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WORK TITLE: Down City
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://www.leahcarrollwriter.com/
CITY: Brooklyn
STATE: NY
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2016067909
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n2016067909
HEADING: Carroll, Leah
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670 __ |a Down city, 2017: |b eCIP t.p. (Leah Carroll) data view screen (lives in Brooklyn, New York)
PERSONAL
Daughter of Kevin and Joan Carroll.
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Author.
AWARDS:Received New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship and MacDowell fellowship.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Leah Carroll is the author of the memoir Down City: A Daughter’s Story of Love, Memory, and Murder, the tale of her mother’s murder and her father’s early death from alcoholism. “Some people might inherit a dimpled chin from their father, or perhaps a mother’s stubbornness. But we also see the shadows of their lives before us cast upon our own paths to adulthood,” declared M.J. Tidwell on the Dig Boston website. “These are the shadows that Leah Carroll explores in her new book, Down City. The story is a reckoning, a search to understand an addicted mother who was murdered by cocaine dealers with ties to the Rhode Island mafia when Carroll was just four years old, as well as a father plagued by alcoholism and depression until his early death when she was eighteen.” “Unsentimental and simply told,” stated a Kirkus Reviews contributor, “Carroll’s quietly powerful story offers a courageous, clear-eyed vision of a broken family while exploring the meaning of forgiveness. An honest and probing memoir.”
Carroll explores not only the loss of her parents but also the drug culture pervasive in the 1980s and the ways in which Mafia families dominated the drug trade in her native Rhode Island. The two dealers that murdered her mother did so in the belief that she was operating as an informant. “I actively resisted the fact that I was writing a memoir,” Carroll told Casey Nilsson in an interview appearing on the Rhode Island Monthly website. “I think that’s why it took me so long to write it. I really thought I’d be doing more of a sociological study of my parents and Rhode Island and I did a lot of research. When I was trying to write the book, I realized that I was the bridge between these two stories. When I hit this form, I sat down and wrote the book in three or four months, after years of research. It entailed letting go of a lot of [the] research.” “Using the present tense to narrate past experiences,” wrote Annie Bostrom in Booklist, “Carroll grasps fleeting moments and memories with confidence and disarming delicacy.”
In this way Down City becomes more than just the story of two lives lost to drug abuse and crime, and more a portrait of a city at a certain moment in time, seen through the eyes of a young girl growing up without a mother and without the full attention of her father. “Down City is both memoir and reportage,” declared Bianca Ambrosio on the 20somethingReads website. “Carroll brilliantly interweaves vignettes of her youth with facts concerning the most corrupt crime families in ’80s Rhode Island. The facts that are revealed will make you question–if you don’t already–our justice system. The book explores, via a true story, the ways in which drug users can fall through the cracks of society…. There are lines in books that are difficult to forget, ones that keep you up at night and disturb you.”
Critics celebrated Down City as both a compassionate portrait of Joan and Kevin Carroll and as a kind of nonfiction bildungsroman. “Carroll’s understated prose,” said a Publishers Weekly reviewer, “complements this daunting material, and her struggles as an unhappy, rebellious teen seem almost idyllic.” “Ultimately, Carroll untangles her identity from her parents’,” explained Molly Brodak in the New York Times, “acknowledging her mother as ‘a woman who existed entirely outside of my existence,’ and the acceptance of this fact offers closure and inspires a pledge to ensure her mother’s life—and her father’s life—mattered deeply, and are redeemed by Carroll’s compassionate reflection on their lives.” “With the compassionate remove of an adult looking back on a difficult childhood,” stated a Jewish Book Council website reviewer, “Carroll allows her parents to exist beyond their weaknesses.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, 15 February 15, 2017, Annie Bostrom, review of Down City: A Daughter’s Story of Love, Memory, and Murder, p. 6.
Kirkus Reviews, January 15, 2017, review of Down City.
