Crave: Sojourn of a Hungry Soul

by Laurie Jean Cannady

Crave is a coming-of-age memoir that chronicles a young girl's journey through abuse and impoverishment. The effusive narration descends into the depths of personal and sexual degradation, perpetual hunger for food, safety and survival. While moving through gritty exposés of poverty, abuse, and starvation, Crave renders a continuing search for sustenance that simply will not die.

It is no surprise this memoir is a narrative about a victim who becomes a survivor. Cannady's target audience are women, African Americans, high-school students, college students, survivors of physical and sexual abuse, veterans, people raised by single parents, and folks who are living in or have lived through impoverishment.

Genres: Memoir

384 pages, Paperback

First published November 10, 2015

About the author

Dr. Cannady has published an array of articles and essays on poverty in America, community and domestic violence, and women’s issues. She has also spoken against sexual assault in the military at West Point. Her memoir, Crave: Sojourn of a Hungry Soul, will be published November 2015 with Etruscan Press. Dr. Cannady currently resides in Central Pennsylvania with her husband, Chico Cannady, and their three children. She currently teaches English at Lock Haven University of Pennsylvania.

Reviews

[Brad Curtis · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was amazing. The author has the incredible ability to take readers from a world of comfort and pleasure to the gritty, hard place where she grew up. The writing is lyrical and captures the reader in her world. You feel her pain, you taste the morsels of food she so jealously guards, you see the light the way she sees it. Most importantly you feel her pain and ultimately her triumph. I couldn't put this book down until I had finished it and can't wait for the next installment. Laurie Jean Cannady is a brilliant new author.

[Liralen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I heard Cannady speak on a panel with Wendy Ortiz, Alice Anderson, and Lynn Hall a couple of years ago and immediately added all of their books to my to-read list. The books—all four of them—lived up to the panel.

Cannady grew up as one of five children raised by a single mother. In some ways what's exceptional about her story is how unexceptional it is: the abuse and poverty—and the hunger—she faced were cyclical, endemic. Normalised. Her mother's dreams of college were cut short by rape and pregnancy, the former tacitly condoned by her sister. (Or—condoned might be too positive a word—but there was clearly a general sense that rape, in particular rape within a relationship, was a rite of passage, not something to intervene in.) Cannady and her siblings trekked from home to home, always scrambling to find enough to eat, as their mother found unhealthy relationship after unhealthy relationship, and as Cannady grew up and started to face many of the pressures that her mother had experienced.

What comes through most strongly in Cannady's portrait of her mother, though, is a woman working herself to the bone to provide for her children in a system that didn't give her many opportunities. Not an easy upbringing but one in which virtually every scrap of stability was possible because of her mother...who isn't painted as a saint here, but as wonderfully complicated and very human.

The book ends with—finally—a sense of hope that Cannady will escape the violence that she has come to see as normal (hard not to, when the relationships modelled around you have largely been violent). Based on her bio and website, it sounds like there's quite a lot more to her story, and that—while things have gotten drastically better, and more stable—'getting out' was by no means a miracle cure. My hope is that sometime down the line she'll write about what came after the end of this book: the military, and at some point education, and the good and the bad that came with those. There portraits of her siblings in this book are also relatively limited (possibly for the sake of their privacy, which is of course entirely valid), and I'd be interested to know more about where they've ended up.

[Susan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had the pleasure of hearing Dr. Laurie Cannady read some of her work - she is an amazing person and if you ever have the opportunity to hear her speak or read, you 100% should. I was uplifted and inspired by her.

I wanted to love this book, and I did love parts of it. Her writing is poetic, her story is heartbreaking and incredible at the same time. My criticism is more with her editor than the book itself - there are typos that should have been caught, and I'm wondering if it could have been organized better. The mini-backstories and multitude of names/characters sometimes took me out of the power of the present story being told, often without providing much illuminating history. The book presents as a mostly chronological telling of her mothers life, and then hers, through the men they were with. I both applaud this and cringe because of it - how many women categorize their lives based on the men they were with at the time? Determine their worth this way? I applaud her because yes, we should bring attention to this and teach women to stop counting their years in men. But I cringe because I wonder if that was her intention, and if the book draws that conclusion by the end. I also wonder if there were other relationships that could have been focused on in more depth (mother/daughter, sibling, etc). I choose to believe it is structured this way because it is about her younger self, the self that believed attention from men was the only thing that made her worth anything in the world she grew up in.

Moving forward, I would be really interested to see what she does with the next book, what twists and turns her life took and how she measures her next years. This book is definitely worth a read, and this author is definitely worth listening to.

