Girl Factory: A Memoir
Karen Dietrich
Oct 2013 · Rowman & Littlefield
eBook
272
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About this eBook
It’s 1985 in a small factory town near Pittsburgh. Eight-year-old Karen’s parents are lifelong workers at the Anchor Glass plant, where one Saturday, an employee goes on a shooting spree, killing four supervisors, then himself. This event splits the young girl’s life open, and like her mother, she begins to seek comfort in obsessive rituals and superstitions. This beautifully evocative memoir chronicles the next fourteen years, as Karen moves through girlhood, adolescence, and young adulthood. It illuminates small-town factory life; explores a complicated mother-daughter bond; thoughtfully unfolds a smart, but insecure girl’s coming of age; achingly recounts her attempts to use sex to fit in; and ultimately uncovers the buried secret from her childhood—a medical file with an unbearable report. The Girl Factory deftly travels the intersections of memory and origin. Karen’s body remembers details her mind has tried to control. As the young woman mines her interior landscape for answers, certain questions persist. Where does memory live—in the body or the mind? And can you rewrite the story of your past?
About the author
Karen Dietrich earned a bachelor’s degree in 1999 at the University of Pittsburgh. After graduation, she moved to Florida where she worked as a restaurant hostess, a video store clerk, and a credit card customer service rep before becoming a high school English teacher for four years. She then earned an MFA in poetry from New England College in 2008, where her mentor was poet and novelist Paula McLain. Karen has published poetry and nonfiction in Nerve, The Bellingham Review, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, PANK Magazine, and elsewhere. She is the author of three limited-run chapbooks with small presses and is a member of an indie folk pop duo, which has two independently released EPs. She is currently an adjunct English instructor at The University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg and Westmoreland County Community College. She lives in Greensburg, Pennsylvania with her husband and their son.
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