New York Times, March 31, 2017, Molly Brodak, “A Memoir Returns to Two Troubled Parents and Their Premature Deaths.”
Publishers Weekly, December 5, 2016, review of Down City, p. 59.
ONLINE
20somethingReads, https://www.20somethingreads.com/ (March 10, 2017), Bianca Ambrosio, review of Down City.
Dig Boston, https://digboston.com/ (June 28, 2017), M.J. Tidwell, “Interview: Leah Carroll’s New Book Revisits Rough Rhode Island Memories and Tough Personal Trials.”
Leah Carroll Website, https://www.leahcarrollwriter.com (October 18, 2017), author profile.
Rhode Island Monthly, http://www.rimonthly.com/ (April 4, 2017), “Leah Carroll’s Buzzworthy New Book, Down City, Unpacks Family Tragedy in Gritty Providence.”
Leah Carroll
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Leah Carroll lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. She is the recipient of fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the MacDowell Colony. She is the author of DOWN CITY: A Daughter's Story of Love, Memory, and Murder.
leahmorgancarroll at gmail dot com
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>> Home / A+E / INTERVIEW: LEAH CARROLL’S NEW BOOK REVISITS ROUGH RHODE ISLAND MEMORIES AND TOUGH PERSONAL TRIALS
INTERVIEW: LEAH CARROLL’S NEW BOOK REVISITS ROUGH RHODE ISLAND MEMORIES AND TOUGH PERSONAL TRIALS
June 28, 2017 By M.J. TIDWELL Leave a Comment
Some people might inherit a dimpled chin from their father, or perhaps a mother’s stubbornness. But we also see the shadows of their lives before us cast upon our own paths to adulthood.
These are the shadows that Leah Carroll explores in her new book, Down City. The story is a reckoning, a search to understand an addicted mother who was murdered by cocaine dealers with ties to the Rhode Island mafia when Carroll was just four years old, as well as a father plagued by alcoholism and depression until his early death when she was 18.
In equal measure tenderly nostalgic and honest, Down City explores a daughter coming to terms with her parents as full humans with choices, mistakes, and lives (and deaths) of their own against the backdrop of seedy yet hardy early 80’s Rhode Island.
Carroll writes that her search for the truth was one of “a lonely impulse of delight,” as quoted from the Yeats poem “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death.”
The author will read from Down City at the Brookline Booksmith on July 6. I caught up with her beforehand to ask about her truth-finding process and more.
Was there anything that really surprised you in the process of writing this book?
There were … I had always understood that Rhode Island is a very singular place, it’s a small place, and people stay there forever. It’s one of those places where, if you meet someone from Rhode Island, it only takes one or two steps to find a connection.
Right, like when you first met your husband who is also from Rhode Island and immediately knew 10 different people in common.
Exactly! I had always known that, but when I started going through all these archival documents and newspaper articles, just seeing the connections in people’s lives that I knew was just … insane. Going through all the legal documents and seeing all these names that I knew, police officers that I knew who would go to the bar with my dad, and the ways in which everything was so connected, even though my parents’ deaths happened 14 years apart. Their lives were so interwoven into the history of Rhode Island in that specific time. The connections blew my mind.
How was it melding together interviews and research like your father’s autopsy report with your own personal memoir?
I had so much research, and I had to give up a lot of that research in the end for the sake of being able to tell a story. It was a little weird from a technical perspective. I realized there were two storylines: my childhood storyline and the storyline of me as an adult looking through all this stuff. Trying to find a way to connect those and try as best as I could to make a seamless narrative required a lot of drafts. [I] decided to do this thing a little bit strange which is where the past narrative, the childhood narrative, is told in the present tense and the adult narrative is told in the past tense to differentiate them.
The documents were really helpful in telling about my mom’s death and the total lack of regard for her and the mess they made of her trial. I thought that my dad’s autopsy report was very telling because he had left me a suicide note. I wanted to find out if he had killed himself or killed himself slowly, which is really what he had done. In the autopsy report you can really see the destruction he did to his body.
