A haunting, memorable mother-daughter story for a fresh generation-the debut of the blazing brand-new lyrical voice

Domenica Ruta was raised in a working-class, unforgiving Italian town north of Boston where in the seventeenth century women were hanged seeing that witches. Her mother, Kathi, a notorious shape in this hardscrabble place, was a drug addict and sometime dealer whose lifestyle swung between welfare and riches, whose highbrow flavor was at chances with her foundation appetites. And yet she managed, despite about With or Without You: A Memoir the chaos she made, to instill in her child the theory that art-via a classic film or a classical education-could transcend this life of undying grudges, self-inflicted misfortune, as well as the crooked moral code that Kathi and her cohorts lived by. With or Without You may be the story of Domenica’s unconventional coming of age-a darkly amusing chronicle of the misfit ’90s years as a child and the necessary and painful respond of breaking away, and of overcoming her have addictions and demons along the way. In a brilliant stylistic feat, Domenica Ruta offers written a robust, inspiring, compulsively readable, and lastly redemptive tale about adoring and leaving.

Advance praise for With or Without You

“Freakishly outstanding, brilliantly freakish, that is one of the best memoirs I’ve ever browse. Domenica Ruta did something every musician using a failed family should do: She’s produced herself.”-Gary Shteyngart

“ ‘Make it fresh,’ Ezra Pound aimed, and Domenica Ruta offers. Hard childhoods are plentiful; the skill to transform adversity into art is an issue. Unflinching in its respect, forgiving in its laughter, With or Without You is normally that rare matter, a story you believe you know transformed into one you have to read to the finish.”-Kathryn Harrison

“In the world of memoir, Mary Karr’s and Geoffrey Wolff’s exceptional books burn and brighten, like actual superstars among strings of tinsel. With or Without You is like that. I will examine whatever Domenica Ruta writes.”-Amy Bloom