Synopses & Reviews
There are family-like bonds that can form within the larger human family, when one's own family life has been broken into fragments. Such is the case throughout
Sleepaway School, Lee Stringer's recounting of his years at Hawthorne Cedar Knolls a school for kids at risk and the events that led up to them.
The clash of being poor and black in an affluent, largely white New York suburb begins to foment pain and rage which erupts, more often than not, when he is at school. One violent episode results in his expulsion from the sixth grade and his subsequent three-year stint at Hawthorne, the "sleepaway school" of the title. What follows is an intensely personal American journey: a universal story of childhood where childhood universals are missing. Excluded at first by his peers, Stringer develops an outsider's eye, enabling him to see some things more deeply from without than from within. Such insight, however, is not enough to assuage the anguish he feels over his isolation. And when this spills out Stringer finds himself in yet another, darker institution.
In Sleepaway School, we experience how a child fashions his life out of the materials given to him, however threadbare. This is a boy-meets-world story, the chronicle of one child's struggle simply to be.
Synopsis
Sleepaway School tells the story of how Lee Stringer reclaimed the mystery and promise of childhood out of the grip of adversity. After crises of family and identity come to a head put up for adoption at birth, sent away to a school for troubled children at age eleven Lee Stringer describes the turbulence of his first sixteen years, recollected here with startling balance, grace, and humor.
Synopsis
Like his brother before him, Stringer was surrendered to foster care, shortly after birth, by his unwed and underemployed mother—a common practice for unmarried women in mid-century America. Less common was that she returned six years later to reclaim her children. Rather than leading to a happy ending, though, this is where Stringer's story begins. The clash of being poor and black in an affluent, largely white New York suburb begins to foment pain and rage which erupts, more often than not, when he is at school. One violent episode results in his expulsion from the sixth grade and his subsequent three-year stint at Hawthorne, the "sleepaway school" of the title.
What follows is an intensely personal, American journey: a universal story of childhood where childhood universals are absent. We experience how a child fashions his life out of the materials given to him, however threadbare. This is a "boy-meets-world" story, the chronicle of one childs struggle simply to be.
Synopsis
A boy-meets-world story from the author of Grand Central Winter, the acclaimed memoir of life on the streets of 1980s New York.
Synopsis
LEE STRINGER's journey from childhood homelessness in the ’60s, to adult homelessness in the ’80s, to his present career as a writer and lecturer, as told in Sleepaway School and Grand Central Winter, is one of the great odysseys of contemporary American life and letters. Stringer, the only board member of Project Renewal who is also a former patient of the facility, has demonstrated that writers are made, not born. He is the two-time recipient of the Washington Irving Award and, in 2005, a Lannan Foundation Residency. He is a former editor and columnist of Street News. His essays and articles have appeared in a variety of other publications, including The Nation, The New York Times, and Newsday. He lives in Mamaroneck, New York, where he also serves on the board of the Mamaroneck Public Libraries.
About the Author
Lee Stringer is the author of the acclaimed Grand Central Winter: Stories From the Street (Seven Stories Press, 1998), which chronicled his twelve years of crack addiction and homelessness on the streets of New York City. It has been translated into eighteen languages, and prompted Stringer's appearance on Oprah and many other national television shows, newspapers and magazines.