In the process of going back and uncovering your own life as well as those of your parents, what was most difficult to put words to?
I grew up very close to my grandmother, and it was difficult for me to read the police reports where my grandmother had been informed of things. It’s not that I had never thought about it, but seeing clearly that she had lost a daughter, seeing the police describe her as “frantic,” seeing them describe coming to her house and telling her that the body had been found … that was really tough.
My grandmother has Alzheimer’s now, but she is just the most wonderful, caring, happy person. This was the most devastating thing to happen to her. We tend to think of our parents and our grandparents as just that: parents and grandparents. It was surprising and enlightening to look at them as people and to realize everything they had gone through.
The title, Down City, is for the part of Providence where your father worked and spent a lot of his time, right? What is it like to go back and visit there now?
It was a center of industry at one point, but by the late ’70s early ’80s it was blighted. The motel where my father died was there as well. One of the most telling things (a story I didn’t get to tell in the book that I think is very fascinating) is that this motel/strip club/ pay by the hour kind of rooming house hotel [where he died] is now a very nice boutique hotel. They did a beautiful beautiful job renovating it. I talked to the people who had the idea to take over the building and they had some before photos. Seeing the photos and seeing what they did with the hotel was very illustrative of Providence and the ways it’s come along.
You say in the book that you looked for repetition, stories or anecdotes about your parents that many people repeated. Could you tell me a little more about what that repetition means to you, why it’s important?
The repetition was important … because nobody talked about this, especially my mom’s death, for so long … there was a silence about it. There was an element of it where people wanted to forget it. They created a narrative about my mom that was very angelic. But my mom was wild! That was part of her personality. She was loud and she was funny and she maybe actively courted danger when she shouldn’t. That was a whole new way of seeing her.
Another thing I would hear over and over again was that she and my dad were such a match. My mom was the only one who could say, “shut up Kevin,” because my dad would always command a room.
Would you say this book has been a process to uncover your parents as people and … forgive isn’t the right word, but maybe come to a reckoning with them?
I don’t think … I didn’t need to forgive them. My mother … was so young when she died and in the prosecution of the people who killed her, her life was treated like a bargaining chip, like it meant nothing.
It was really important for me to reclaim her memory and say yes, she was a drug addict, yes, she was all of these things, but none of that matters. Our flaws are what make us who we are. Who knows what she could have been? She never had the chance.
And I’ve always been writing about my dad. He was a huge part of my life. There would be nobody who would be more thrilled about having a book written about him. He was the one who encouraged my love of writing and literature.
They were an absence in my life, but they were such a presence. This book is a concrete way to celebrate them, while still talking about the things that were difficult in their lives.
LEAH CARROLL: DOWN CITY. THURS JULY 6. 7PM/FREE. BROOKLINE BOOKSMITH, BROOKLINE. BROOKLINEBOOKSMITH.COM
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Filed Under: A+E, Literature Tagged With: Autobiography, books, Brookline Booksmith, Down City, Leah Carroll, mafia, murder, providence, Rhode Island
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Carroll, Leah: DOWN CITY
Kirkus Reviews.
