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WORK TITLE: A Normal Life
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 2/24/1958
WEBSITE: https://www.kimmrich.com/
CITY: Lafayette
STATE: LA
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
Daughter of gambler John F. “Johnny” Rich and exotic dancer, Frances “Ginger” Rich.
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born February 24, 1958, in Hollywood, CA; daughter of John F. “Johnny” and Frances “Ginger” Rich; married; children: three daughters.
EDUCATION:Received degree in journalism; Columbia University, M.F.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Author and journalist; instructor, University of Louisiana, Lafayette. Former writer, Anchorage Daily News.
WRITINGS
Johnny’s Girl was adapted into a Hallmark film starring Treat Williams and Mia Kirshner in 1995.
SIDELIGHTS
University of Louisiana Lafayette instructor Kim Rich was brought up in Alaska as the daughter of a famous gambler and racketeer: Johnny Rich and his wife, the dancer Ginger Rich. She tells the story of her brief life with her parents in two books: Johnny’s Girl: A Daughter’s Memoir of Growing up in Alaska’s Underworld, and A Normal Life: A Memoir.
Rich’s first volume of memoirs, “Johnny’s Girl,” explained the contributor of a biographical blurb to the author’s home page, the Kim Rich website, “chronicles Alaska’s mean streets and her parent’s tragic lives cut short.” “Rich grew up in Anchorage in the 1960’s, when Alaska was the last frontier and a wide-open refuge for scoundrels. Her mother … was a stripper and prostitute, who worked the bars until she succumbed to recurring mental illness,” stated Cyra McFadden in the New York Times Book Review. Ginger Rich had suffered from mental illness for some years before Johnny married her, and the illness colored her relationship with her daughter. Ginger divorced her husband and left Alaska, ending her days in a nursing home in northern Michigan. “When she died of cancer at the age of thirty-eight,” McFadden declared, “her daughter hadn’t seen her for years,”
Rich’s father’s career was just as adventurous as her mother’s. “Johnny Rich was a ‘steerman’ who led … unsuspecting amateurs, into crooked card games with professional gamblers. A career petty criminal, he graduated to owning massage parlors.” Anchorage at the time was a true “frontier town,” said a Kirkus Reviews contributor, “and Johnny swam in it as if born to the ooze, though Frances went to pieces and Rich endured endless midnight police raids on their house.” Eventually Johnny’s abuse became too much for Ginger, and she and Kim left for refuge in her family’s home in Ironwood, Michigan. As Ginger’s mental state deteriorated, however, Johnny reclaimed Kim and took her to live with him in Alaska. In 1973, he was murdered.
A Normal Life opens in the months after Johnny’s murder and before the arrests of the persons responsible. It tells how Kim, abandoned by her heroin-addict stepmother, survived on her own for months before becoming a ward of the state. “In a straightforward, journalistic style,” said a Kirkus Reviews contributor, “she chronicles how, as an orphan in Alaska, she drifted from one friend’s home to another, attended high school, made friends, and explored nature.” “Along the way,” wrote a Publishers Weekly reviewer, “she comes to terms with her relationships with her parents.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, February 1, 1993, review of Johnny’s Girl: A Daughter’s Memoir of Growing up in Alaska’s Underworld; February 1, 2018, review of A Normal Life: A Memoir.
New York Times Book Review, March 21, 1993, Cyra McFadden, “A Bad Hand Played with Grace.”
Publishers Weekly, February 8, 1993, review of Johnny’s Girl, p. 67.
ONLINE
Kim Rich website, https://www.kimmrich.com (August 8, 2018), author profile.
