Fierce: A Memoir
Moss does what you'd expect from a visual artist: she paints pictures with her words. As with her first memoir,Change Me into Zeus's Daughter, she uses the painful stuff of her life—an alcoholic father; numerous abusive husbands; continual, exhausting poverty—and turns it into chilling, visceral imagery. Recalling a day in her tumultuous childhood when her father shot the family pony in a rage, she writes, "Then I saw it, clear as a bell—the tractor dragging the dead pony through the freshly plowed soybean field behind our house. The wet, red mud guttered on either side of the pony like a wake left by a boat." She mercilessly braids the gruesome beauty of images like this with a hopeful message: survive. But beyond surviving, Moss creates. She holds fast to her dream of becoming a visual artist, no matter how impractical a notion it is for a woman from a working-class background. Even more moving, she doesn't become an artist—or a writer for that matter—who transcends and leaves her beginnings behind; she carries them with her, puts them on canvas and paper and exhibits them for the world to see. Admittedly, there are times when the rhythm feels a bit off, but even Moss's lack of pacing feels like part of the erratic whirlwind that is her life.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.