(Jan. 15, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Carroll, Leah DOWN CITY Grand Central Publishing (Adult Nonfiction) $26.00 3, 7 ISBN: 978-1-4555-6331-9
A debut memoirist tells the story of her mother's brutal murder and her difficult relationship with her father, who
followed his wife to the grave 14 years later.When Carroll was 4 years old, police discovered the body of her mother,
Joan, on the side of the highway. Fourteen years later, they found her father, Kevin, who had died from an enlarged
heart and liver disease, in a room in a cheap Rhode Island hotel. The question of who her parents were and how they
had come to such tragic ends haunted Carroll into adulthood. Determined to find answers, she scoured her memory,
newspaper accounts, and police records for clues and interviewed people who had known them both. Carroll speculates
that her cocaine-addicted mother got involved with drugs through her father, a man who may have given Joan pills from
the "collection" he took to manage mental illness. Joan's addiction eventually led to ties with the Mafia drug lord who
killed her out of fear she would turn him in to the police. Not long after his first wife's death, Kevin remarried and
moved the family from Providence to Barrington, an upscale Rhode Island town that made them all feel "normal and
wealthy and safe." Yet alcoholism and manic depression took their tolls. Kevin and his new wife eventually divorced,
while Carroll moved between homes and through high school in a haze of angst-ridden confusion. Yet it was after her
father's death that she was finally able to "reinvent [herself] as wholesome, and capable" and begin the long, difficult
task of making sense of her family's tragic history. Unsentimental and simply told, Carroll's quietly powerful story
offers a courageous, cleareyed vision of a broken family while exploring the meaning of forgiveness. An honest and
probing memoir of coming to terms with family.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Carroll, Leah: DOWN CITY." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Jan. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA477242337&it=r&asid=10ad3048d843d36f8463683783969ade.
Accessed 27 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A477242337
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Down City: A Daughter's Story of Love,
Memory, and Murder
Annie Bostrom
Booklist.
113.12 (Feb. 15, 2017): p6.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
* Down City: A Daughter's Story of Love, Memory, and Murder. By Leah Carroll. Mar. 2017.240p. illus. Grand
Central, $26 (9781455563319); e book, $12.99 (9781455563302). 361.452.
When Carroll was four, her mother was missing for several months before her body was found, off the side of a
highway a state away from their home in Rhode Island. Years later, her father, long suffering from depression and
alcoholism, was gone, too. For the traumatic parental losses, Carroll divides her first book into two parts: her longsimmering
inquiry into the murder of the mother she barely knew and her account of the brilliant, charming, Vietnamveteran
father she watched diminish. In recording the outsize tragedies of her small family, Carroll maps the social
topography of her small state ("down city" denotes a Providence neighborhood), contextualizes organized crimes power
there--as well as its involvement in her mothers death--and tells an intersecting story of print journalism's significance
and demise. Using the present tense to narrate past experiences, Carroll grasps fleeting moments and memories with
confidence and disarming delicacy. We're witness to her animal-loving, addiction-addled mother, an amateur
photographer whose photos Carroll includes here; her handsome, beguiling newspaperman father; and young Carroll
herself, writing poetry through the classes she's flunking. So rich in mood, feeling, and genuine love, this investigative
memoir is a true tribute.--Annie Bostrom
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Bostrom, Annie. "Down City: A Daughter's Story of Love, Memory, and Murder." Booklist, 15 Feb. 2017, p. 6. General
OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA485442434&it=r&asid=860dd0a928c78ff16ffcae8d349633ba.
Accessed 27 Sept. 2017.
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Down City: A Daughter's Story of Love,
Memory, and Murder
Publishers Weekly.
263.50 (Dec. 5, 2016): p59.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Down City: A Daughter's Story of Love, Memory, and Murder
Leah Carroll. Grand Central, $26 (240p) ISBN 978-1-4555-6331-9
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
In this somber, moving blend of memoir and reportage, native Rhode Islander Carroll confronts the ghosts of her
parents--two bright, charming, and extremely damaged people, both talented amateur photographers and addicts.
Carroll's Jewish mother, carefree and reckless, was snorting cocaine in a motel room with two mafia toughs when they
strangled her at age 30. Carroll's Irish-Catholic father, a charismatic autodidact, turned to alcohol after serving in the
Vietnam War and was found dead, possibly by his own hand, in a flophouse at 48. Carroll intensively researches their
deaths, going so far as to examine her father's autopsy report and interview the imprisoned son of her mother's killer.
She explores how they lived while also recounting her troubled childhood. "Down city," a term used by locals to
describe central Providence, circumscribes the decaying realm of blue-collar jobs and rough taverns in which her
parents lived and died. Carroll's understated prose complements this daunting material, and her struggles as an unhappy,
rebellious teen seem almost idyllic in contrast to the dysfunction and tragedy that shadow her. Nevertheless, Carroll's
determined grappling with the burden of her past is honestly and skillfully done. (Mar.)