“A Normal Life” is for my three daughters. I wanted them to know my journey to being their mom. I became a mother to triplets at age 44. This book picks up where my first book left off – me, an only child; orphaned at 15. The story, often humorous, takes readers through college, career, marriage, divorce, remarriage, cancer, infertility, plus a couple of near death experiences. This is also a story of the search for family and finding it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Kim M. Rich is the author of “Johnny’s Girl” the nationally acclaimed memoir of growing up in Alaska’s underworld as the only child of gambler John F. “Johnny” Rich and exotic dancer, Frances “Ginger” Rich. “Johnny’s Girl” chronicles Alaska’s mean streets and her parent’s tragic lives cut short. Rich’s father was murdered when she was 15; her mother had died a year later in a psychiatric institute. The book was reviewed and featured by, among others, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, CNN, NPR, Glamour magazine and Entertainment Weekly.
The book was adapted into a Hallmark film starring Treat Williams and Mia Kirshner, which aired on ABC and is still in syndication (including Netflix.)
Rich’s undergraduate studies were in Journalism. She began her career with the Pulitzer-Prize winning Anchorage Daily News. She possesses an M.F.A. in Nonfiction Writing from Columbia University. She continues to write and teach college. She currently lives in Lafayette, LA, with her husband and three teen daughters.
Kim Rich - Is an author, Journalist, college professor, screen writer and public speaker.
She has a MFA degree in writing from Columbia University and teaches at the University of Louisiana Lafayette. In her early career she worked as a journalist for the Anchorage Daily News and published a series about her father that was nominated by the ADN for a Pulitzer Prize in feature reporting. She is an essayist, screenwriter and creative writer. Rich now lives in Louisiana with her family. Her new book is to be released in April.
The book is called A Normal Life: A Memoir is the continuation of her previous book called Johnny's Girl.
Johnny’s Girl the nationally acclaimed memoir of growing up in Alaska’s underworld as the only child of gambler John F. “Johnny” Rich and exotic dancer, Frances “Ginger” Rich. Johnny’s Girl chronicles Alaska’s mean streets and her parent’s tragic lives cut short. Rich’s father was murdered when she was 15; her mother had died a year later in a psychiatric institute. The book was reviewed and featured by, among others, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, CNN, NPR, Glamour magazine and Entertainment Weekly. The book was adapted into a Hallmark film starring Treat Williams which aired on ABC and is still in syndication.
Rich’s new book A Normal Life: A Memoir Picking up right where her first memoir left off, A Normal Life tells the author's vivid story of being an ordinary girl faced with extraordinary circumstances at seemingly every turn in life - with grace, humility, and clever wit.
Rich, Kim: A NORMAL LIFE
Kirkus Reviews. (Feb. 1, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Rich, Kim A NORMAL LIFE Alaska Northwest Books (Adult Nonfiction) $16.99 4, 3 ISBN: 978-1-943328-50-5
The story of the author's search for a meaningful life after tragedy.
Rich (Johnny's Girl: A Daughter's Memoir of Growing Up in Alaska's Underworld, 1993) begins her narrative shortly after the death of her mother and murder of her father when she was in her teens. In a straightforward, journalistic style, she chronicles how, as an orphan in Alaska, she drifted from one friend's home to another, attended high school, made friends, and explored nature, all while searching for a normal lifestyle. She then moves on to discuss her move to New York City, her college days, her first marriage, and her ventures into journalism. Eventually, Rich shares the details of writing her first memoir, Johnny's Girl, which started out as a series of newspaper articles and was later made into a Hallmark TV movie. Once she moves past those early years, the author's writing becomes somewhat less rote, and she focuses on minute details of her childhood and touching, sometimes-humorous tales of her grandfather, who suffered from dementia and struggled against a woman's plot to marry him and take his money. Rich's tone grows more serious as she discusses her bout with breast cancer and the frightening decisions she had to make during that period. She quickly follows with her troubles conceiving a child with her second husband and the efforts they made to create a family via fertility treatments and adoption. The second half of the book is far more vibrant and emotionally gripping than the first, allowing readers a closer look at the author as she is today rather than the awkward adolescent she used to be. For those who read Johnny's Girl and want to know what happened next, this book has the answers.
