Johnny's Girl: A Daughter's Memoir of Growing Up In Alaska's Underworld

Johnny's Girl: A Daughter's Memoir of Growing Up In Alaska's Underworld

by Kim Rich
Johnny's Girl: A Daughter's Memoir of Growing Up In Alaska's Underworld

Johnny's Girl: A Daughter's Memoir of Growing Up In Alaska's Underworld

by Kim Rich

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Overview

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. It chronicles Alaska’s mean streets and her parent’s tragic lives that were cut short. 



Kim Rich was an ordinary girl trapped in an extraordinary childhood, someone who dreamed of going to parties and getting good grades while living in an after-hours hell of gamblers, pimps, and con men. She longed for normalcy, yet she was inescapably her father's child, and she had no choice but to grow up fast. Her mother, who suffered from mental illness, was a stripper and B-girl: her father was a major player in the underworld of Anchorage, Alaska in the sixties, a city flush with newfound oil money.  


Only after her father was gruesomely murdered when she was 15, and Kim became a journalist, was she able to fill in the missing pieces of one American dream gone horribly wrong. Kim's true story is a tale of a woman's search for her parent's secrets. What she finds is both shocking and tragic, but in the end she's able to discover her true self amid the remnants of her parents' lost lives.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780882405247
Publisher: TURNER PUB CO
Publication date: 09/01/1999
Pages: 304
Sales rank: 1,099,990
Product dimensions: 5.40(w) x 8.34(h) x 0.91(d)

About the Author

Born in Hollywood, raised in Anchorage, Alaska, Kim Rich has an MFA degree in writing from Columbia University, and has taught at Alaska Pacific University. She now lives in the lower 48, outside of Alaska. A Normal Life is the follow-up to her critically acclaimed memoir, Johnny's Girl: A Daughter's Memoir of Growing Up In Alaska's Underworld.

Read an Excerpt

Johnny's Girl

A Daughter's Memoir of Growing Up In Alaska's Underworld
By Kim Rich

Graphic Arts Books

Copyright © 1999 Kim Rich
All right reserved.

ISBN: 9780882405247

“Everyone here in the building would not condone our morals” was the first thing my father told the social worker who interviewed him the day after my mother had been hospitalized. …The interview, which took place before the earthquake at the state Division of Mental Health office downtown, was held to determine who would pay for my mother’s medical expenses. What my father had to say that day isn’t surprising to me.” Page 95, Shattered Dreams, Johnny’s Girl



Continues...

Excerpted from Johnny's Girl by Kim Rich Copyright © 1999 by Kim Rich. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“This memoir poses the question, ‘Which offenses from our childhood are forgivable and which ones are not?’ [Rich’s] book is…the story of a gutsy child’s survival, the kind that should go straight to the heart.” 

—-New York Times Book Review

“Rich 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 a effort to lay to rest the ghosts within her…Compelling.”         —-Kirkus Review

“Some books in the true crime genre transcend the formula, and JOHNNY’S GIRL does just that.”

                                                       —- Los Angeles Times Book Review

"The grittiest, most memorable Alaskan story I've ever read. An evocative and deeply moving memoir of a most unusual family."
                                                        —- Joe McGinniss, author of Fatal Vision

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