This braisedflank steak with nasturtium leaves and green olives is one highlight in The Book of Greens by Jenn Louis
and Kathleen Squires (reviewed on p. 63).
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Down City: A Daughter's Story of Love, Memory, and Murder." Publishers Weekly, 5 Dec. 2016, p. 59. General
OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA475224887&it=r&asid=a2617b1b3b5c9378b3713a7a3e500c3b.
Accessed 27 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A475224887
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BOOK REVIEW|A Memoir Returns to Two Troubled Parents and Their Premature Deaths
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A Memoir Returns to Two Troubled Parents and Their Premature Deaths
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Leah Carroll Credit Rose Lichter-Marck
DOWN CITY
A Daughter’s Story of Love, Memory and Murder
By Leah Carroll
228 pp. Grand Central Publishing. $26.
Two very short sections open Leah Carroll’s memoir: the description of her mother’s murder in a seedy hotel room, and the description of her father’s death in an equally seedy hotel room 14 years later. Carroll proceeds from these haunting twin plot points through a patchwork of vignettes, reportage and reflection that reaches after her absent parents with sensitive longing.
Carroll was only 4 years old when her mother was brutally strangled by two drug dealers with mob ties, the cold description of which she reads as an adult in newspapers. The drug dealers had suspected her mother of being a police informant, and were ultimately offered light sentences for their horrific crime in exchange for incriminating information on an important local mob family. Carroll writes about her discovery of her mother’s murder used as a bargaining chip by the state with understandable bitterness: “I’ll never know if my mom gave confidential information to the police or not. I do know that almost everyone involved . . . saw her as a disposable person.”
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Five months pass before one of the killers reveals where he’d dumped Carroll’s mother’s body beside a highway, and in the meantime, she is introduced to an ever-shifting family structure with her volatile, alcoholic father at the helm. He remarries and moves Carroll from gritty “down city” Providence to a comfortable suburb until this family, too, breaks apart; caught between two worlds, Carroll renders meticulous and empathetic portraits of both sides of Providence in the ’90s.
Carroll’s writing is most evocative when she describes, with a heartbreaking mixture of tenderness and disappointment, the moments of intimate connection between her and her father, her struggle to enjoy spending time with him even as she knows she will later find him drunk and helpless on the kitchen floor.
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Leah Carroll
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“It seems we cannot spontaneously feel important enough to ourselves, sufficiently worthy of carrying our absurd figure through the tangles of life, unless at some point . . . we were privileged enough to derive a sense of mattering limitlessly and inordinately to another person,” Alain de Botton wrote on the crucial role of a parent’s unconditional love to a healthy psyche. While Carroll occupies herself with tracking down the details of her parents’ lives, her readers become increasingly aware of what not “mattering limitlessly and inordinately” to either parent can do to a child as she grows; in Carroll’s case, how a mixture of manic depression and powerful addictions to drugs and alcohol overwhelmed her parents and left her estranged.
The power silence has to impose a kind of order on disordered family relationships is not lost on Carroll, as she connects the threads of her family’s silence over her mother’s death to the “invisible barrier, years of so much unsaid,” between herself and her father. When he dies, she offers her readers both the full text of his last note to her — which appears to read like a suicide note — and his autopsy report, which claims he dies of an enlarged heart and diseased liver due to his alcoholism. These documents offer, as she describes it, “proof” of him, a few pieces of tangible closure after years of uncertainty.
Ultimately, Carroll untangles her identity from her parents’, acknowledging her mother as “a woman who existed entirely outside of my existence,” and the acceptance of this fact offers closure and inspires a pledge to ensure her mother’s life — and her father’s life — mattered deeply, and are redeemed by Carroll’s compassionate reflection on their lives.