An uneven memoir full of meticulous details and some funny moments.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Rich, Kim: A NORMAL LIFE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A525461545/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=0eef62c7. Accessed 26 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A525461545
Johnny's Girl: A Daughter's Memoir of Growing Up in Alaska's Underworld
Publishers Weekly. 240.6 (Feb. 8, 1993): p67.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1993 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
JOHNNY'S GIRL:
A Daughter's Memoir of Growing Up in Alaska's Underworld
Kim Rich. Morrow, $22 (288p)ISBN 0688-11836-4
In this engaging memoir, the author, a journalist raised in Alaska and now living in New York City, probes her late parents' past. Rich was 15 years old in 1973 when her father, Johnny Rich Jr., a well-known mobster in Anchorage, was murdered. Her mother, Ginger, a former stripper, had died the previous year. Although they both grew up in New England, Johnny and Ginger met in Los Angeles in the late 1950s. Soon they embarked for Alaska, where Johnny became a big man about town and Ginger would soon begin her sojourn through a series of mental institutions. Rich traces and plumbs official records to capture the minutiae and major moments of her parents' lives, including their deaths. Along the way, she comes to terms with her relationships with her parents, especially her father: "Now I'm beginning to like being Johnny's girl." Photos not seen by PW. (Mar.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Johnny's Girl: A Daughter's Memoir of Growing Up in Alaska's Underworld." Publishers Weekly, 8 Feb. 1993, p. 67. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A13464443/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=0532fe7a. Accessed 26 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A13464443
A Bad Hand Played With Grace
Date: March 21, 1993, Sunday, Late Edition - Final
Byline: By Cyra McFadden;
Lead:
JOHNNY'S GIRL A Daughter's Memoir of Growing Up in Alaska's Underworld. By Kim Rich. Illustrated. 302 pp. New York: William Morrow & Company. $22.
Text:
THIS memoir poses the question, "Which offenses from our childhoods are forgivable and which ones are not?" But Kim Rich's childhood was so bizarre that it defies her attempt to make peace with it. Ms. Rich learned young that to survive, she had to keep her emotional distance from her parents. She keeps her distance in "Johnny's Girl" as well, by means of coolly controlled prose. Between the lines, unacknowledged anger smolders.
Ms. Rich grew up in Anchorage in the 1960's, when Alaska was the last frontier and a wide-open refuge for scoundrels. Her mother, Ginger Chiaravalle, was a stripper and prostitute, who worked the bars until she succumbed to recurring mental illness. Divorced from Kim's father, Johnny, when Kim was 5, Ginger spent most of her adult life in institutions. When she died of cancer at the age of 38, her daughter hadn't seen her for years. Johnny Rich was a "steerman" who led pigeons, or unsuspecting amateurs, into crooked card games with professional gamblers. A career petty criminal, he graduated to owning massage parlors that were actually brothels. He also ran an illegal gambling operation in his house. More than once, as a schoolgirl, Kim Rich was routed out of bed by police raids.
In 1973, Johnny Rich disappeared. The 15-year-old Kim, who was living apart from him by then, wasn't worried. Her father often went away for days at a time. In fact, no one who knew him thought to call the police. This time, however, Johnny had been murdered. His death was followed by the sensational trial of his killers. "Johnny's Girl" is Ms. Rich's account of life with a father whose idea of a loving gesture was to propose naming his latest massage parlor "Kim's."
The book grew out of a series of articles in The Anchorage Daily News, and its newspaper origins show. The author researched her parents' lives in such detail that the result reads as if she'd transcribed her notebooks whole. Although an editor should have stepped in, the overreporting is understandable. How else could Ms. Rich unravel the truth, when Johnny and Ginger left as few tracks as possible?
