Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls: A Memoir

I loved this book from beginning to end. It was beautiful, even in its painful moments. I feel sad that I’ve finished it.

T Kira Madden writes with so much heart and tenderness. Long Live will make you laugh, it will make you cry, it will make your heart feel full and full of some deep down in your gut understanding of what it means to love and seek love. It will break you and put you back together again. It's an absolute feat and it will stay with you long after you've finished reading.

This book is so meaningful & precious and touches the depths of my soul for a multitude of reasons. Here’s the short list...Deep wounds, addiction, privilege & scarcity, adoption, inadequacies, queer awakenings, forgiveness, synchronicities, loss of a parent, sexual assault, healing & love, deep, wide love. It’s beautiful, brilliant & courageous writing... Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls!

In this well structured memoir, T Kira Madden tells us of her childhood in Boca Raton, Florida, marked by wealth and instability. She was born to a single mother and a father who was married to someone else at the time. Although Madden’s upbringing was privileged, it was also challenging in many ways. Both her parents were alcoholics and drug addicts and lived a rollercoaster relationship. The author grows up in desperate need for attention and love as she watches her parents come and go as they please. For so many times she could not afford to be a child in a house of adults. With absent parents, she joins other fatherless girls whose goal is to live excessively and in them she finds the affection she can’t find at home. The book is mainly about Madden coming to terms with queerness, racial identity, sexual assault, trauma, drugs, love, and her complicated relationship with her family. The end of the book gives the reader an incredible and surprising story. Long Live The Tribe of Fatherless Girls is beautifully written in small essays format and it is completely engaging while brings some serious subject matters. It is a great book.

I just finished this bold and mesmerizing gem. It’s one of the best books I’ve read this year. She has such a gift for making her language both accessible and stunning. She writes about trauma and family and forgiveness and manages to be funny, moving, and self-aware. You will fly through these pages. Don’t sleep on this one.

Captivating and poignant, Ms. Madden weaves together her life’s stories with stunning nuance. She paints a picture of privilege and despair, abundance and neglect, all set against a 2000s South Florida backdrop that becomes yet another richly shaded character in Ms. Madden’s unique tribe. This book touches on mixed race and queer identity with honesty and wit. Once you find footing in this world, you don’t want to leave. You’re strapped in till the brilliant and twisted ending, all the while hoping for one more page, one more sentence, just a bit more. You leave feeling part of the tribe, hopeful its leader finds her way.

There have been a lot of memoirs/autobios published the last few years, a few of them actually memorable. Leading the pack is of course Michele Obama's totally readable and immediately identifiable Becoming. Followed by Tara Westover's stunning Educated and J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy. Patti Smith's Just Kids and M Train are arguably her best work in any medium. In Tribe of Fatherless Girls, Madden does a credible job of relating who she is and how she became that person. She doesn't, however, get across to the reader why they should care. The harrowing drug/sex/rebellion adolescent motif of GenX/Millennial crossovers is getting a little stale, and surviving young adulthood may at the time seem like an accomplishment, but it's certainly not a distinction. In the end, this reads like a fairly good, but overly long, blog post.