Molly Brodak is the author of the poetry collection “A Little Middle of the Night” and “Bandit: A Daughter’s Memoir.”
A version of this review appears in print on April 2, 2017, on Page BR18 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Home After Dark. Today's Paper|Subscribe
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Down City: A Daughter's Story of Love, Memory, and Murder
by Leah Carroll
DOWN CITY by Leah Carroll is as dark as dark gets --- with all the hope of a girl trying to put the pieces of her family's history, and her young life, together. Yet this history involves the cruel murder of her mother and the subsequent death of her father.
It’s hard enough knowing the truth about your parents --- what makes them tick, and why they said the things they said, did the things they did, that didn’t sit quite right with you. Now imagine they’re not around to give you answers. Carroll’s parents are no longer living in the physical world, but they live within her, and she is on a mission to uncover the truths of their existence, as well as their tragic demise. At a young age, Carroll learns how evil murder can be, and how, oftentimes, those affected are innocent children left to survive, and thrive, without those who are supposed to be there the most. Carroll does both survive and thrive, but not without some challenges along the way.
Leah Carroll is a girl living in a world knowing that her mother was brutally murdered and that she can't turn back the clocks and change it. Set in 1980s Rhode Island, this story paints a world I’d be afraid to encounter. There's the side of Rhode Island people remember: the side with beautiful homes and upper middle class families going about their typical days. Then there's the dark side, the evil side of the Mafia and the people they consume. When Carroll is a child, drugs keep her mother away from home some nights. Drugs are also the cord that attaches her mother to those who destroy her --- the “BAD” men. Carroll is aware of these men in a metaphorical sense, and she makes sure not to let them into her orbit. Her family’s history haunts her. It will not repeat itself.
"Carroll narrates with honesty, showing what it's like to long for your parents. I feel like I was that girl, and that's how you know a book is great."
In this memoir written with short, honest and to-the-point sentences, Carroll paints a portrait of the revered criminal, the one neighborhood citizens applaud and want to be friends with, the charming man who wins the affections of the same people he is stabbing in the back. It isn't fair. Don't these people know that this group of glorified criminals is responsible for her mother's death and so many others?
DOWN CITY is both memoir and reportage. Carroll brilliantly interweaves vignettes of her youth with facts concerning the most corrupt crime families in ’80s Rhode Island. The facts that are revealed will make you question --- if you don’t already --- our justice system. The book explores, via a true story, the ways in which drug users can fall through the cracks of society. One of the men who helped murder Carroll’s mother was able to make a deal. Her mother and another victim got no deal at all. What society didn’t know was that Carroll’s mother was a talented photographer and a beloved parent and daughter.
There are lines in books that are difficult to forget, ones that keep you up at night and disturb you, making you question what it means. Why would someone do this? "‘Come on you rat,’ Mastracchio wheezed. ‘Give me the death rattle,’" is that line in Carroll's memoir and the last words her mother hears before she dies. And those are some disturbing words to hear.
Carroll’s mother is the driving force of the story, but her father is the pillar. This charming man, admired by all those he meets, is her best friend. Sometimes, Carroll almost wishes she could be more like him, holding his magic. Sometimes, her father does things we wish our own fathers would have done. One call and he is there. He wants to share his life with his daughter, and there is nothing wrong with that. Yet his alcoholism is what tears them apart, even if it sometimes brings them together. Their memories are played like scenes in a movie, and Carroll dearly holds on to them.
At the onset of the memoir, Carroll asks her own questions: “Who were these people, my parents, and how did they come to this place?” Yet this story is more about Carroll's life as she tries to figure out who she is, and how she relates to her parents whom she longed to know everything about --- every inch of their lives --- but were taken too soon.
DOWN CITY is a heartbreaking book about what it's like to have parents who are different from the rest --- parents who love you in their own special way, but can't get out of their own way. Carroll narrates with honesty, showing what it's like to long for your parents. I feel like I was that girl, and that's how you know a book is great. DOWN CITY exposes the truth, and I think the truth is something people should seek more often.