[Tisha Marie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a meal that has to be eaten slowly, savored like it might be your last. The kind of starvation the narrator experiences as a child would stop most grown folks dead. But she persisted, like her mother and the women who taught her to be strong, independent, and succeed in spite of the unfortunate circumstances. This is not a memoir about pitying a victim; it is a celebration of an empowered woman who stands as a model for the resilience and fortitude necessary to achieve life goals.

[Laurie Jean Cannady · Rating 5 out of 5]

I lived it. I wrote it. I love it. You should too :-)!

[An Nguyen · Rating 4 out of 5]

In my opinion, the chapter of Crave that left the deepest impression on me so far is The Reason. Besides the bravery of Laurie's mother, it was the Big Boone's actions that actually draw my attention. Reading Crave, we all already realized that Boone was a very strict man towards her since almost everything he held dear to had left his side, from his wife to most of his children, and Pretty was the last one staying. After all that, the likelihood of him even considering Pretty was almost unimaginable. But then something in him just sparked up, and like a miracle, he granted his daughter her wish. On an emotional level, it felt like there was a psychological struggle in the old man's mind: one part of him, like I expected, would have turned down her request immediately for fear of losing the last coin in his treasure chest, the other part wanted Pretty to be happy, to be free to make choices in her life, to be better than her daddy. In the end, the instinct of a father in him had won and told him to let her go. The fact that he would risk everything he had left for his child's future was quite shocking, and beautiful at the same time. It really made me think a lot about my own future, when I have my own family, my own children. No one can be the best father in the world, but anyone can be a good father, like Big Boone at the very end.

[Har Patel · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book has a great amount of detail. This allows the author to put in detail which readers can connect to. Each chapter has a different aspect with certain details that relate to some parts of your life. One part that relates specifically to me is The Reasons chapter, just as Momma who was scared to ask her father to join the Upward Bound program, multiple times in my life, I had to muster up the courage to ask my father permission to do many things. To the most simplest thing as to having to go outside to applying to colleges, my fathers rules were so strict. No going outside, only homework and studies, no closed doors, sleep at 9 P.M., get to places yourself(walking, public transportation, carpool). The restriction on my life is something that novel and I have in common. Relating is key while reading therefore this book can be given a semi-descent rating. Other topics such as rape and child molestation is why this book gets a lower rating as they were described in detail. However, it is the author's personal life so I understand her viewpoint.

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

A chapter from Crave that speaks to me is "Black Oak". I picked this chapter because it went into depth about what Cannady is willing to do to protect her family from harm's way. She let one of the neighborhood boys grind on her for a potato and what is even more disturbing is when Pee Wee rapes Cannady, she chooses to stay quiet because he threatened to kill her family if she spoke about the atrocities that occurred. Afterwards, Cannady poured herself a glass of Kool-Aid in a broken cup and she wondered how it stayed together when it was so broken which describes Cannady. Although she has gone through terrible things, she still manages to hold herself together despite what is going on. This relates to me because when I go through hardships I still stay motivated to move on. Crave explores the many hardships of Canada's life such hunger and make you reflect on your own life and see what you took for granted.

[Joy Mohr · Rating 5 out of 5]

A glimpse into my favorite chapter -

Although my experience is not as horrifying or vivid as the one Cannady expressed through the chapter, The Way It Is Done, the pain and suffering is still there. The oppression Momma felt as her sister told her to not tell Pop because "this is the way it is done" is what many victims of rape, harassment, and abuse feel. It is hard to tell the truth to someone who might not stand by you when all you need is love. It is explicitly displayed when Momma ran into the bathroom and asked her sister why she didn't come when she heard her scream. Momma needed her sister the most at that exact moment and she was not there. I experienced it and witnessed it happened so this chapter really represented a pain that is real and might be hidden within someone who may look fine on the surface but is boiling with pain on the inside.

[Thea Swanson · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very difficult read. I gave this book three stars only because it was so hard for me to stay in that world (Cannady writes with beauty, clarity and generosity). I had a traumatic childhood and could relate to a number of aspects of this memoir--childhood sexual abuse, alcoholism, poverty, moving from apartment to apartment--but the degree to which Cannady suffered was so intense and constant, that my childhood seems serene. Perhaps the saddest part is that Cannady's experience is not unusual.

With that said, Cannady loves, through it all. And her family loves. Interspersed throughout the many, many, details of pain, mistakes, and severe abuse, love continues to surface, to rise, and it seems, to ultimately win.

