Andrew Bridge
Hope's Boy (2008)
Author: Andrew Bridge
Genre: Nonfiction (Memoir)
Book Summary:
Andrew Bridge, legal advocate and Executive Director for the Alliance for Children’s Rights in Los Angeles, recounts the eleven years he spent in the Los Angeles County foster care system as a young boy. The memoir is both an indictment of the abuses and negligence of the foster care system and a cathartic account of his boyhood longing for love. Andrew’s memory of those years is filled with a yearning for the returned love of his young mother, Hope. After reclaiming Andrew, who lived the first 5 years of his life with his grandmother, Hope struggles to make ends meet and endow her son with life skills. The two years (ages 6-8) Andrew spent with his mother prove to be the most influential in his life, coloring his experience in the foster care system and all subsequent relationships he establishes. Slowly, Hope goes downhill, is institutionalized in a mental facility, and deemed unfit to care for Andrew. Unlike many foster care children, Andrew is placed with one foster family (the Leonards) and remains with them until he graduates high school. His experiences with the Leonard family reflect the neglect of the foster care system and the utter absence of love from his foster mother and father. Andrew was a forgotten child, but he never forgot his mother. SPOILER: Eventually, Andrew perseveres despite his painful and lonely childhood, graduates high school, wins a scholarship to Wesleyan, becomes a Fulbright Scholar, and graduates from Harvard Law School. He reestablishes contact with his mother and grandmother as an adult, and goes on to advocate for foster care reform in Los Angeles County. Although legal vindication appears to stifle Andrew’s anguish, his forgotten childhood remains a source of pain that cannot be easily discarded. Nonetheless, without bitterness or reproach he continues to love the mother who could not care for him and the grandmother who was too old and destitute to take him in. He continues to long for his mother’s love.
Geographical Setting:Los Angeles County, United States
Time Period: 1970-1980s
Appeal Characteristics:
Andrew Bridge successfully conveys the desperation and longing of a childhood that languishes from a delinquent foster care system. He balances the tone of his narrative between a sense of withering nondescript loneliness, evocative pining for his mother, and bleak matter-of-fact survival. Most of the narrative consists of descriptive details of Andrew’s experiences and the people around him. The deficit of dialogue reinforces Andrew’s loneliness and his utter sense of loss. Characters are experienced through Andrew’s perspective. Although he tries to remain objective and even-handed, his characterization of his foster family is not complimentary. He doesn’t describe characters by overusing adjectives, but puts them in action, showing the reader exactly what they did or did not do to contribute to the worsening or betterment of his childhood. Andrew is the obvious center of the story, providing introspection and a personal perspective. Secondary characters, such as his mother, grandmother, foster family, and Jason, his foster brother, all play critical roles in retelling his story. He gives them presence and power in the narrative. The memoir itself is flanked by a prologue and epilogue. In them he attempts to uncover abuses in a specific foster care system and save a young boy whom he discovers in the basement of a foster care facility. These sections serve to ground the memoir as more than a retelling of his childhood experiences; rather, Andrew offers his memoir as a template for the abuse and anguish experienced by all foster care children. In this way, the memoir serves two distinct purposes: a condemnation of the foster care system and a personal account of his own experiences. The majority of the narrative follows Andrew through his life in chronological order. On occasion there are brief flashbacks to his life with his mother, but these are rare and only serve to reinforce the impact she had on his life. The pacing is deliberately slow, evoking the prolonged agony of Andrew’s silence. However, the narrative is not relaxed. In fact, there is a continued sense of anxiety associated with Andrew’s constant wish for the return of his mother. The storyline is character-centered, although the broader issue of a failed foster care system looms in the background. The end of the memoir provides the reader with some resolution in that we are encouraged to believe that the system, with the help of people like Andrew Bridge, will change for the better. Nonetheless, the bleakness of Andrew’s experience haunts his adult life and he never seems to escape its hold on him. Andrew’s prose style is frank, not overly flamboyant, and natural. He is honest with the reader, making great efforts to retell his story truthfully and without too much embellishment. This is perhaps one of its strengths as a memoir in that his prose style conveys a balanced and forthright perspective. He does not try to dramatize the events in his life as if it were a Hollywood melodrama.
