The Fake
Rose & Sonny
The Fake Rose & Sonny By Shirley R.
Morgan
I would like to tell you a little about my book, The Fake
Rose & Sonny. It is a true story not only about love,
but about abuse, poverty and perseverance.
I was born in Harlan County Kentucky to an old man and a young woman. I was my father's thirteenth child. Both of my parents were alcoholics. From the time I was nine months old and my sister was three years old we were left alone for days at a time without food or warmth. We were placed in several abusive foster homes. Neither of us enjoyed a normal childhood.
Sonny was a boy I met when I was fourteen years old. We dated for three years until he joined the Air Force. His letters were confiscated causing us to lose touch. We had a reunion after thirty eight years of being apart.
This book is warm, sad and amusing. The characters are real people that I lived with and knew personally. Some of the names have been changed to protect the ignorant, innocent, and the guilty.
Ellen
Tanner Marsh, New York Times Review
Shirley Morgan, in her "true story," The Fake Rose & Sonny, demonstrates an uncanny ability to reduce complex matters -race issues, chemical dependency, incest, battery, and self-loathing -into manageable parts. This story smartly shows what is imparted to the next generation. Quite often, the abused become abusers. Yet, unlike Selby's characters in "Last Exit to Brooklyn," in which there's a constant barrage of brutality, the central tension in this book is the inherent goodness of its two protagonists, Rose (also known as Cheryl Leigh) and Sonny. However, one of the most appealing nuances of this book is the author's resistance to sugarcoating the grime. The recipients of anger do not play the woe-is-me-I'm-a-victim role. Morgan's matter-of-fact story telling doesn't glamorize the events of cruelty. Instead, she delivers the news in a similar manner to how the victims receive their punishments, like a daily pedestrian occurrence.
In addition, Morgan uses humor to buffer the violence that some characters experience and some inflict. Lines such as, "Donna... married her second husband to spite her first and. ..she married Henry to spite herself' and, "instead of hot flashes, all they [old worn out menopausal women] could get was a warm blink" sprinkled throughout this book provide a relief from tales of violence. For pages and pages, the audience reads about filthy, apathetic, and malevolent characters, but from whom amusing lines sprout. And when a doctor laments to a patient that he is diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's (a degenerative neurological disease) the patient retorts, "I have never played baseball in my life." Without this keen juxtaposition of the comical with the brutal, this story might have crashed. However, by illustrating glimmers of white in a tale imbued with black, the audience can better appreciate the sundry shades of gray.
This no-nonsense portrayal of two morally bankrupt families has a similar potency to the photography of Richard Billingham. The British visual artist shows his battered drunk father and tattooed chain-smoking mother, among other family members, in a vivid non-sentimental light.
Both Morgan and Billingham render their characters in plain light, which allows their respective audiences a raw look into the human condition. An example of the author's pithy insight into the character's mind is this, "...they were too young to get married but he thought giving her a ring would be like putting her on the lay-away."
Though compassionate and conscientious, Rose is not immune to consequences of an abusive upbringing; she self-mutilates as a child, drops out of school, and struggles with addiction. Likewise, Sonny lives an impoverished life. In the end even though they were reared in hate, both Rose and Sonny have the capacity for depth, kindness, and love. The Fake Rose & Sonny sings a tale of life and love: a flower that cannot thrive without radiance, and a Sun that finds its purpose in Rose.
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