Darling Days

Unfolding in animated, crystalline prose, an emotionally raw, devastatingly powerful memoir of one young woman's extraordinary coming of age—a tale of gender and identity, freedom and addiction, rebellion and survival in the 1980s and 1990s, when punk, poverty, heroin, and art collided in the urban bohemia of New York's Lower East Side.Born into the beautiful bedlam of downtown New York in the '80s, iO Tillett Wright came of age at the intersection of punk, poverty, heroin, and art. This was a world of self-invented characters, glamorous superstars, and strung out sufferers, ground zero of drag and performance art. Still, no personality was more vibrant and formidable than her mother Rhonna, a showgirl and young widow, a mercurial, erratic Glamazon who was iO's fiercest defender and only authority in a world with few boundaries and even fewer indicators of normal life. At the center of Darling Days is the remarkable relationship between a fiery kid and her...