Read-alikes: Fans of Hope’s Boy may enjoy the honest retelling of Frank McCourt’s destitute childhood in Angela’s Ashes. McCourt offers a poignant, often stark account of his life growing up in Limerick, Ireland. His father is an alcoholic who, despite the love he carries for his children, is unable to provide for them. This results in McCourt’s longing for a better life, the love of his father, and a desire to return to America. McCourt adeptly provides in depth characterizations of his family, especially his mother, who struggles daily to put food on the table. Family is an essential element to his story, paralleling Bridge’s attachment to his mother and grandmother. Reader’s who enjoy a slow paced, character-driven, and authentic, raw memoirs about children who survive abusive and negligent foster care systems may like Finding Fish by Antwone Quenton Fisher. Finding Fish recounts the life of a young boy who is placed with a foster family in Cleveland, Ohio after his mother is sentenced to prison. He endures great hardship and psychological abuse at the hands of his foster mother. This resembles Bridge’s trials living with an abusive and neglectful foster mother. Ultimately, Fisher slowly rises above his troubled past. It is a tale of survival, redemption, and renewal. Although not forgiving of the people who mistreated him, Fisher attempts to understand his abusers and the system. Another indictment of the foster care system, this time in Florida, comes from Ashley Rhodes-Courter in Three Little Words. The memoirist is able to successfully combine her understated prose, matter-of-fact style, and honest insight in a description of her life as a foster child. At the age of 3 her and her brother, Luke, were removed from the care of their mother and placed in foster care. For the next 9 years Rhodes-Courter bounced from one family to another (14 total), often enduring a series of abusive relationships with foster families. Eventually, the state denied her mother parental rights and she was adopted by a loving family. At the age of 21 she recounts her tale in a way that mixes slight bitterness with an authentic portrayal of her life’s experiences. Although characterization is difficult because of the innumerable foster families she encountered, she is still able to convey a deep sense of her own experiences and personality. Another element critical in this memoir is the way it serves as a condemnation of the foster care system. This parallels Bridge’s dual purposes of balancing a deeply personal account and an issue-oriented story. Reader’s who are attracted to stories revolving around relationships between troubled parents and their children may find Laura Flynn’s Swallow the Ocean enjoyable. Flynn adeptly narrates the story of her childhood, as she manages to cope with her mother’s slow descent into a paranoid schizophrenia. Flynn and her sisters try to overcome this hardship by relying on one another and allowing their imaginations to shield them from pain. Not unlike Bridge, Flynn finds creative and necessary ways to cope with the pain of having a mother who is mentally unstable. This does not diminish the love either memoirists feel for their mothers. Flynn is controlled and calm in the way she narrates her story with sprinklings of lyricism. She is also overwhelmingly honest and forthright. She strives to tell how it was to live with a mentally ill mother. For readers who may enjoy a fiction title similar to Hope’s Boy, Janet Fitch’s White Oleander is a good crossover book. It offers in depth characterization of Astrid, the main character, her mother, and various foster families. The novel follows the life of Astrid, daughter of a talented but disturbed poet, Ingrid. When Astrid is 12 years old her mother murders her lover and is sent to prison. Astrid is placed into the California foster care system and experiences the abuse and confusion associated with being thrust into an uncaring bureaucracy. Ultimately, Astrid survives her childhood and comes to terms with her past, her mother, and herself, finding a kind of redemption through art. This is not unlike how Bridge is able to cope with his troubling childhood through the catharsis of writing a memoir. The longing for a child-parent relationship and the power of expression and finding a voice when that relationship does not turn out to be perfect are central to both stories. Fitch adeptly narrates her story mainly through the perspective of Astrid, giving it the feel of a memoir while still maintaining its fictional quality. She also tries to convey the sense of real life experience with her clear, unadorned writing style.
Red Flags: There is a vivid rape scene witnessed by the author. Physical and psychological abuse toward children are also present.
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