to stealing batteries and pregnancy tests to support her crack habit and sharing day-care motherhood with strippers. She is fearless in presenting both worlds and sketching the twilight zone between them, showing us that the struggles of adolescence in a dysfunctional family in the Middle East have their counterpart in the daily struggles of an addict, equally a foreigner in the surface world of respectability in any American city. Turning horror to hope, as we have seen in so many tales that have held our attention through the ages, can give even the most sordid journey a golden destination, and it does so here. ~ Rob Simbeck, from his introduction.

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Punk Hostage Press (November 5, 2020)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 108 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1940213096
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1940213095
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 6.1 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5 x 0.27 x 8 inches

5.0 out of 5 stars Technicolor Postcards from Glorious, Harrowing Life
Reviewed in the United States on November 27, 2020
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Nadia Bruce Rawlings has walked on a razor’s edge of a turbulent, at times violent childhood, descended into addiction, battled crazy people, made poor choices in love and ended up with a beautiful life. Told in the same lean, true style as Hemingway, DRIVING IN THE RAIN is a series of vignettes, broken with free form poems, that capture the visceral images, emotions and actions that hold a life like this together.
Fraught with joy, strong in the tough spots, she writes an honest accounting of a father who was dreadful, worlds most of us will never see — and loving a life she created from the realm of a woman more than once skulking for drugs into the writer she is today.
Inspiring, easy to read and a scant 84 pages, this could well be the lifeline people struggling can hold onto as they try to find their own higher ground.

5.0 out of 5 stars Live through it.
Reviewed in the United States on January 16, 2021
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Bruce-Rawlings FEELS life, everything about it. From her fears of a father who abuses her sweet mother, through her struggles with addiction, to her touching experiences as a single mother, navigating through her own complicated human connections, we get to feel life vicariously. And that is precisely why I read, to be able to feel someone else’s human experience and to make it part of my own. So thank you Nadia, for Driving in the Rain.