The family moved every few months and had no contact with relatives. Their only friends were "business associates." Because she longed for normalcy and acceptance, like all children, Kim too became a keeper of secrets. Her loneliness must have been profound. Ginger, who was too damaged to be a good mother, left Alaska after the divorce. Kim saw her for the last time in a nursing home in Ironwood, Mich., a visit that she describes with characteristic restraint:
"I was 9. For the three years before, she'd been in and out of mental hospitals and nursing facilities -- cold places with white walls and white linoleum floors. . . . I didn't look forward to seeing her. My mother was a stranger, someone who cried often. Her eyes seemed to search mine for answers and help, but I never knew what to do."
Nor could Ms. Rich lean on the father, whom she found dashing and glamorous, although she was afraid of him -- with good reason. "My father was a man of exact manners and expensive tastes. He nurtured a lifelong love affair with huge, finned American luxury cars. Predictably, he loved Cadillacs best. . . . His jewelry was like his cars: large and expensive."
Johnny flattered and flirted with her, then flew into rages and beat her. He came and went without any explanation. He never so much as told her his real name, John Francis Galenski. "For a long time, my father's F.B.I. rap sheet was all I had by way of a family history," Ms. Rich writes. Only after he died did she uncover her father's origins, about which, it seems, he knew almost as little as she did. "Even my father had never seen his own birth certificate." Belatedly, Ms. Rich understood why he'd fought for custody of her, although he wasn't fond of legal proceedings. Johnny Rich had grown up in children's homes and must have wanted to spare his child the same fate.
He didn't succeed. After one beating too many, Kim Rich had herself declared a ward of the state and moved into a series of foster homes. Yet she remained "Johnny's girl," under her charismatic father's spell. That she's still spellbound as an adult, and a victim of brutal abuse, makes this uncomfortable reading.
Her book is in part the story of a gutsy child's survival, the kind that should go straight to the heart, in a voice that insists "no big deal." And it's in part an apologia: "For a long time, I viewed my parents as people living outside the mainstream. But they weren't, really. . . . My parents' goals were no different from those of others of their generation; only their means were." Kim Rich isn't trying to convince the reader here; she's trying to convince herself.
JOHNNY'S GIRL
A Daughter's Memoir of Growing Up in Alaska's Underworld
by Kim Rich
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KIRKUS REVIEW
Superbly well-balanced and thoughtful reconstruction of a family life in the Anchorage underworld; based on Rich's series of articles that appeared in the Anchorage Daily News. ``Family life'' may be too loose a phrase to bind the fragments of existence excavated by Rich while digging up the bones of her murdered father and mad mother. She does an amazing job of searching out legal and hospital records, plus letters and diaries of her dead parents, and of interviewing cops, lawyers, former B- girls, and family members--all in an effort to lay to rest the ghosts within her. In the early 60's, her father, John Francis ``Johnny'' Rich, was a small-time bamboozler who worked whores in massage parlors, set up nude-photo sessions for all comers in his own home, assembled craps, poker, and blackjack games, and apparently pimped for his wife. And these were among the more openly shady of his dealings, which also included real-estate scams, an addiction to moonlight flights from landlords and creditors, longstanding wrangles with the IRS, and the double- dealing that got him killed in 1973, when Rich was 15. Unbeknownst to Johnny when he married her, Rich's mother, Frances Ann ``Ginger'' Chiaravalle, had been hospitalized for a mental breakdown at age 20. She kept her sanity during the first years of marriage by focusing on her newborn daughter and saving every scrap that attested to the child's existence. Rich was born in Hollywood, but the family shortly moved to Anchorage, with Frances sent ahead by Johnny to set herself up as a B-girl. Anchorage was an oil-rich frontier town, and Johnny swam in it as if born to the ooze, though Frances went to pieces and Rich endured endless midnight police raids on their house. After Frances died, Johnny married a teenage heroin addict, whom Rich fought with like a sister. Smartly written and compelling.
Pub Date: March 23rd, 1993
ISBN: 0-688-11836-4
Page count: 288pp
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 20th, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1st, 1993