Reviewed by Bianca Ambrosio on March 10, 2017
Down City
Leah Carroll
Grand Central Publishing 2017
240 Pages $26
ISBN: 978-1455563319
amazon indiebound
barnesandnoble
Leah Carroll's mother, a gifted amateur photographer, was brutally murdered by two drug dealers with mafia connections when Leah was four years old. Her father, a charming alcoholic who hurtled between depression and mania, was dead by the time she was eighteen. Leah was left to put together her own future, and now in her memoir she explores the mystery of her parents' lives through interviews, photos, and police records. Her Irish Catholic father converted to Judaism at 29 to marry her mother, a Reform Jew. Her Jewish identity was extremely important to her spiritually and culturally, and while Leah's father rarely spoke about her mom and did not continue to practice Judaism after her death, it was very important to him that that Leah understand her Jewish identity, be proud of it, and own it fully. With the compassionate remove of an adult looking back on a difficult childhood, Carroll allows her parents to exist beyond their weaknesses, to find a fullness and complexity that is often denied those who struggle with addiction or mental illness. In this way she sets them free from their dark ends and allows herself to embrace their artistic natures and even find inspiration in the unique way each of her parents interacted with the world on their best days. Down City pushes beyond painful circumstances and setting to explore the more universal questions of how we define ourselves how intrinsically connected we are to our parents and the way the past impacts who we are, yet holds no power over our future.
Leah Carroll’s Buzzworthy New Book, Down City, Unpacks Family Tragedy in Gritty Providence
The memoir, which explores the untimely deaths of her troubled parents, was featured in Sunday’s New York Times book review.
April 4, 2017
Casey Nilsson
Last month, Grand Central Publishing released the memoir, Down City: A Daughter’s Story of Love, Memory and Murder, a debut from Brooklyn-based writer, Leah Carroll. The story investigates the murder of Carroll’s mom in 1984; she was strangled by drug dealers with mob ties, who suspected she was working as an informant. Carroll was four years old.
Fourteen years later, Carroll’s dad, a former Providence Journal photographer, was found dead on the floor of the old Sportsman’s Inn in downtown Providence. His body had finally succumbed to the strains of lifelong substance abuse.
We caught up with Carroll to learn more about the book, which was reviewed in Sunday’s New York Times. Read the review here or meet Carroll in person at the Point Street Reading Series in Providence on May 14.
Rhode Island Monthly: When did you decide you wanted to write about this complicated family history?
Leah Carroll: I’ve been working on it for a long time, probably about ten or twelve years. It really started when I went online in college and started to find out information about my mom. I was creative writing undergraduate [at Emerson College in Boston] and I have a graduate’s degree in creative writing [from the University of Florida], so I always knew it would be some kind of writing project. A little after I turned thirty, which was the age my mom died, was when I decided it was time to write the book.
Did you always want to write a memoir?
No, I actively resisted the fact that I was writing a memoir. I think that’s why it took me so long to write it. I really thought I’d be doing more of a sociological study of my parents and Rhode Island and I did a lot of research. When I was trying to write the book, I realized that I was the bridge between these two stories. When I hit this form, I sat down and wrote the book in three or four months, after years of research. It entailed letting go of a lot of research but I think it was what the book was always supposed to be.
Is there any line of research that you wish you could’ve included in the story?
I had done a lot of research on, for instance, the Dean Hotel, which was the Sportsman’s Inn. And so I had researched the history of that building intensively and thought it was so illustrative of Providence. It was a home for wayward sailors and then it became the Sportsman’s Inn and then it became the Dean Hotel. I loved that story.
The Sportsman’s Inn is a real emblem of Providence’s seedy history. Is that history a big part of your story?
