Booklist’s review of
DRIVING WITH DEAD PEOPLE
for 1/1/2007:

Holloway’s candid story starts out innocently enough as she describes her eccentric family, especially her father, who loved “talking gore” and kept a movie camera in his pick-up for filming gruesome wrecks. Monica, too, has an obsession with death, and revels in her friendship with a mortician’s daughter and their access to postmortems. When Monica reaches her teen years, her parents divorce. Her mother then decides it’s “her turn,” and she goes back to college, often leaving Monica and her next oldest sister alone. Holloway perceptively writes about hurtful moments embedded in her memory, such as her parents repeatedly telling her that her birth was a “mistake,” and her mother’s selfish refusal to pay for treatment for a kidney infection. The final piece of this dysfunctional family’s puzzle falls into place when the oldest sister begins to remember being molested by their father; so, too, does Monica. Amidst a burgeoning number of abuse memoirs, Holloway’s shines because of her deft handling of the small details, while painstakingly assembling the larger picture.

–– Deborah Donovan