Crave is a rough road to walk, and I applaud Cannady for her bravery to lay the stones.

[Lara Lillibridge · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an important book for anyone wondering why more people don't escape the cycle of poverty. Cannady's memoir details growing up in the projects, and is written clearly and in a straightforward, linear progression. She doesn't shirk from the ugly truths of her life, nor does she over-explain or bog the memoir down with too much of the reflective backward gaze. Rather she presents her story as clearly and simply as possible, allowing the reader to slip into her life and form their own opinions.

I recommend this book not just to students of memoir, but to anyone seeking to understand race and the socioeconomic divide in the US right now. If I could only recommend 5 books on Goodreads this year, this would be one of them.

[Andrew Ragni · Rating 5 out of 5]

An interesting chapter to me was called "The Reasons." It is about Momma telling her father she got into Upward bound. Her life was awful up to that point, and the only way to escape that was by going to school. Getting out from the rape, her scary father, and hunger would all happen when she went to this school. This relates to me because school is my escape(my situation is far less serious). Going to to university I attend is going to allow me to be qualified to make great money. I will get experience in my field and learn all i will need to know for my future. Much like Momma, going to school will break the chain and make my child's life easier than mine. Or at least that is the goal.

[Dylan · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the most impactful chapters (2 technically) was the one where Cannady describes how she was repeatedly raped by her mother's boyfriend, Pee-wee, as a child. One reason these chapters were so impactful to me was because they demonstrate some of the darkest depth of human depravity. The fact that anyone can feel pleasure from that fills me with disgust. The second reason why the chapters were compelling was Cannady's wide range of emotional response to what was happening, how she tried to go numb and count birds during the rapes, how she felt a responsibility to go through with it to protect her family, how becoming a victim became almost "normal" to her. I just find the psychologies of both parties involved disturbing yet fascinating.

[Allen · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the chapter "Snow Cold" in Crave: Sojourn of a Hungry Soul by Laurie Jean Cannady, it shows the harsh reality of the mother's life in the eyes of her children. The simplistic language that Laurie Jean Cannady uses expresses the emotions that are felt, which is symbolic to the weather, cold and tense. In the eyes of the audience, the entire chapter felt cold when the father left his own daughter in the snow and when he didn't come back for a year, but that all changed in the small moment at the end when he looked at the closed door and regretted it all. This chapter relates to me because we've all felt that loneliness of when someone close leaves and that emptiness you feel when you see them off.

[Kyle Biro · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thought this book was good. Like Lois, my mom is also a single mom who works hard to provide for me and my sister. Of course it's not as extreme as in this book, but my mo gets up at 6 a.m everyday, works until 4 p.m and still comes home to cook dinner. All she asks of us is to keep the house clean and clean up after dinner. Most days we do, but on the days we are too lazy or tired to, she gets very upset. Me and my sister always cave in and clean up as soon as possible. I feel like though many people have not had the experiences Cannady has, most can connect to this book one way or another.

[Jared · Rating 3 out of 5]

I do not enjoy the book very much so far, but I thought the chapter of Crave that was most engaging for me was “The Reasons.” In this chapter, Momma writes an essay for the Upward Bound Program to get out of the house and away from her father. The author writes that “She soon decided the problem wasn't her body, but her daddy’s home. Its rules had tightened around her…” I often felt this way during high school and when writing my essays for college applications I imagined the extra freedom I would have while living on my own. That view has changed since I got into college and I still get homesick every once in a while.

[Alisha S · Rating 5 out of 5]

For me, the most impactful chapter was "Nowhere Man." It shows the narrator's struggle for self discovery. She is desperate to find out who her father is, by any means necessary. She feels a connection to him through her early memories. "'Girl,' he responded abruptly. 'I ain't see your daddy.' My face burned with his gruffness. I hadn't asked any questions and he'd already decided he had no answers. Still, I prodded. Maybe my father's location would slip past his non answers." If I was in her position, I too would experience the emotions going through her head. I understand the feeling of wanting to discover my roots and where I come from.

[Kaley Nhu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Throughout the book, we can see Cannady's desperate need to find someone to identify with because she feels as if she doesn’t belong It was quite sad to know that a twelve-year-old child feels misplaced in the world. It was heartbreaking to know that children are forced to resolve these difficult “life challenges” (even sometimes alone). She not only has determination but also courage to find herself, which was quite inspiring. She gives her readers a perspective to her world and her problems. It was a great book that I would definitely recommend this to others.