Definitely. My family exists only in Rhode Island. My grandparents were the children of immigrants who came, on my father’s side, from Ireland and, on my mother’s side, Jewish Eastern European immigrants. When they came here, there was industry and that really died out. My parents straddled the time in the late ’70s, ’80s and ’90s when Providence was really struggling. They were in that time when [the] Patriarca [crime family] was ruling everything and Buddy was running for mayor again in 1990.
My dad worked for the Providence Journal for twenty years. And he lost his job when Belo bought it out. The Journal was so important to my father, and it was so important to so many Rhode Islanders. It was one of the last things we really had. Today, it’s much different than it once was. It was a big blow and a big loss, and my father felt that loss personally.
My dad grew up on Eddy Street in South Providence; my mom grew up in Western Cranston. She worked in the American Tourister factory. It’s gritty in the sense that we have Brown University up on the hill and everything else is below it. I don’t know if that’s entirely true. But my parents were quite removed from that and also aspired to that side of Rhode Island.
It’s funny that you mention American Tourister, because it’s being renovated into apartments as we speak.
That’s fascinating. Of course it is! The career I knew about was that she worked as a dog officer in Cranston; she really loved animals. It was in one of the newspaper reports I saw that they had referred to her as a factory worker. My aunt was like, “Oh, she worked at the American Tourister factory for a couple of months.”
What was it like, finding all of these little details about your mom along the way?
There was so much silence about her when I was growing up because of the way she died and because of the fact that she was a drug addict and she was murdered. It was something we never talked about. People wanted to remember my mom but they didn’t want me to remember her with any flaws. I was told she was in a car accident until I was, like, nine or ten
One of these things I loved finding out about her was that she was really wild; she was fun. She would skip school and she didn’t like the rules and that was all part of her.
What have you learned about yourself over the course of this decade of family research?
One of the craziest things was realizing, first, how my mother’s life had been stolen from her. When you’re a kid and your mom dies, you think of her as just being your mom. But really she was only thirty — like, how incomplete of a life was that.
I had all of my dad’s annual reviews from the Journal. And they’re like every single job review I’ve ever had. They’re like: “Kevin is great to have around the office and he doesn’t really show up on time.”
I was very close with my dad. He was not a particularly good father, in the traditional sense, but I think he instilled in me an intellectual curiosity that changed the course of my life.
How did you feel about stepping into the mob connection to your mom’s death, which is still alive and well in Rhode Island?
I was thrilled to step into that. I have been in touch with the guys from “Crimetown” and I think the history of organized crime in Rhode Island is a story that I’m really glad is being told right now. It’s fascinating.
I also think that it dominated every facet of life in Rhode Island for so many years in a negative way. I think it’s important for a story like mine to come along and tell my mom’s story. For so long, it’s been [her mother’s murderer] Peter Gilbert’s narrative. I could show that not only was she affected by this mafia presence in Rhode Island, but that people in law enforcement and government were as culpable. They didn’t kill her, but they viewed her as this disposable person that they could use as a means to an end. Nobody ever had to answer to that. There was never even a trial for her murder. She was here and she was important and she was a casualty to this fantasy we have about organized crime.
What are you working on now?
I’m working on a novel. Other than that, I work at Refinery 29.
Can you tell me anything about the novel?
I can’t, because I haven’t yet fleshed that out in my mind yet. I will say this: After writing a book about your family, and your family know you’re writing a book about them, writing a book about pretend people is great.
How did your family take Down City?
So amazing. For somebody like my aunt, my mom’s sister, it was nice after so many years of silence to get to talk about my mom as a real person. My family has been so great about opening up their lives and letting people look at parts of their lives that are hard. They’ve been supportive and really great. My little sister is twenty-three, and she’s the same age as I was when my dad died. And my stepmother, who raised me when I was six on and is my sister’s mother — they have always been there for me and they were there for me throughout this book.
Last month, I read at Barnes and Noble in Warwick and there were so many people there who knew my dad. One man came and he had a photograph that my dad had taken and given to him as a wedding gift, and he gave it to me. People still remember them.
The interview has been edited for clarity.