Prologue
PART I: SPOTLIGHT
Prisoner's Dilemma
Hide and Seek
Emerge
Figurante
Denoument
Breaking and Entering
Torch
PART II: SIMON SAYS
Sober
Vanity Fair
Audition
Understudy
Mirror, Mirror
PART III: ALL THE PRETTIEST GIRLS
Impostor
Paper Doll
Origin Story
Cinderland
Acknowledgments
Amy Jo Burns teaches at the Arts Council of Princeton and writes for Ploughshares. She lives in Franklin Park, New Jersey. This is her first book.
“The toll that Burns’s silence took manifested in several forms,
and she details them here in a thoughtfully written examination of
what motivated her to keep silent while other victims spoke
out”
—Library Journal, starred review
“A haunting debut memoir about the price of keeping secrets…
[S]lim, lyrically evocative.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“[A] raw, painful memoir ... at its most compelling when Burns
sketches the contours of her girlhood ... rendering them
not quaint but stifling and ominous.”
—Boston Globe
“Burns’ writing is deliciously dense and full of perfectly picked
observations.... Cinderland is a powerful and captivating
memoir.”
—The Rumpus
“With gentle, focused prose, [Burns] turns the confessional memoir
genre upside down.”
—Pittsburgh Quarterly
“An expository reflection on how a place shapes our own sense of
self.”
—Star Tribune
“A scorching memoir about a town divided.”
—The Kansas City Star
“[Burns] has a way with words that allows her to make her
sleepy town and the dilapidated Pittsburgh area of the 1990s
glimmer. … Her writing is affecting without being sensational, and
the reader’s heart is left aching at the end of each chapter.”
—The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“Burns writes beautifully of coming of age in a rust belt
town.”
—The Star-Ledger
“A rare and important work . . . Burns has brought something
utterly new and distinctive to the art of the memoir.”
—Louise DeSalvo, author of Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling
Our Stories Can Change Our Lives
“Amy Jo Burns has written a humane and lapidary account of her Rust
Belt childhood: the claustrophobia, the yearning for escape, the
weight and consequence of secrets. I have never read a book that
captures small-town American life so perfectly.”
—Justin St. Germain, author of Son of a Gun
“Amy Jo Burns’s Cinderland is an exquisite achievement. From the
first page to the last, I held my breath as Burns held my heart.
She writes of small Rust Belt towns and the boys and girls who grow
up and apart in those towns and the overwhelming need for escape
and what happens when secrets no one should have to bear burn and
burn. This book demands to be read.”
—Roxane Gay, author of An Untamed State
“Memoir of the highest order, Cinderland lovingly gives voice to a
troubled community, small-town summers, young love and heartbreak,
a scandal that tears a town apart, and the memory of a young girl
who told a dangerous lie. Or did she? Amy Jo Burns writes like a
dream, beyond her years, and this book is gripping, generous, and
wise.”
—Scott Cheshire, author of High as the Horses' Bridles
“Amy Jo Burns delivers an unerring report from inside the universe
of a teenaged girl struggling to escape the town she both loves and
mistrusts. This is a place that insists on secrets held, and she is
a good girl, holding hers tenaciously, at all costs.”
—Meredith Hall, author Without a Map
“‘I did not want to tell this story,’ Amy Jo Burns confesses in
Cinderland, but readers will be glad she did. This memoir is
testament to the incinerating power of secrets and the steely
resolve of survivors. But it’s also an unforgettable portrait of a
small Rust Belt town in decline, and in that sense it is a story
about America, one of ruin and reinvention, of ashes and
incandescence.”
—Elliott Holt, author of You Are One of Them
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