[Elan · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the beginning of the this chapter Laurie introduced Pee Wee as a man who would numb her hunger and bring her treats. In my life I had multiple figures who would give me gifts and treats. Specifically, my parents and a cousin who used to give me light up toys. My parents would give me that comfort just as Laurie's mother and even Pee Wee did. My cousin or as I called him, "Gift Man", used to give me gifts and in some ways reminds me of how Pee Wee would bring food, or chocolates to Laurie and her siblings.

[Mitchell Hurtado · Rating 4 out of 5]

"...no matter how hard they are studied, and those elusive remembrances, the smell, the touch, the voice, of a mother. Those are not mementos, but mementos every motherless child works hardest to keep." Everyone tries to keep the things that make them happy, even if it's just a memory. Everyone wants to be reminded of the good times in there life and revisit it. Although I couldn't relate to much to this book, the one thing I could relate to is the fact that lose is in everyone's life, and this book helped me see some of the things that everyone is against admitting themselves

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think the chapter that engaged me the most was “Casualty of War.” Cannady describes the way her and her and Champ fought over who would clean up the dishes and clean the floor, “I was no dummy, and I knew if Champ was electing to do the table and the floors this was a much sweeter deal than the dishes.” I related to this because this was something me and my siblings would do every week growing up. We would argue over who got to do what chore because we all wanted to do the easiest one like Cannady and Champ.

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

I absolutely love this story. In the novel, the chapter that was most engaging to me was “Singer,” where Laurie Jean Cannady describes her love for Tom-Tom when he was born, how she treated him differently than the rest of her siblings, and how he would sing to them by humming. Cannady writes, “While he sang, we didn’t see the hand-me-downs we had to wear...” I experienced those moments a couple times in my life, where everything isn’t going my way but being in that one moment makes everything feel serene. Those are the moments I strive to have when things aren’t looking out.

[Dylan · Rating 4 out of 5]

While this may not be the best book I've ever read, it does a fantastic job keeping my interest. The way the first chapter throws the reader into this deplorable situation, there is just something captivating about it. It also makes the situation the characters were in seem like the most important chain of events to have ever occurred in the world. There is something to be said for how the book makes you relate to things you have never experienced.

[Jason Cho · Rating 5 out of 5]

The things that happened in this book, Crave, were very shocking. The fact that Cannady got raped and could not even say a word about what happened because she was worried about the safety of her family really had me thinking. The shocking stuff though also kept me to continue reading because it really grabbed my attention.

[Ali Elzahri · Rating 5 out of 5]

Crave was a well written book because of the extra detail added in it. I was able to visualize some of the descriptions in my head as I read in the book. Because of the extra detail and emotion, I found it very hard to put this book down as I was reading it. For these reasons, this is why I enjoyed this book.

[Ben Snouffer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Crave was able to grab my attention throughout the book because of how well everything was described. Cannady was able to describe a situation as if you were seeing it through her eyes. This made it easy to stay involved and interested every step of the way.

[Reilly · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is a very well written account of the struggles the author and her family went through in their lives. Cannady does an excellent job creating nonfiction that is enthralling.

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a great book, and is very emotional. It is a very raw life-story of a gal from P-Town & all that entails.

[William · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book engages you with topics that are relative. For me the chapter where the main character is looking for clues about her missing family, I've had a similar events so I connect with the book.

[Enrique Feliciano · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ever since I was younger, my mother told me stories about the conditions that she had to live through when she was around my age, which included, wearing clothes worn by many people before her, clothes that did not even fit, and also, the part that really connects to Crave, the lack of food in her house. My mom went on and on saying that food was a scarcity, but when she did have it, it was always the same thing, spaghetti and meatballs. She said that she grew tired of it but was forced to always eat the same meal in order to satisfy her hunger. Now, this is similar to Crave, because throughout the book so far we hear all this talk about hunger and dissatisfaction with the amount of food given and I can really relate to that because I am very close with someone who has experienced this hunger first hand and I constantly hear stories about what the hunger is like and how it has shaped her as a person and how it has affected the way that she lives her life. The chapter that I picked is the chapter titled A Feast in the Making, I picked this chapter because it really goes into the aspects of hunger and the desperateness felt by those who lack food, a basic necessity, in their lives. In this chapter, Pretty, the youngest of all the Boone children, was forced to go and ask a neighbor to "borrow a meal." Now, I believe that this shows that desperateness that I talked about earlier. If one is willing to ask a child to go to a strangers house, all alone and beg for food, then that person has no other option left.