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Publication Date
Fall 2020
Degree Type
Thesis - Campus Access Only
Degree Name
Master of Fine Arts (MFA)
Department
English and Comparative Literature
Advisor
Cathleen Miller
Subject Areas
Creative writing
Abstract
Give These Kids A Chance is a candid, personal account of my struggle with ongoing trauma resulting from the sexual violence I experienced as an adolescent and, more recently, the grief over losing my younger brother to a drug overdose. Told through disjunctive memoir in a series of flashbacks and present meditations, I have structured this thesis around the way these parallel tragedies have interwoven and continue to exacerbate and feed one another. As a consequence, Give These Kids A Chance delivers a psychological and sociological study on trauma processing and behavior, and it does so in a context which is itself traumatic, a period during which our nation has been seized by an ongoing reckoning with sexual violence and inequality. This memoir began by telling the story of how, at fourteen, I was approached, groomed, and romanced by the thirty-year-old father of my best friend. The resulting relationship was my first encounter with sexual and romantic intimacy. This was an overwhelming expedition into my experience of processing trauma when I received the news that my brother had died this past June, which disrupted an already complicated task and turned it into an unthinkable one: to contrast my brother’s death with my own survival and, ultimately, to grapple with an unanswerable question: how was I able to survive when he did not?
Recommended Citation
Adry, Talia, "Give These Kids A Chance" (2020). Master's Theses. 5135.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.31979/etd.3twx-tqy8
https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/etd_theses/5135