The Violent Child: A Novel

Teddie Durban is a college English professor who visits his elderly mother, Lorraine, at her inner-city apartment. Cigarettes and alcohol have stolen the health of the bony, blue-haired woman, yet Teddie glimpses the two-fisted young steelworker beneath the sagging skin and bloated belly -- the alley fighter, the body puncher, a woman fully able to bully life into a corner, then apply fists, feet, and teeth.
Teddie and Lorraine spend the evening drinking and vying to tell the story of their youth -- mother and child -- as they struggled to survive the blue-collar poverty, alcoholism, and violence of a 1950's steel town. As in all their visits, they hope to stretch one another out, "to see how much truth we can stand from one another" before they exhaust the generosity of bourbon. But, if the two share a common history, they have long passed the place where they share common language and symbols. For a young Teddie had ultimately turned from his mother's care, fleeing to the security of his grandparents' home, where he was encouraged to escape the adversity of a working-class life through their gentle guidance and insistence upon the importance of education.

"The Violent Child" portrays the life of a tenacious woman who struggled to make a home for her son, to nurture the disabled daughter of her lover, and to embrace the gift of an unexpected, unconventional love. It is the story of a son who finds himself, at the end of his mother's life, with a final opportunity for reconciliation.